On ‘nut-picking’ (or, the caricaturing one’s political opponents)
Fun hating Conservatives dinosaurs were outraged last week, when a video surfaced of recently elected Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in 2010. As you might expect, this back-fired because everyone correctly decided — and tweeted — that the video of her mimicking the dance sequence from The Breakfast Club was, in fact, great. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? However, I’ve just spent an extremely tedious hour trying to find some of these outraged Conservatives / Republicans who were upset by a young woman dancing in college, and I’m struggling. I found a couple of possibly Conservative-ish accounts mildly upset. But even world famous up-tighter Governor Mike Huckabee said he wasn’t bothered. That’s something I suppose, and maybe I’m just missing it. But does this really warrant the following headlines, which imply thatConservatives – plural, en masse — were outraged?
Daily Kos: ‘Video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in college shocks AOC-obsessed right wing — and nobody else’.
Newsweek: ‘Conservatives mock Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for College Dancing Video, Everyone Else Thinks it’s Adorable’.
NowThis News: ‘Conservatives tried to shame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by surfacing a video of her dancing in college — it backfired spectacularly’
What happened was this: a couple of weeks ago a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop while at college was posted by an anonymous Twitter user called AnonymousQ1776, in a hapless attempt to embarrass or smear her. (AnonymousQ1776 is now deleted). This handle looks like someone involved in the absurd anti-establishment 4chan Qanon conspiracy. None of the media outlets I listed above produced any examples of Conservatives being ‘shocked’, or trying to smear her because of it, other than the original post by AnonymousQ1776. So, in effect, Newsweek — that highly respectable magazine — extrapolated ‘Conservatives’, which encompasses millions of people and a wide range of opinions, from a single anonymous, deleted, troll account. Maybe they were sitting on lots of other examples, but if so then they should probably include them, given the claim. As this spread, users repeated the generalisation to make wider political points. Andrew Weinstien, chair of the Democratic Lawyer Council, tweeted that ‘So Conservatives have a problem with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in high school but are perfectly fine with Brett Kavanagh sitting on the Supreme Court’. There were lots of retweets on offer for this sort of take.
This article isn’t about defending poor, unfairly maligned Conservatives. (Plenty of high-profile Conservatives have made unfair, personal attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, including ludicrous claims about her clothes). Plus, I thought the video of her dancing was great. It’s about a much larger trend, of which this story is one example: nut-picking.
Nut-picking is the practice of dredging through the online comments of your political opponents to find the most extreme, outlandish, offensive or idiotic view, and then taking it to be typical. The constant exaggeration and caricaturing of one’s opponents is a defining feature of political debate online these days. One common version is those stories I keep reading about snowflakes apparently agitating to ban free speech, or Christmas, or men, or whatever. Another is the ‘Twitter was outraged’ story. James Bond carrying his baby in a papoose: Twitter was outraged. Jamie Oliver launches a new dish: Twitter was outraged. Who’s Twitter exactly? When you actually dig into these stories, you’ll often end up chasing apparitions, finding there is no ground zero anger. Perhaps a couple of Twitter users. But there is a lot of outrage about the outrage. It’s a circular self-perpetuating anger machine: a few weeks back, after the Corbyn lip-reading incident in the House of Commons, #stupidwoman was trending. It was trending because everyone kept tweeting about how furious they were that it was trending.
All those articles about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ miss this. Far from being an echo-chamber, it’s very easy to find opposing views on social media. Your timeline and feed is bursting with dangerous knaves and cartoonish fools, and each can be used to illustrate just how mad your opponents are. Moronic racist posts on Boris Johnson’s Facebook page? Tories are all racist! An anonymous Corbyn Twitter account does some heavy duty virtue signalling? Lefties are all loonies! It’s very easy to assume the margin is the norm if it plays to your own preconceptions, and you also get the warm buzz of righteous indignation that comes with publicly denouncing and admonishing. But where does fabricated outrage and counter outrage take us in the end? After the Ocasio-Cortez story, Liberals feel a little more that Conservatives are joyless, out-of-touch hypocrites. Conservatives feel a little more that Liberals are smug and patronising cherry-pickers. And all because of a harmless, fun video published by an anonymous troll.
