A collection of references on disinformation & electoral influence, from November 2020

I haven’t kept up with this blog, so am instead going through old posts on another medium looking for things I can repurpose / repost here. There will occasionally be new posts here too.

These were some that I posted in the wake of the 2020 election.

An overview of several of the techniques in play: “Americans Were Primed To Believe The Current Onslaught Of Disinformation” from the now-archived fivethirtyeight.com

"The leader of your party is pouring poison into our national bloodstream, and if you can’t find the courage to say it’s wrong, don’t ever try to tell us again how patriotic you are." quoted from “On his way out, Trump salts the earth behind him” by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post

The Economist is more conservative than I am, but they justify their statements and have studiously avoided & openly-criticized the reality-free partisanship that that dominates the right these days. I maintain a subscription so that I can find and understand common ground with conservatives:

"It seems likely that Republican leaders and donors obstructed Mr Obama so feverishly not because they genuinely thought he was an extremist, but because they knew that he was not. It was precisely his attempted bridge-building that was so threatening to them. Because it was at odds with the story they had been telling their voters about the left for a decade. And because, had Mr Obama pulled it off, it would have made his already powerful government hugely popular. Paradoxically, it was by spurning his offer of bipartisanship that the Republicans made him seem, true to the right-wing caricature, overbearing and partisan. It also helped them stymie his plans and thereby dismantle the powerful Democratic trifecta he had assembled at the mid-terms in 2010."

This is why I get extremely frustrated at the right stereotyping all Democrats as socialist leftists, and why I'm angered by Republican memes that seem more designed to upset liberals than to suggest actual policy solutions. It's also why I've avoided terminating Facebook relationships over partisan differences and why I grow frustrated when liberals willingly play into conservative stereotypes.

There will be more of these historical posts as well.