Engage the Trolls
Propaganda won the presidential election for Donald Trump. Fake news convinced millions of people to vote against their interests and propel an unqualified corrupt industry puppet into the oval office. Progressives brought David Brooks to a troll thread, and we might as well have brought Daniel Tiger to the zombie apocalypse.
Truth lost.
Ken Bone turned out to be one of the most emblematic characters of the season — a cuddly, red-sweatered undecided in public who turned about to be a creepy celebrity orifice aficionado on Reddit.
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, and in the voting booth no one knows you’re a troll.
Donald Trump has no mandate and a giant asterisk because millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton and her policies, but the troll army made the popular vote closer than it ever should have been. And, of course, they won the electoral college.
Given the campaigns, we all thought that surely no self-respecting woman would vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault:
Surely no evangelical voters would vote for a man whose personal life reads like a Jack Chick cautionary tale:
Surely no one who made less than a million dollars a year would vote for a guy who brags about his “5-star bathroom”:
But enough of them did for Trump to win, and many of them did so on false premises.
Why?
It’s been hashed out before, but to recap the highlights:
- The most-shared election story on Facebook declared Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump (false)
- 41% of Republican voters still doubt Obama was born in the U.S. (he was)
- Enough people felt PizzaGate was credible that a lone gunmen drove hundreds of miles to go liberate the child sex slaves at Comet Ping Pong (there weren’t any).
- Oh and the CIA and the FBI agree that Russia attempted to directly interfere with the election through strategic hacking (yikes).
Trump won because propaganda won.
So, the more important question, is what do we do with this disinformation?
Staying in our social media bubbles gnashing our teeth and rending our garments isn’t working (cf: recount and faithless elector campaigns), nor is just hoping truth will out.
Truth will not out on its own.
To win, we must develop and run effective counterpropaganda campaigns against this domestic disinformation war. We have to have a strategy, and we have to diligently and relentlessly pursue it.
This strategy should be to correct the facts, to persistently highlight the Trump team’s hypocrisy, and to directly engage with Trump supporters on their own turf.
Sadly, this means we have to engage with the trolls. We have to read the comments.
(Listen, I know. I’ve already spent my time in the swamp, and all I got for it, according to one distinguished gentleman from Reddit, was a “butthurt thesis.” So no one wants to avoid the comments more than I do. But here we are.)
The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security already know counterpropaganda is one of the most effective ways to combat insurgent threats to democracy. They’ve developed the “Global Engagement Center” to, in their words:
develop, plan, and synchronize… whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation directed against United States national security interests and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests
And they’ve partnered with private initiatives like “P2P: Challenging Extremism” to build a counterpropaganda team from the ground up:
Our military isn’t just hoping its tweets are fiesty enough win over enemies of humanity. We shouldn’t either.
Of course, America has fought propaganda and counterprogaganda wars for much of its existence. We’re doing it right now. But because now more than ever we can’t trust the government to do what is right, we can’t leave counterpropaganda to them to fight for us.
Yes, you can now tag “fake news” on Facebook (which you can tell is working because fake news outlets hate it); yes, you can fact check Trump’s tweets with a web extension; yes, Snopes and Politifact remain great resources. But these won’t be enough.
For too long the received wisdom for progressives has been “Don’t Read the Comments.” We’ve put our faith in the paid commentators and thinkers in the sanctioned page space and assumed that if we weren’t feeding the trolls, they’d starve. It turns out, they had plenty to feed on down there and grew into the President Elect of the United States.
To quote the possible incoming Secretary of Energy, “Oops.”
Even if most comments are paid astroturf Thinkfluencers from Russia, they still signify, and just because we’re savvy enough to know doesn’t mean ignorance isn’t going to win the argument. Comments and discussion boards are part of the national discourse.
If we’re going to keep the Republic alive, Van Jones may just have to take his “Love Army” to 4Chan.
So, progressives to the comment sections! You have nothing to lose but your elections!
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