Molly Jong-Fast: Owning the Libs Is the Only GOP Platform

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/61df26769a2cf50020163abc/owning-the-libs-is-the-only-gop-platform/

The idea that liberal outrage is being weaponized by the GOP is nothing new. Since its inception, Trumpism has made a point of eschewing policy in favor of “owning the libs” to garner likes, retweets, and small-dollar donations. And it has worked. Look no further than the 2020 election, where the GOP refused to even write a new platform for its convention. Trumpism didn’t need a new platform, because besides racism, the only tenet of Trumpism is baiting Democrats. Who could forget the meme of the protester in the black cap weeping? Much of Fox’s evening programming consists of making fun of liberals for their earnest beliefs.

But something more specific is happening on social media. On Friday, the Texas GOP Twitter account posted a meme that showed people waiting in line in New York City for a COVID test and superimposed the text, “If you can wait in line for hours for testing … you can vote in person.” According to Erin Douglas, a reporter for The Texas Tribune, the meme “quickly provoked anger from the left, giddiness from the right, and rose to one of the top trending posts on the platform that day.” Trolls—including Donald Trump himself—have been posting dumb stuff like this for years. What the Texas GOP recognized was that one of the two dominant American political parties tweeting it from an official account was going to get some attention.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, tweeted: “You are being rage farmed. Your angry quote tweet = the goal. Left: the tweet everyone is dunking on. Right: Texas GOP gloating at the engagement they got.” I caught up with Scott-Railton on the phone. He told me that he started noticing this trend on his own Twitter timeline; it “was filled with quote tweets of inflammatory things, that seemed almost structured to provoke that kind of engagement. I began suspecting that in some situations either by accident or by design, the inflammatory content was being amplified by an algorithm-driven engagement loop.”

“There’s a precedent for this,” he continued, with “neo-Nazi and extreme far-right groups seeking to do extreme and inflammatory things in the hopes of provoking a conflict or a reaction that will garner media attention. What I see here with rage farming is the distilled tactic of this strategy for social media … A lot of people experience social media as a 24-hour cage fight. The algorithm is giving us more of the people engaging with problematic content and less of their original thoughts. We’re quickly beginning to live in a dunkocracy. The dunkocracy is killing democracy.”

*snip*