The Tyranny Of The Blue Checkmarks
Who are these people -- and why do we care what they think?
For those who have not followed the uprising at The New York Times, Bari Weiss — formerly an editor at the grey old lady — resigned her position in what has to be one of the best op-eds I have read all year. She writes:
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
Of course, Weiss is not alone among liberals who find themselves on the outside of the new “woke” progressive culture. Andrew Sullivan — a longstanding critic of all-things-conservative — finds himself on the outside and as of Friday, will no longer be writing for New York Magazine.
Noam Chomsky, a man no stranger to the left, co-signed a letter from hundreds of academics only to be slaughtered by the Twitter mob for doing so. Yes, that Noam Chomsky who serves as a reminder that despite our political affiliations, liberals and conservatives tend to share the same classical liberal tradition tolerating error so long as reason is left free to combat it, pace Jefferson.
Leave aside for a moment that liberals are quietly discovering that the B-list academics on our college campuses and universities have spent the better part of three decades teaching its graduates to hate the very ideas Americans were supposed to champion: free minds, free ideas, and a free society.
Let us further leave aside the snitty little Slack chatrooms where employees and cliques share and malign snips of commentary so that weak characters can feel some sort of parity against stronger ones. Whether it is a symptom of “splash and trash” media or a failure to grow out of a middle school sentimentality, I leave to the reader.
Once upon a time in Virginia when online blogs were the most expeditious way of reaching readers and avoiding the editors in the legacy media, journalists and reporters would judge whether an article (or blog) was well read based not on how many people clicked on the article — which is the only metric — nor on whether folks actually read the article, but on how many “hits” it achieved vs. how many comments it generated.
Of course, this was all faked.
One particular blog in Northern Virginia was discovered doing this by tracking IPs. Turned out that a 300 comment long section was effectively one Northern Virginia blogger talking to himself (called sockpuppetry) over and over again in his own comments section. This clod eventually moved on to marketing, where he fleeced his customers selling them on form rather than on substance (and was eventually called out in the press for doing so).
But it’s the tactic of sockpuppetry that we want to focus upon here.
Every once in awhile you hear a story of someone posting something truly nasty and despicable on an “official” account — the comment meant for some other account like @NastyTroll28365 (apologies to NastyTroll28365 if you actually exist). A short kerfuffle emerges and we all move on.
. . .but this is Twitter.
Fun fact: Most of social media isn’t genuine at all. Public affairs officials, social media gurus, marketing experts, all of it are in on the same game. It takes no time at all to sit and make 100 Twitter accounts and put them on ice for a month… three months… three years… and then deploy them at will against an unsuspecting target.
Managers and board members on corporations who have no idea who social media works believe that a mob is coming after them and shift millions of dollars over accordingly — all in reaction to a few tens of thousands of dollars of effort pushed by PAOs and public affairs folks working in cubicles on K Street.
That’s sockpuppetry.
Here’s another dirty secret: The “Twitter mob” doesn’t exist. There are no human beings behind the outrage and hashtags. Just public affairs groups, marketers, and lobbyists who know the score.
Want to know how the Russians played ball in 2016? They troll farmed it. Want to know why Obama eclipsed Hillary in 2008? They troll farmed it. Want to know how Dominion Energy got rolled by Clean Virginia? They troll farmed it.
Ryan Holliday’s Trust Me I’m Lying is critical reading for anyone looking at how a weakened newsroom bereft of editors is pushed around by public affairs wonks taking advantage of reporters. In some instances, the reporters are simply bought with tickets, lunches, dinners and access (bloggers even more so).
Want to put pressure on folks? Find influencers willing to share your rainbow, BLM fist, or red rose and then present your cause as inevitable. Then turn on the group or individual you intend to freeze, isolate, polarize, and destroy — Alinsky 101.
Yet the larger point remains.
These so called “mobs” don’t exist in the form we think they do.
Tens of thousands of people aren’t coming after your business. Tens of people are… and they create fake accounts on social media to target you to create the mirage of public influence.
That’s it.
The reason why it works? Such targeting is designed to trigger your fight-or-flight response, that little bit of your brain called the amygdala. This bit of psychology works against targets; it works better to find “useful idiots” (the term actually used by PAOs to describe folks who come along) who will mimic your marketing campaign.
Real voices admixed with sock puppets create the false mirage of a movement, and it is this mirage which is driving much of our public action these days.
Weiss’ observation that Twitter has become the ultimate editor is spot on, but Twitter isn’t a genuine editor of anything at all. Twitter is an influence machine for the weak — that’s it.
Kneeling to the blue checkmarks pushing narratives only gives the machine more strength, and as liberals are slowly (and to their horror) coming to discover, Mensheviks still go to the wall. In fact, the woke progressives reserve their utmost hate for “liberal allies” precisely because they are not willing to take that extra step from disagreement to direct action. There is no safe space from this mob; they must be met and fought.
So why are we giving the blue checkmarks so much control over our national debate if we know the scam?
Of course, some folks are in on the scam. Sometimes the scam works in their favor. Most folks would rather not believe that this is how the sausage gets made nowadays — calling in hit pieces and pretending it is journalism-via-airstrike.
But one has to wonder how much longer this so-called “mass movement” of cancel culture will last, much less whether Americans are content to continue fueling our own demise through our educations system.
One thing is for sure. When the likes of Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and Noam Chomsky are perceived as “out” while the 20-somethings on Twitter are perceived as the voices worth listening to? That strikes one as a particular and degenerative failure of optics.
First institution to fire the woke McCarthyites in toto wins. Tribalism — the very thing that bothered so many about the populist revolt of 2016 — cannot be combated with more tribalism.
But until someone has the virtue (emphasis on vir-) to stand up to the stentorian voices on the left? The beatings shall continue until moral improves. . .
When the woke find their ceiling and one voice is willing to stand firm, maybe then we can have a conversation about how error can be tolerated so long as reason is left free to combat it.
That is, if reason and the scientific method (no joke) aren’t viewed as the tools of white supremacy (sic) by the new class of diversity hustlers.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.