(THREAD) BREAKING: The new position of the GOP—especially the Trump family—is social media manipulation changes votes and we can measure how many votes were changed to see if they switched an election outcome. Everyone clear? OK, now let's talk 2016 Russian election interference.
1/ For two years, Democrats have tried to explain to Republicans what all social media and election experts say: that *systemic disinformation coordinated by a hostile foreign power*, when it is *facilitated through dissemination by a presidential campaign*, can affect elections.
2/ For two years, Republicans insisted the *largest foreign cyber-attack on an American election in history*, whose reach we can and *have* quantified macroanalytically and microanalytically—through Big Data as well as anecdote—couldn't *possibly* have affected the 2016 election.
3/ Despite all we know, presidential adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner once dismissively referred to one of the 3 Russian election interference campaigns the Kremlin coordinated in 2016—the others being a hacking op and campaign-infiltration op—as "a few Facebook posts."
4/ But *now*, up and down the internet, in and out of the White House, far-right circles are passionately discussing how social media platform operations conclusively and measurably change votes and swing elections. Yet they're two years late to the conversation—and that matters.
5/ It matters because—in duration, scope, national security implications, measurability, *and* academic consensus as to its contours—the Russian election interference scandal *dwarfs* a single academic journal editor making (wildly imprecise) claims about vote-switching in 2016.
6/ The conspiracy theory the GOP and the Trumps are now pushing says 2.6 million to 16 million votes—note the *insane* range there, calibrated on the low end to constitute *the amount Trump lost the popular vote by*—were manipulated via a secret cabal of U.S. social-media mavens.
7/ So here's a thought: how about we take pull-quotes from everything Trump is now saying, and everything Don Jr. is now saying, and everything far-right GOP politicians like Ted Cruz are saying, and apply it *first* to a conversation the nation began having *over two years ago*.
8/ Once the Trumps and the GOP has participated robustly in a conversation they skipped out on for years—how to measure the effect of the *largest hostile cyberattack on a U.S. election ever*—we can talk about a wild conspiracy theory pushed by a *single* academic journal editor.
9/ Media plays a major role here; it must—*sometime*—take a politician by his rhetoric and force him to own what he says. If Trump and GOP now say we can measure how many votes social media platform operations push, they *must* join the discourse on Russian election interference.
10/ The overwhelming majority of Democrats support three of the most important things we learned from the Enlightenment: reason, tolerance, and method. I'm sure we'd have no problem slotting Bob Epstein's theory into a *far* broader conversation involving *hundreds* of academics.
11/ As ever, it's media that'll direct what happens here, and media that can choose—as ever—to decontextualize news to make it clickable or *see the factual field* its own journalism developed.
If it does the latter, Trump and the GOP will be pushed to revisit data they ignored.
12/ The error that media often makes is the error voters often make, with the difference that—for a journalist—it's a professional failure: treating "the news" as a series of single-node "breaking" events while ignoring the past news that forms—with the present—a matrix of ideas.
13/ The *idea* that social media platform manipulation creates a measurable impact on elections is one the GOP and the Trumps rejected for *two years* because it was politically damaging.
Now they embrace that *idea*.
Media: write *that* story.
Don't just cover tweeted claims.
14/ The newest Trump-and-GOP conspiracy theory about how Trump's historic popular vote *decimation* in 2016 was in fact a popular vote *win* actually *is* major news—but it's news because it represents an ideological shift that the party and its leaders now must be made to *own*.
15/ I hope media takes this chance to open a new bipartisan dialogue about how social media manipulation influences voters. I've every confidence Bob's theory will be discarded as contrary to the facts—and our focus will finally be on the *real* conversation we need to have. /end
PS/ And yes, part of discussing the influence and reach of a social media campaign orchestrated by a hostile foreign power will be discussing how a presidential campaign—in 2016, the GOP one—can *massively* increase that influence and reach by knowingly amplifying disinformation.
NOTE/ I call this breaking news because it is. In the last 48 hours, Republicans' new—180-degree different—position on vote manipulation through social media shenanigans has spread from the White House to Congress, from Trump to Don Jr., from the GOP fringe to the GOP mainstream.
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1/ If I had to rank by how annoying they are the false narratives I hear folks who don't study these men professionally advancing, the claim that the Feud is fake would easily rank #1.
There's *no evidence whatsoever* substantiating the claim that any part of the Feud is fake.
2/ #2 would be the claim that Trump isn't the most powerful man alive. I've spent more time and words arguing that Trump is beholden to foreign business associates than anyone anywhere—and even I understand that when you control Earth’s most powerful military, it means something.
(🚨) EXCLUSIVE: This report is epic, crossing years, continents, and scandals some readers won’t have encountered before—from golf to crypto, intel to international law. Everything comes back to why the Iran War happened, and why it’ll likely restart.
1/ I’ve been thinking about what else I want to say on this subject since I first posted this report a few hours ago. The report is of course extremely long, detailed, and well-sourced, so there’s much that I could write that would simply be redundant.
2/ I do have thoughts I want to expand on, though.
Stunning how media turned passage of the Abominable Bill into a will they/won't they romcom with a July 4 deadline for Cinderella to kiss the prince, rather than a situation in which members of Congress say they're terrified they or their family will be killed if they cross Trump
The only journalistically responsible way to cover what's happening in DC is to report that the Dear Leader of a cult set an arbitrary deadline for his cult to dance for him on penalty of sinister punishments, and now we're watching a gruesome public whipping unfold in real time
The grotesque mummery playing out at the Capitol is not just joyless and borderline violent but without any suspense whatsoever, as in an authoritarian regime—which is what the GOP is—the outcome isn't in doubt, only whether 1-2 rebels choose to sacrifice themselves to the flames
Agents of Trump business and political partners MBS, MBZ and el-Sisi were secretly in the White House as Trump agreed to go to war with their enemy Iran?
How is this not the big news right now? How is this not bigger than every other story media is covering?
This is beyond journalistic malpractice.
We're talking about matters of war and peace—historic lies told by a POTUS to push America to war—and CNN is burying the lede that the attack was a byproduct of secret negotiations with those who support Trump financially and politically?
And should it not also be noted that the man representing Trump in these hours of secret negotiations inside the White House—assuming Trump wasn't there himself, which I suspect he was for part of the time—is a man (Witkoff) with financial ties to parties he was negotiating with?
(🚨) BREAKING: Exactly as happened in 2020 after Trump illegally assassinated the second-most-popular Iranian—and therefore as Trump could easily have predicted, and as media should already have forecast for Americans—Iran has just launched missiles at multiple US military bases.
CNN:
It is certainly possible that, as in 2020, this response is gestural rather than serious. But it might not be, and Trump might deliberately pretend that it is not, and either way there could still be some Americans injured, so who knows what is going to happen now.
2018: Gen. Kurilla—“Israel’s favorite general”—is made CENTCOM Chief of Staff
2018: CENTCOM urges Trump to add Israel to CENTCOM’s Area of Responsibility
2021: 4 days before leaving office, Trump adds Israel to CENTCOM AOR
2021: Process making Kurilla CENTCOM commander begins