Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t matter. The GOP playbook has been: accuse the other side of doing the bad thing, and then do the bad thing, so that when you get accused it sounds like more of the same.
It doesn’t matter if we have 1000 independently verified videos of Elon himself paying vote counters to fake results while holding the newspaper of that day up next to his birth certificate. People against trump will say “yeah, we know”, and people for Trump will say, “he won, get over it”.
It’s the same reason the courts found Trump guilty of falsifying records, and then did nothing: that’s not how this situation resolves itself.
There will never be a time where truth does not matter, whether you believe it does or not.
That’s funny you say that, because this whole ordeal has made me realize that truth does not matter at all, and it’s a privilege to be able to live as though it does. But in most countries and throughout most of history, what is true doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is what people believe to be true. And only if you work very hard as a society, and get lucky, do those two things coincide.
Case in point: it could have been the case that Obama was a perfect president who made the best possible decisions to most effectively care for all constituents. But that doesn’t matter if right wing media convinces half the country that he’s a radical communist terrorist who is ignoring the constitution to enrich his deep state. Regardless of what Obama did, what happens in response is what people believe he did.
🎶No one else was in the room where it happened🎶