Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign | A team of meme-makers has been flooding social media with pro-Trump posts riddled with sexist and racist tropes. Donald Trump is cheering them on
nytimes.com
Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.
Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.
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Trump is a festering wound that will keep producing pus if you keep poking at it. Wash your hands, wrap it up, take your antibiotics, and ignore it until it goes away.
Or, in the immortal words of Paul Anka and Lisa Simpson, "Just don't look!"
yeah i'm sure fascism will just go away on its own if we don't talk about it.
No, we need to aggressively stamp out fascism, but you won't do that by arguing with xitter memes or amplifying their message by making it a news story.
Read the metaphor again. I didn't say don't treat the wound. I said stop poking at it with your dirty fingers.
As I've told conservatives, I'll stop talking about Trump when they stop worshipping him and making him their leader. Until then, I'm just criticizing the opposition leader.
Problem is that it's not just Trump at this point.
No, but the same rule applies. Trolls feed on attention.
Problem is, you're not their intended audience. Their audience is the hate-filled assholes that they can rile up, hopefully into a self-sustaining hate movement. Then all they need to do is the occasional steering and maintenance.
And engaging in a Xitter debate amplifies their message, convinces no one, and wastes your time and effort. Focus on real issues, real debates, and don't let the trolls drag you down to their bullshit.
I don't even have a xhitter account.
You don't engage directly, but it's important for people to understand what they're seeing.
Is there anyone anywhere in the world who hasn't heard of Trump? Anyone who doesn't already understand exactly what he wants and where he stands? People are not going to be convinced by memes, it's just for the people who already support him. They're trying to reframe the debates, and recenter the political landscape around their narrative.
And by engaging with it, you feed into it. You lend it your power. You concede that their ideas are worthy of your time. They are not.
All I need is for him to not be the presumptive Republican nominee, to not have influence on the Republican party, and to no longer have an army of stochastic terrorists just waiting for the right signal. Then I can finally in good conscience listen to the unending stream of myopic advice from people on the internet who think we should just ignore him.
I don't think anyone should ignore Trump or the rise of fascism. I'm saying that you don't feed the trolls with attention. We should get updates on the various court cases and pay attention to justice being done. But if he and his followers pitch a nutty on social media, that's not news, and paying attention to it amplifies the message. Debating the crazy nonsense shifts the Overton window further away from reasonable discourse.
It's how he was elected in the first place. Covering Trump was good television. Lots of viewers tuned in to see what ridiculous fucking bullshit he was say or do next. Making a spectacle of it, building the circus tent around it, made it more powerful because it has no shame. It has no desire to speak truth or be virtuous. Trump and his troll army want you to get down into the mud and wrestle until you're too tired to fight actual, serious people. Shining a light on it won't kill the disease, it will encourage it to grow.
Think of it like a child's temper tantrum. You don't get down on the floor of the department store and argue about why they can't have ice cream before dinner. You deal with the tantrum, whether it's taking them home or otherwise punishing bad behavior, but you don't engage in the tantrum.
I see your point, but if we don't talk about it then we don't know it's happening. There's no one here in this thread arguing with anyone about it, it's just people learning one more thing to remember if (somehow) they are still on the fence about whether they would vote for him.