It's truly scary watching how viral the conspiracies in this election go in minutes on Twitter/FB. One side wants to find "fraud" so any clip someone posts out of context becomes proof and spreads like wildfire.
As a complete outsider,I watched the politics and conservative subreddits respectively as the election unfolded.
It's of course anecdotal, but after watching that with my own eyes I would find it very hard to believe that those links, threads and comments were developing organically.
For example, the conservative subreddit went from following the election to having the front page fully filled with claims of election fraud in matter of literal minutes, with sources coming from a million places at the same time.
Just like magic, suddenly the election being rigged went from a crazy idea to incontestable fact, and now for many people that's what happened, clear as day.
It was extremely scary to see,I still don't know what to make of it.
Social media is now a primary target for foreign election interference, I'm sure that's a major cause. In 2016 Russia targeted Clinton and supported Trump. But they also generally tried to increase division. One ugly thing about that is disinformation campaigns would actually get support from some Americans.
My main worry is that this is in the US and it's being handled poorly already. A country with great resources where these companies are based and somewhat governed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elections_in_2020
How many Cameroonian experts do the US based tech giants have to combat misinformation there?
Conservatives were saying Trump’s margins would have to be big enough that Dems couldn’t steal it well before election day. It was never a “crazy idea”, it’s been on their minds since the push for vote by mail.
