1/ I don't trust the motivation behind anything the Trumps do. But this DOJ/DHS/White House effort around child trafficking is especially smelly due to the amount of effort this President and his campaign have put in to courting and leveraging Q Anon.
2/ Ivanka hosted a summit at the White House earlier this year which a number of notable groups active on human trafficking refused to attend, citing a chasm between "rhetoric and reality". washingtonpost.com/local/human-tr…
3/ At the meeting, Donald signed an EO to combat human trafficking and online child exploitation. “I have many issues,” he said at the time. “I have never seen such enthusiasm for a single issue as I have for human trafficking.” nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/…
4/ Indeed, could that 'enthusiasm' be primarily showing up in social media stats the White House monitors? @kevinroose has been following the performance of posts on these topics, which are absolutely driven by the rabid, diffuse Q network:
5/ The social "pop" is evident- in August, on the announcement of a modest $35 million investment in the issue, Ivanka dominated Facebook's top news links, in what was hardly the most important story of the day.
6/ I could be wrong. Perhaps this is all on the up and up. But it smells. We know this is an administration that has repeatedly harnessed conspiracy theories to drive engagement. Could Ivanka be pursuing this issue with Wolf and Barr in part to activate the Q network? I think so.
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1/ I'm sympathetic to some of the angles on this issue that @jawillick explores here; yet I think talking about misinformation as a singular concept can be misleading. There are forms of mis- and disinformation that are very dangerous... washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
2/ Is the concern over these issues out of whack with the threat, writ large? Probably. But when you zoom in to particular phenomena, there is plenty to worry about. We have real examples to point to in this country and many others of mis- and disinformation leading to harms.
3/ Better to consider these issues through the lens of power, and to look at how the deliberate deployment of mis- and disinformation serves those in power and those that seek it. There is a lot of work to do to improve democracy; information integrity is only one lane.
1/ I've covered January 6 fairly closely, including helping with the @just_security January 6 Clearinghouse. I've read thousands of pages of documents and watched dozens if not hundreds of hours of footage from that day and the events that led up to it. justsecurity.org/77022/january-…
2/ I've paid close attention to the dynamics in the media and social media ecosystem as they relate to January 6, writing about related research and producing information and reporting on the subject. While what Fox News and others on the right are doing is abhorrent ...
3/ In many ways it is just more of the same. Public perception of January 6 has remained remarkably static since it happened. If you participate in or largely consume a media diet from the MAGA cinematic universe, you've been exposed to these ideas for more than two years.