> Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.
> All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016.
> In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.
> When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.
@Memor-X don't forget Zuck.
> The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.
For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.
See the brazen revisionist lie of Zuck behind creating fb:
> Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.)
> Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate.
> X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X.
> Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech.
> A recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.
These people pose an exceptional danger in manipulating the whole electorate.
> “As I said, things could go wrong. There could be unprecedented events that change the pattern of 160 years of history. That’s what happened here,” Lichtman told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo in an interview on Monday.
> Lichtman blamed disinformation first and foremost, and called out two culprits by name: “You talked about a grievance-driven election, but a lot of that grievance was driven by disinformation. It starts with Fox News and conservative media. Conservative podcasters with tens of millions of views. But we’ve seen something brand new this time—the $300 billionaire, Elon Musk, putting his thumb on the scales through his control of X, formerly Twitter.”
> Lichtman said that voters were given “vast disinformation” on a variety of issues, including jobs, immigration, unemployment, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and even hurricane relief.
> The second factor, according to Lichtman, was what he called the “dark side of American history”—elements that included “racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.”
> “Remember, the premise of the keys is that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides if a White House party has governed well enough to get four more years. But if views of the White House party are controlled by disinformation, particularly driven by those that are so rich that they have extraordinary influence beyond anyone else, than maybe the premise of the keys needs to be changed.”
> “I only have one problem with the ‘woke’ theory,” Stewart replied. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke s--t.”
“These were the commercials I saw for the Democrats,” Stewart said, showing a montage of Democrat campaign ads expressing conservative stances on immigration.
> “Those are the Democrats,” Stewart said. “They didn’t talk about pronouns. They didn’t say ‘Latinx.’ It was the opposite.”
> Stewart later added, “They didn’t do the woke thing. They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around the Cheneys?”
