"If Buttar were a Russian troll, the #PelosiMustGo triumph might have earned him a promotion: Americans were yet again feuding on social media.
"But Buttar is very much an American, and so were the overwhelming majority of the online activists whom he exhorted to join his campaign.
"Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic:
"Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause."

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More from @HalMarshall2309

12 Oct
"Behind-the-scenes redistricting work: Adam Foltz, who was part of a secretive process that crafted Wisconsin’s legislative maps, is on the payroll of the Texas Legislative Council, a nonpartisan state agency that manages the internal mapping tool used in redistricting.
"Records show the agency hired him as a 'legislative professional' at a $120,000 annual salary, but Kimberly Shields, the council’s executive director, said Foltz reports to the House Redistricting Committee.
"Shields and other legislative staffers did not respond to questions about Foltz’s involvement in redistricting.
Read 8 tweets
12 Oct
"In 2019, she joined Facebook to work on civic misinformation. She took the job because she viewed it as an opportunity to make sure others wouldn’t experience the pain she did of losing a friend to online conspiracies, she said at the Yale panel." washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
"She also wanted to do her part in the run-up to the 2020 election to prevent a repeat of the foreign interference in the 2016 election, she said.
"She went into the company clear-eyed about the problems with social media, which had been extensively covered by the news media in the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But she soon learned that the problems were much worse than she realized.
Read 7 tweets
12 Oct
"The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that ex-Trump legal adviser John Eastman works for as a senior fellow, on Monday defended Eastman’s memo to then-President Donald Trump ...
"and then-Vice President Mike Pence that laid out how the latter could hijack the 2020 election certification process to keep Trump in power.
"The organization released a statement that spun Eastman’s memo, which blatantly sought to help Trump subvert the election, as mere 'legal advice' that has 'since been maliciously misrepresented and distorted by major media outlets.'
Read 4 tweets
12 Oct
"About a month after Kim announced his departure, Trump nominated Treasury Department official David Malpass to run the World Bank." news.yahoo.com/how-donald-tru…
"In announcing the nomination in February, Trump said he hoped that Malpass would make sure that 'U.S. taxpayers’ dollars are spent effectively and wisely' and that 'financing is focused on the places and projects that truly need assistance.'
"Once the chief economist at investment firm Bear Stearns, Malpass was best known for a 2007 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that infamously predicted that the unstable housing market —
Read 5 tweets
12 Oct
"By September, Haugen had made the decision not just to leak documents but to go public as a whistleblower.
" 'I just don’t want to agonize over what I didn’t do for the rest of my life. Compared to that, anything else doesn’t seem that bad,' Haugen wrote in a text.
“ 'You just defined bravery,' Fine responded. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
Read 11 tweets
11 Oct
"What happens to America's mental health under a second Trump administration? Very bad things" salon.com/2021/10/10/wha…
Dr. John Gartner predicts:

"Democracy would be dead, and the coup complete. All future 'elections' would be Putin-style shams, where the electorate never actually has the power to remove the Republicans from power.
"We could expect criminal prosecutions against Democratic leaders, the press and anyone who opposed the regime. Experts of all types would be persecuted.
Read 7 tweets

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