If you’ve been on social media lately and are any sort of left-of-center, it hasn’t been real fun. I’m sure you’ve seen the current trend of Democratic posting where they’re telling trans people to “enjoy the camps” and blaming the genocidal posture of Republicans on the Muslims whose relatives are being targeted. It’d be easy to go “so much for the party of tolerance” but that’s a Republican move. No, I think we need to try to understand what’s going on in a deeper way.
What’s the purpose of social media? Bad question, I know, but it gets us on the right track. There isn’t “a purpose”, of course. What I mean to ask is what is the role that social media plays in modern politics? Why is it important, if it is? Because a lot of us are eager to see the answer here as just abandoning social media. We characterize it as something that isn’t necessary, something that should be ignored, especially as most people don’t pay attention to it.
The role of social media is pretty much the same as the role of academia, the news media, and the general intelligentsia: to make sense of current events. It is a propaganda vector. This is important because it really differs from how a lot of people use social media. That is to say, we get onto social media in large part to be social in a personal way. This makes it hard to react in all cases as if this is the production of propaganda. At the base level, though, that’s what we’re dealing with.
It would be easy to simply ascribe all of these opinions to “bots”, whether that be actual automated accounts or simply extra accounts used by real people to make it appear like arguments are coming from new places. The problem with this is that there’s no good way to even figure out who is a bot, even if you only looked for the automated ones. Looking at follower or followed counts isn’t reliable, and they have a range of sophistication in post output.
Instead, I’ve always used the “common person” test to decide if something is a “real opinion”. This has its own problems. Namely, I am basically assuming that people are not stupid, and obviously, there are some people who genuinely are. However, I am anti Hanlon’s razor, and I feel that this stance is a better way to analyze a situation. That is to say, I don’t think it’s useful to just see people as stupid and then reason from there.
In this situation, if we’re talking about current American politics, the common person naturally understands that the Democratic Party failed them. I am not saying this because I’m a leftist. I’m saying this because if you are in a contest and you lose, the immediate and most direct assumption is that you didn’t do what you needed to do to win. Either you did your job badly or the other side did their job so well that you couldn’t match them.
In order for people to start to believe that something else happened, they either need to be able to analyze the situation themselves or they have to be convinced by someone else. Most people can’t analyze the situation. This, again, isn’t to say anybody is being stupid. Most situations in life are difficult to analyze for people who aren’t trained. For “educated” people, the usual question is something like can you fix your car or your electricity? For a mechanic or a stocker, it might be can you analyze a financial crisis? Obviously, any single person might have any combination of different knowledges; the point is that you’re gonna have blind spots somewhere and you’ll have to rely on someone else being convincing.
This is where social media comes in. This is where the meaning of what is happening is hashed out, and arguably more than news media itself. It could be argued that social media has become the “town square” – not just Twitter but all of social media, and perhaps all of the internet, in its many forms – and specific outputs like news articles and TV shows are products of the social media environment. In earlier ages, this kind of discourse would have been largely hidden as it took place in newsrooms, academic conferences, and the like; there wasn’t really the mechanism for the conversation to be held out in public.
But now it is. Journalists are digesting this information in real time and receiving comment, without the ability to create a hard barrier between their subjects in the community and their peers in the office. Not only that, different publics are now able to access each others’ conversations immediately instead of being silo’d off by distance.
That is why social media occupies a central place in modern political thought and expression. And it’s why we have to be skeptical about social media, especially opinions we see on it.
There are a lot of people who are interested in using social media primarily as a vector for propaganda in its many forms. The Democrats are one of these groups, especially the “engaged Democratic base.” This is a different set from Democratic voters at large, even from “liberal” voters at large. The engaged base is that group which views the Democratic Party as being in their interest itself. They aren’t allied to the Democratic Party because they feel it is most likely to help them, they’re allied to it because they view the Democratic Party as its own good, as an institution which must be protected for its own sake.
These are the people who have primarily been pushing the anti-trans and anti-Muslim narratives on social media. Of course, many of them are working with the Democratic Party directly or picking up on messages that have originated with Democratic operatives. It’s not likely that the Democratic Party is actually running all of these operations directly, though. I think that considering there to be an “engaged base” which is involved in putting out these messages is the most useful way to understand what is going on here.
The engaged base wants to make sure that their view on how the election went becomes the dominant one because that is the best way to ensure that the Democratic Party does not experience a wide rejection. This is a rejection that they probably deserve, given that they do not represent the ideas of most of the country and have been a block to social progress at all stages. But at the base, these are people who are interested not in achieving things for their fellow people first, but in first preserving the Democratic Party.
Why do I lay all this out? I think it’s easy for us to get wrapped up in believing that most people are naturally going to buy in to ideas like “Muslims abandoned the party and that’s why Harris lost”. I don’t think that’s the case. Obviously, like I’ve said, social media isn’t important, but it isn’t the same as real life. If you talked to people the day after Harris lost, I don’t think most of them would say “Muslims and trans people are what caused this”. There had to be a production of that viewpoint, and I think many of us watched it happen. The engaged base then took this up and is using it to defend the party.
But what we’re dealing with isn’t the rise of a real, considered opinion. This is people relying on who they believe to be experts, and on the opinion they can glean from social media. We don’t need to despair because we believe the public is naturally against the right opinion. We need to destroy and discredit the peddlers of propaganda and/or outcompete them.