Lead Us, Bots, Into Temptation

As Puck noted on another thread, Twitter yesterday released the news that at least 50,000 Russian bots were tweeting about the U.S. election.

To which I reply, so what?

If Russian “interference” in the election amounts to nothing more than a handful of people at a troll farm pretending to be tens of thousands of people, where’s the crime? As campaign dirty tricks go, this one’s relatively clean.

Here’s the thing: If 50,000 bots started tweeting obvious nonsense — Goldman Sachs was being run by lizard creatures from outer space, say — would anyone pay attention, other than to wonder why this idiocy was suddenly so widespread? Probably not (though probably a cult would spring up to proclaim the truth of it, and a tongue-in-cheek cult would spring up to mock the first one).

The problem for liberals isn’t that Russians sent out anti-Hillary messages. It’s that they were no different from the millions of messages sent out by actual Americans — in fact, from what I’ve seen, the Russian trolls were more rational and measured than most of the ravings of our natural-born morons.

The Russian interference by bot isn’t a danger to Trump — conservatives traffic in more fake propaganda daily than the troll farms put out in a year — it’s money. The danger is that Trump’s “self-funded” campaign quite possibly used tens of millions of dollars funneled from his usual Russian oligarch sources — sources that operate with the (at least) implicit approval of Vladimir Putin.

If Mueller can show that people in the Trump sphere knew where that money was coming from and that there were strings attached, then Trump’s in trouble. From everything that’s been made public so far it appears his team tried to create plausible deniability all along the way, a task made much harder given that they were trying to make a control freak like Trump appear to have not known about things, when we all know that Trump would freak out big-league if he knew he was being kept in the dark. Since all around him try to avoid triggering one of his freak-outs, my guess is that they let him know what was going on, which is why he’s so worried.

As for Twitter, and its more dangerous older cousin Facebook, corporate entities in a capitalist society are incentivized to make money and to behave as monopolistically as they can get away with. They traffic in content, and propaganda is content — hell, homegrown right-wing propaganda props up what’s left of the AM radio industry, why shouldn’t it prop up Facebook? Expecting these companies to police this is as absurd as expecting Delaware’s Attorney General to lead a money-laundering investigation of the state’s crooked LLC industry.

And why should they police it? Opinions are just that. If Nazis are getting a sympathetic hearing, and they are, the problem isn’t the Nazis doing the talking; the lunatic fringe, like the poor, will always be with us. It’s that those doing the listening compose such a receptive audience.

Why that is — the persistent presence of pernicious propaganda in our daily lives — is a subject for another day.