Seth Abramson Profile picture
Aug 20, 2019 18 tweets 4 min read Read on X
(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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More from @SethAbramson

Sep 12
I just woke up from a long nap, can someone tell me if Trump has already apologized to the nation for falsely blaming the Kirk assassination on the left when—as with both his assassination attempts and 85% of political violence this century per the data—it was a far-right nutjob?
He is a Groyper. The Groypers are a far-right, neo-Nazi cult made up of young far-right males who thought Kirk was insufficiently far-right. thedailybeast.com/charlie-kirk-s…
Read 15 tweets
Sep 12
Bomb threats against the Maryland General Assembly. Bomb threats against the Michigan lieutenant governor and his family. Bomb threats against 5 HBCUs. Two arrests for violent assaults in Idaho.

In 24 hours.

All Democratic/left-leaning victims.

All suspected MAGA perpetrators.
And that wasn't a full list—not even close.

Bomb threat against the Rhode Island Senate President. Bomb threat against the Rhode Island Majority Leader. Bomb threat against the New Mexico Senate Majority Leader. Once again all Democratic victims, all suspected MAGA perpetrators.
There's no reason to have a conversation about political violence based in rhetoric rather than data.

I don't need to note that every bomb threat on Election Day in 2024 was a MAGA bomb threat.

I don't need to mention January 6, Paul Pelosi, or the two dead Minnesota Democrats. Image
Read 13 tweets
Sep 11
There was significantly less political violence in America before the 2016 presidential campaign. We all know why.

That doesn’t change that what happened today—in both Utah and Colorado—were tragedies.

It just underscores that revisionist history won’t solve America's problems.
Donald Trump transformed politics into an ultraviolent Thunderdome.

He did it for his own advancement, and he didn’t care what the consequences would be.

It’s *also* true that since Trump poisoned our politics there’s been violence from both Left and Right, though mostly Right.
Both Trump assassination plots I condemned immediately and unreservedly. Both would-be assassins were Republicans. The assassin who killed Minnesota’s Speaker was also Republican. So was the man who plotted to kill Pelosi. But there have been leftist assassins too. I condemn all.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 8
There's no lie Elon Musk and his racist friends won't tell to try to hurt nonwhites—or even, I fear, to try to get deranged others to *literally* hurt nonwhites.

And we know these racists want to cause pain because a two-second Grok search would destroy every one of their lies. Image
Image
If you read the comments on Musk's racist post, it's person after person after person absolutely convinced that Muslims never migrate to other Muslim countries but only come to Europe or America and only do so as part of some sort of invasion. These folks are touched in the head.
The history of human migration, by whatever group—of whatever race or ethnicity or religion—is that sometimes migrants are looking for a very similar place, sometimes a slightly different place, sometimes a very different place.

That has been human nature for thousands of years.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 28
(🧵) Major media should be ashamed.

The manifesto of the Minnesota shooter has been translated—and it's all about his hatred of Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, illegal immigrants, Somalis... none of this had to do with him being trans and major media *knows* it.

So why won't it say so?
1/ The manifesto uses the most vile slurs imaginable to describe Jews and Blacks, groups MAGA is hostile to.

The manifesto uses the most vile rhetoric imaginable to speak of illegal immigrants, another group Maga is hostile to.

And it uses 4chan-speak. 4chan is a MAGA hotbed.
2/ Everyone in America knows at this point that MAGA is a fascist movement and that the first group it wants to start treating like the Nazis did Jews are transgender persons. So the second the possibility the shooter was trans arose, all of us should have apprehended the danger.
Read 13 tweets
Aug 17
(🚨) The seventh book in the NYT-bestselling Proof Series is PROOF OF DEVILRY: THE CRIMES OF DONALD TRUMP, GHISLAINE MAXWELL, AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

It’s so large—a 600-page epic—that it’s being released in three parts (on 8/17, 8/24, and 8/31).

Book One: sethabramson.substack.com/p/part-1-proof…Image
1/ I recognize that I often say this when I am speaking of extremely deep-dive curatorial research into Trump and two discrete topics—Jeffrey Epstein and January 6—but it is true: what is in this book will shock you even if you believe you cannot be shocked on these topics.
2/ I want to issue a warning to those with sensitivities surrounding the subject of sex crimes and pedophilia. It is almost certain that this epic work will be triggering for you so, do read with caution or decide whether it even makes sense for you to read this at all.
Read 21 tweets

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