Pages

Wednesday, July 05, 2023

A video posted to twitter that does no good for Trump nor DeSantis. Anonymity has a downside. Who can we blame?

 Someone - some group - took the effort to produce this monstrosity. Sicko plus.

Yes, free speech. But this is just plain mean and awful, in not presenting anything of real substance, but demonizing DeSantis.

Yes, the Crabgrass opinion is that DeSantis is a small nasty individual.

That is based upon something more than a hodge-podge of small-bite images strung together with bad background music.

Whoever did this should be made to parade in shame.

By opening with faint praise of Trump, then dumping on Ron, both individuals are lessened by the effort. It is as if somebody were trying to make Trump look as if he had a part in this shit storm against DeSantis. It is unfair to both.

If this is what is in store for the public leading up to election day in November, we are at least on notice of how shabby stuff will be.

A closing thought. Is it still up on twitter, or did the person posting it remove it?

Also, the link that sent me there is one I do not completely remember. I think it was this. Both items were downloaded but the video was not viewed until this morning.

Do you trust that latter item's headline that the video was posted by pro-DeSantis interests? Surely not. It looks aimed to tar both Ron and Don.

Freedom of speech does include license to offend, and this thing offends greatly. The guess here is that NOBODY will come forward to say, "Yes, I funded it and scripted it and would do it again." The guess is anonymity can shield bad stuff. Accountability for producing and posting that thing deserves attention, but who really would take his/her time to pursue such crap-mongering? Calling it out is sensible use of time. Trying to pin the tail on that donkey, too much for too little.

Let us simply say, NO MORE, PLEASE. And move on, repulsed by this quite early sign of a terribly puerile and vile election ramp up.

UPDATE: I cannot say, shocked, SHOCKED! It is not as much a surprise as a saddening thing. In posting of it, it might have been best to leave it alone, to not draw attention to it. It was a judgment call to castigate the effort rather than to let sleeping dogs lie. The deciding factor, a likely move toward such electioneering if it is not called out as too vile early to where the consultants can redirect their bile to something less ignorant and less vile. Something, even, like positive advertising instead of dumping garbage hither and yon. Expect more of the same, but hope the expectation is not met. BOTTOM LINE: So bad it should be made an example.

___________UPDATE__________

Relevant schematically to the opening above, but distant in content, this SeattleTimes report stating early to mid-item -

She’s been especially popular with conservatives, who promoted her as a perfect symbol of how overly theatrical and inane progressives can be — like when she attacked the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision last week by saying “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” The tweet was viewed more than 27 million times.

There’s just one problem: She’s probably a fake.

The “proud Democrat” in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn’t show up in any local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign, where she said she worked as a field organizer, has no record of her; neither does the Obama Foundation, where she claimed to have volunteered.

Her only other known social media profile, on TikTok, posts copies of her tweets but has never included her speaking or showing her face. And a digital-imaging expert said that the three purported selfies she’s posted on Twitter — showing a young, smiling blond woman — bear the hallmarks of digital manipulation.

“I strongly suspect that this person doesn’t exist,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who studies online disinformation. “It’s as if she dropped from the moon and arrived fully formed with this narrative that makes liberals look like idiots.”

After The Washington Post raised questions about the account with employees of Twitter’s trust and safety department, the account was suspended on Sunday for unknown reasons.

Twitter does not officially respond to requests for comment. Marsh’s account, which did not respond to requests for comment, has not tweeted since.

Months after Elon Musk took over Twitter with a scorched-earth playbook to eradicate scammers and spam, the internet’s long-established playbook for winning online engagement — known as “attention farming” — remains decisively in play.

Marsh’s account tended to post messages so polarizing and incendiary that readers couldn’t help but respond, boosting her public profile in the process — a tactic known as “rage baiting.”

[...] For months, Marsh’s account had raised suspicions among online misinformation experts due to her lack of a real-world footprint and her devotion to attention-grabbing viewpoints one called “cartoonishly liberal.”

Her account carried a blue “verified” check mark — an icon that once connoted that the person’s identity had been confirmed by Twitter but, since Elon Musk’s takeover last year, has come to mean only that the account had paid for the designation.

She waved off doubters by saying repeatedly that she was not a “parody,” “fake person or a robot,” but tweeted once that she wished she were, because “it would make navigating Twitter a lot easier.”

She declined to share details about herself by saying she had a “terrifying” stalker from social media, adding, “I’ve learned from mistakes in the past and choose not to share much of my personal life.” Last week, as people questioned her legitimacy, she asked her Twitter followers to recommend a defamation attorney to her.

When it came to political commentary, she seemed to regard every polarizing news story as an opportunity to offer her opinion and to solicit her fans to promote her to their own networks.

She started her account in September 2022, shortly before Musk’s takeover, with a rapid-fire series of left-leaning tweets and requests for people to retweet if they agreed. It worked: In November and December, she was gaining more than 1,000 followers a day, according to audience data from the social media analytics firm SocialBlade.

It’s unclear where the account’s photos came from. But Scott-Railton suspects they may be stock images, selfies taken from a woman not connected to the account, or images that were otherwise altered, perhaps to combine multiple photos into one. Each had a different background, though the facial features remained largely the same.

Some of her tweets were copied word for word from other big left-wing accounts or trending tweets, while others sometimes read like liberal caricatures; last month, she said she still wears “2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine.”

On Twitter, she became a subject of heavy doubt and fascination, with some theorizing that she was “a right-wing agitator or a foreign actor” or that she was “designed to collect as much data about Democratic voters as possible for God knows what.”

 Attention farming. Rage baiting.  Like liberal caricatures. Interesting terms. 

A distinction, this individual, likely as not a false troll, compares to the host of producers likely behind that opening video; with it being taken seriously as non-troll, by at least the one linked MSM item that pointed to it as if it were dead serious politics. It might be that, but certainly not pro-Trump nor pro-DeSantis.

Being sensible about things that ring false is helpful to a balanced understanding, because if it rings too false it likely is. False tweeter, (twit?), allegedly from the left side of things, offset by a false twit group posting a video - in each instance an insult to the intelligence of the public. Interestingly, both tweet. Sez something.

Musk bought a viper den, and overpaid.