Re:How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong...
by freeflight on Thursday September 19, 2019 @08:07AM
(#21015397)
> The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people.
He said that because in Germany it's actually quite mainstream to blame everything on social bots.
When the German alt-right gained popularity, and alt-right topics became very popular on Facebook, the reaction of the German mainstream to that was to go "Those are all Russian social bots! There are no alt-right Germans! Facebook you need to fight those fake news and social bots harder!" [0].
By now those supposed "social bots" are going to elections and are voting [1]. The German mainstream reaction to that is to keep ignoring it, after marginalizing it as "Russian propaganda" didn't work.
He said that because in Germany it's actually quite mainstream to blame everything on social bots.
When the German alt-right gained popularity, and alt-right topics became very popular on Facebook, the reaction of the German mainstream to that was to go "Those are all Russian social bots! There are no alt-right Germans! Facebook you need to fight those fake news and social bots harder!" [0].
By now those supposed "social bots" are going to elections and are voting [1]. The German mainstream reaction to that is to keep ignoring it, after marginalizing it as "Russian propaganda" didn't work.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/ge...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/europe/german-far-r...