Web 2.0’s democratic features powered right-wing disinformation campaigns
Evidence
Between the shock of Brexit in June and Donald Trump’s election that fall, elites shed their techno-optimism almost overnight. The internet once promised a golden age of global democratization; now, as the cliché went, reality felt like an episode of Black Mirror. The utopian features of Web 2.0—lifting marginalized voices and extending monetization tools to everyone—ended up powering disinformation operations that catapulted right-wing politicians into office. … The new face of tech was no longer an archetypal West Coast nerd but a Macedonian millennial working with right-wing operatives to enrage voters for cash. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 486
Between the shock of Brexit in June and Donald Trump’s election that fall, elites shed their techno-optimism almost overnight. The internet once promised a golden age of global democratization; now, as the cliché went, reality felt like an episode of Black Mirror. The utopian features of Web 2.0—lifting marginalized voices and extending monetization tools to everyone—ended up powering disinformation operations that catapulted right-wing politicians into office. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 486
Categorization
- QUESTION: The claim that Macedonian teenagers ran pro-Trump clickbait farms — worth verifying the details and scale of that specific disinformation operation.
- XREF: Directly relevant to Marx’s proposed mechanism of internet-collapsed distribution and the death of subcultural signaling — this is the political corollary of the omnivore monoculture’s flattening. — connects to: Web 2.0 ideology diluted hacker radicalism through Silicon Valley orthodoxy.; Online trading memes from Reddit and 4chan shaped offline neopopulist politics — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 391; Fake news sharing in 2016 concentrated among elderly white male right-wing Facebook users — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 524 (+1 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 486