How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
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Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#2This is interesting as a work of network analysis, but I'm not sure how to connect this back to politics. It seems pretty clear to me whenever I browse /r/The_Donald that they're actively uninterested in fact-checking. There are posts hating on the new Netflix TV series "Dear White People" where people ask questions like "Do I even want to know what it's about?". There was a highly-upvoted image about Pizzagate with a leaked Podesta email on the left and a UrbanDictionary screenshot on the right defining some word as a lewd sex act—from the fourth page of results. Anyone who's ever been to UrbanDictionary knows that literally every word has a definition somewhere about it being a lewd sex act.
Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? That seems unlikely to me, although certainly possible. I worry that the fringe of loud people on the internet isn't actually connected in a meaningful way to voters, and so analyzing the fringe isn't a good way to learn anything about the world at large, just about loud people on the internet.
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#3I'm eager to see the follow-up: "How some dude's medium post triggered a left-wing moral panic on HN!"
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#4This is interesting as a work of network analysis, but I'm not sure how to connect this back to politics. It seems pretty clear to me whenever I browse /r/The_Donald that they're actively uninterested in fact-checking. There are posts hating on the new Netflix TV series "Dear White People" where people ask questions like "Do I even want to know what it's about?". There was a highly-upvoted image about Pizzagate with…
> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts?
Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#5It's good to see this analysed; conspiracy theory of this kind has long been a plague on US politics and now it seems to be spreading to Europe. It takes a remarkably small number of people to put it in front of the meme-susceptible, who will then themselves spread it.
(What I don't really understand is why US conspiracyism limits itself only to things that don't exist - you don't hear so much about Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO and so on.)
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#6This is interesting as a work of network analysis, but I'm not sure how to connect this back to politics. It seems pretty clear to me whenever I browse /r/The_Donald that they're actively uninterested in fact-checking. There are posts hating on the new Netflix TV series "Dear White People" where people ask questions like "Do I even want to know what it's about?". There was a highly-upvoted image about Pizzagate with…
> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."
"The Russians phished some Hillary staffers, and that's why she was so unpopular with voters!"
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#7This is interesting as a work of network analysis, but I'm not sure how to connect this back to politics. It seems pretty clear to me whenever I browse /r/The_Donald that they're actively uninterested in fact-checking. There are posts hating on the new Netflix TV series "Dear White People" where people ask questions like "Do I even want to know what it's about?". There was a highly-upvoted image about Pizzagate with…
I'm curious about Pizzagate. Some of those emails are clearly trying to hide something. The language in them is obviously "code" for something or other. Has there been any other plausible/implausible theories apart from the Pizzagate one?
Edit: Getting downvoted for asking a question. To be clear I have no idea what the emails are about and zero agenda here. The emails came across as very weird to me which is why I am asking.
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#8Is she deliberately trying to "Hitlerize Europe" or is she just somebody whose heart is in the right place but repeatedly making poor policy choices? Regardless, she's running Europe into the ground.
We can't know what Merkel's end goal is because we cannot read her mind, so this theory is obviously just conjecture that fits some of the facts and cannot be proven or disproven.
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#9I wonder if flooding the internet with obviously-fake news (eg. markov model it) is one way to immunize people against the more slick kind of fake news.
Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
#10> ...so that she could unleash an “EU Army” against fellow EU member states.
The article puts “EU Army” in scare quotes, but that part is actually true; Merkel does support the creation of an EU Army:
> "Mrs Merkel is backing a push by Mr Juncker to create an EU army." [1]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11861247...