Thread by @opensrcdefense

The Trace is running a hit piece soon about a bunch of big 2A social media influencers. Here's a screenshot from an email they sent to a company, soliciting comment.

It's a great example of how this flavor of reputational blackmail works.

🧵 Anatomy of a hit piece 👇

The first thing to notice is the subtle-but-sweeping category creep. In two sentences, the suspect category expands from insurrectionists to conspiracy theorists to people talking about elections and politics and finally all the way to people who warn of gun confiscation.

Textbook motte-and-bailey: throw up a half-court shot (people warning of gun confiscation are bad) at the same time that you toss in a lay-up (insurrectionists are bad). When people call out the first, you fall back to the second. Smart sleight of hand. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and…

What that does is that it confuses readers who don't know much about the topic. So they lock into a particular negative emotion at the beginning of the passage, when the category is small, and then they dutifully retain that emotion as the category steadily expands.

Motte-and-bailey successfully employed, the email has now established a massive group (covering tens of millions of people) as untouchable for any company that cares about its reputation.

Then it innocuously asks, "So, do you care about your reputation?"

The company that got this email is in the gun industry, and knows enough to see the game that's being played.

But mass-market companies have less time for this stuff, and both they and their customers don't know enough to see the game that's being played. So they fold, in fear.

One way to fix that is to post these sorts of things, to analyze the game *while it's being played*. Once it's been done, that's too late. But if you shout out how a magic trick is done *while the magician is in the middle of doing the trick*, then yep, the illusion pops 👍

Hidden camera video of them trying to pull this off now that the internet exists: