Dominick McGee didn’t enter the Capitol during the siege on Jan. 6. He was on the grounds when the mob of Donald Trump supporters broke past police barricades and began smashing windows. But he turned around, heading back to his hotel. Property destruction wasn’t part of his plan. Plus, his phone had died, ending his Facebook Live video midstream. He needed to find a charger. After all, Facebook was a big part of why he was in Washington in the first place.
Mr. McGee is 26, a soft-spoken college student and an Army veteran from Augusta, Ga. Look at his Facebook activity today, and you’ll find a stream of pro-Trump fanfare and conspiracy theories.
But for years, his feed was unremarkable — a place to post photos of family and friends, musings about love and motivational advice.
Replacing “why is this happening to me” with “what is this trying to teach me” is a better way of thinking. Positivity only..
0
0
Most of his posts received just a handful of likes and comments.
That changed after the presidential election, when he began posting about what he believed was suspicious activity around the vote.
Americans have always viewed the media as an enemy of the people until President Trump was elected. We have allowed the media to earn our trust in this nation because the masses would accept anyone who wouldn’t accept Trump. #StopTheSteal&🇺&🇸
0 0 He saw a sharp rise in engagement — more than 50 comments and nearly a dozen shares.
On Nov. 6, he wrote that he’d “rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” garnering 106 comments and 134 likes.
A post about Democrats supporting slavery in the 1800s received even more attention. Within weeks, he was committing nearly all his time to sharing what he learned from the Stop the Steal movement. He started a Facebook group, Win the Win, with the goal of overturning the election results. Tens of thousands of people joined in just weeks. Mr. McGee, who uses the pseudonym Dom Lucre on Facebook, wrote in the group that a “storm was coming,” a common QAnon reference, getting 440 comments and 1,500 likes.
Suddenly he had followers: “Thank you for helping we the people to wake up and see the truth, and see how we’ve been lied to for way too long,” one commented. “Thank you Dom!”
By the time he drove from Tennessee to Washington to march on the Capitol, his Facebook group had swelled to more than 61,000 members, and he was eager to meet some of them in person.
“Everyone has some type of thing that gave them a spark,” he said in an interview last week. “Facebook just so happened to be mine.”
He’s not alone. Facebook’s algorithms have coaxed many Americans into sharing more extreme views on the platform — rewarding them with likes and shares for posts on subjects like election fraud conspiracies, Covid-19 denialism and anti-vaccination rhetoric. We reviewed the public post histories for dozens of active Facebook users in these spaces. Many, like Mr. McGee, transformed seemingly overnight. A decade ago, their online personas looked nothing like their presences today.
A journey through their feeds offers a glimpse of how Facebook rewards exaggerations and lies.
But the rewards are trivial compared with the costs: The influencers amass followers, enhance their reputations, solicit occasional donations and maybe sell a few T-shirts. The rest of us are left with democracy buckling under the weight of citizens living an alternate reality.
Fanos Panayides’ story follows a similar trajectory to Mr. McGee’s. Judging from his Facebook profile and online history, he seems to have stumbled into his role as one of Australia’s pre-eminent Covid-19 denialists. Years of previous posts never mention vaccines or express much of an interest in science or politics.
Rocking a pink shirt. Looks pretty good if I do say so my self.
0 0 In 2017, he became a contestant on the popular Australian reality television show “Family Food Fight.” After being eliminated from the program, Mr. Panayides struggled to keep the attention of his followers with motivational posts. In April 2019, he tried to promote a YouTube channel called Mind Liberation Conversation. His first video, “Don’t watch this if you’re not ready. This will change your life,” was viewed 1,110 times, and the channel drew just 150 subscribers. His last video on the channel, posted March 8, 2020, and viewed just 115 times, didn’t mention the encroaching pandemic.
The video did, however, end with this message: “Act now. Make the decision to become the new you as of this moment.”
Five days later, Mr. Panayides took his own advice. He posted a different kind of update on Facebook.
This thing is not an accident it’s man made. Watch and Share this. Numbers don’t lie.
0
0Instantly, the piece drew engagement from his followers, with 83 comments and 26 shares. Mr. Panayides started posting multiple times each day, attacking the media and decrying the pandemic as a hoax perpetrated by world governments to control their populations. Occasionally, his posts referred to QAnon and included pro-Trump hashtags (which have become right-wing calling cards among influencers around the world) like #DrainTheSwamp.
This thing is not about a sickness, it’s about destabilising the world’s economies and kicking off the master plan. The elites agenda is in motion and once it begins nothing’s going to stop it.
0 0 Get with it people. They said asbestos was safe too. Boy they were wrong about that.
0 0 People actually think that they are going to let us have our normal lives back &😅&😅&😅&😅 &🤣&🤣&🤣 . When you snap out of your delusion I’ll be over here &😅
0 0 Had to be said!!! The media should be held criminally accountable. IF THE AUSTRALIAN & THE WORLD'S PEOPLE SHOULD SUFFER ANY HARM OR LOSS, AS A DIRECT RESULT OF THE MEDIAS BLATANT DILBERATE MISS INFORMATION, THEY SHOULD ALL BE HELD CRIMINALLY LIABLE AND SHOULD END UP IN A JAIL CELL.
0 0 On April 8, Mr. Panayides created a Facebook group called 99% unite Main Group “it’s us or them.” According to BuzzFeed News, the group grew into “one of the biggest hubs of resistance against Australia’s coronavirus response,” adding 37,000 members in one month. His monologues now brought in thousands of views and shares.
In early May, Mr. Panayides protested against public health measures about masking and social distancing in the media by destroying his television, throwing it onto a concrete floor. His post was shared 1,500 times, and other conspiracy-minded viewers posted videos of themselves destroying their televisions in solidarity.
Finding an Audience
Mr. Panayides started posting about coronavirus conspiracy theories and found a much larger audience.
Avg. likes and shares on
Mr. Panayides posts
2k
1.5k
1k
Begins posting
about coronavirus
conspiracy theories
500
0
April
July
Oct.
2020
April
July
Oct.
Avg. likes and shares on
Mr. Panayides posts
2k
1.5k
1k
Begins posting
about coronavirus
conspiracy theories
500
0
April
July
Oct.
2020
April
July
Oct.
Mr. Panayides helped leverage the page’s audience, which, according to BuzzFeed News, included a “mix of coronavirus deniers, anti-vaxxers, 5G truthers, sovereign citizens, QAnon believers and other fringe conspiracy theorists” to organize a protest against the lockdown in Melbourne. He was arrested at the protest, which led to a rapid rise in his followers.
When Facebook took down 99% unite Main Group “it’s us or them” for violating its rules, he created a different group, 99% Unite Worldwide, which has over 20,000 members and features the same kind of content.
Tiffany Katheryn Hayden, a self-described “actress, singer, songwriter, composer and writer” from Florida, has posted regularly on Facebook since 2015. She shared updates on her health, her dogs and her spirituality. On April 17, 2020, she changed her profile picture to include the phrase “stay home, save lives.”
Then, on Nov. 6, three days after the election, her feed changed drastically.
I never post any politics but this just came in and its absolutely crazy! I had to post. Total corruption. This just came out from Michigan. How many other states are having “ glitches ” in the computers. Unreal. An election should be fair in every regard ...
0 0 Other than a few photos she’d shared of herself in a bikini, the comment quickly became one of her most engaged Facebook posts.
She posted updates and more links the next day. In between election denial posts, Ms. Hayden posted links to past modeling photos. By January, she was posting almost daily. With each post, she and her followers constructed a collective delusion surrounding the 2020 election.
Breaking news ! Western Journal ...We won the WH ! The swamp is finally getting completely drained !!
0 0 Proof! And lots of it . So tired of the dems saying no proof ! Trump will be re-elected ! Trump 2020
The noose is tightening and this is just the beginning so expect more testimony and some people doing prison time. So I don't want to hear So where's the evidence? You are seeing it unfold right before your eyes if you want to deny it to yourself than your more braindead than the useless Joe Biden. Go get em Rudy and Sydney . Trump 2020&🇺&🇸&🇺&🇸&🇺&🇸
0 0 She appeared eager to convince others of her conspiracy theories. “So are you saying my vote didn’t count?” one of her commenters asked under a voter fraud article she shared. “Yes that is what I am saying,” she replied.
We reached out to Mr. Panayides and Ms. Hayden for comment, but neither of them responded. Mr. McGee, however, was willing to talk about how and why his online persona changed.
Before the election, he was careful about expressing his political opinions, he said. While most of his family members identify as Democrats, his mother was a Republican, and he said he has long identified with the Republican Party’s focus on “morals and tradition.”
“I was afraid of people not accepting me for who I was,” he said. “It sounds crazy, but it’s really true. I do. I want to be accepted. I’m human. But I can admit that.”
As he watched election results showing Joe Biden taking the lead, Mr. McGee felt frustrated. “I didn’t care about my reputation. My beliefs overran my fears of not being accepted” he said.
And more and more, those beliefs were affirmed. “I made a post, I got engagement. I said, ‘I’ll do it again.’ And then I just repeated the same thing that worked once.”
The people he started reaching online weren’t the people he knew in person, who might disagree or ask him to calm down or start an awkward in-person debate at the next family dinner. There were thousands of them, and none of whom would offer a corrective.
He’s paid a price. He said he lost a few customers of the credit repair business he runs, which he also promotes on Facebook. And members of his family started distancing themselves. After his cat died in December, Mr. McGee said, no one in his family offered condolences.
“It is what it is,” he said. “It does hurt, but it’s fine.”
On Facebook, though, Mr. McGee has found acceptance, and he’s chasing the feeling.
Key to his growth was Mr. Trump’s page, which Facebook suspended indefinitely after the Washington riot. With more than 35 million followers, Mr. Trump’s posts and their comment sections were a lightning rod for influencers seeking fans. Mr. McGee said he commented there daily to promote Win the Win.
A Turn to Partisanship
After Mr. McGee started posting more about President Trump and the election, he was rewarded with surging likes and shares. Those rewards multiplied after starting his Win the Win group.
Comments and shares
on Dom’s Win The Win
posts
Avg. comments and shares
on Dom’s posts
2k
1.5k
1k
Election
on Nov. 3
500
Comments and shares on
Dom’s personal timeline
0
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
Avg. number
of daily posts
10
8
6
Election
on Nov. 3
4
Dom’s posts on his
personal timeline
Dom’s posts on
Win The Win
2
0
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
Avg. comments and shares
on Dom’s posts
2k
Win the Win
1.5k
Election
on Nov. 3
1k
500
Personal
timeline
0
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
Avg. number
of daily posts
10
Win the Win
8
Election
on Nov. 3
6
4
Personal
timeline
2
0
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
Removing Mr. Trump from online platforms supposedly limits dangerous content from spreading. Twitter banned the president. Amazon stopped hosting Parler, an app popular with the far right, for “violent content,” and Apple and Google suspended the app from their stores. But for his supporters, it may be little more than a speed bump. Over the past week, they’ve flocked to an array of other platforms, including encrypted text-messaging services like Signal and Telegram, which were among the most popular apps in the country this week.
Facebook also said it would remove Stop the Steal groups. But the ideas and sentiments still blanket the platform. Mr. McGee decided to simply avoid the reference when he named his group Win the Win — an idea inspired by his search engine optimzation savvy.
While each person and post history was unique, a number of the feeds we reviewed suggested that those who’d made a sharp pivot to sharing misinformation were similar in their desire to cultivate a public persona.
Ms. Hayden, Mr. McGee and Mr. Panayides shared an entrepreneurial streak. They expressed a desire for connection with others and sought to achieve it online. But their attempts at conventional influencing (via modeling, reality television, running a small business and sharing motivational content) brought only modest attention.
It wasn’t until they tapped into an ecosystem charged by hyperpartisan politics that they were able to access the levels of engagement they desired. In each case, these newfound influencers recognized the opportunity and had the digital savvy to siphon off a portion of the attention and outrage generated by the news cycle for themselves. Quickly, they seized on hashtags and refined their messages, occasionally posting the same thing numerous times — testing their language to see what would take off. Most realized that the same post on a personal page generated only scant attention compared with the likes, shares and comments it could get on a group page.
Facebook groups for like-minded people are where lies begin to snowball, building momentum, gaining backers and becoming lore. Organizers refine their messages and titillate followers with far-fetched predictions and analysis, often recasting Mr. Trump’s loss as part of a master plan to get re-elected.
They’re also a way to bring together disparate conspiracy factions into a larger movement. Not long after his group took off, on May 6, Mr. Panayides laid out what was, essentially, his growth strategy to his followers. “This is not a group for socialising,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re a 5G person, you come from QAnon, you’re a mad super believer in all this stuff that’s happening, or you’re just new to the group, you’ve just had your eyes open, you have to understand, we’re a mixed bag.”
This combination of radicalized groups has led some experts to sound the alarm. The Stop the Steal movement, they say, served as a kind of mass radicalization. Mainstream Republicans joined with more extreme voices for the first time. Similarly, anti-vaccination and Covid-19 denialist groups have seen a demonstrable uptick in participation.
Still, it’s unclear what kind of real-world changes will come to pass through groups like Win the Win. Mr. McGee said he would use it to protest and to collect signatures for petitions, but one petition he posted got hardly any attention. He requested donations, but no one sent money.
It’s hard to determine the extent to which Facebook caused this hyperpartisanship or simply stumbled into it. Did Facebook cultivate more extreme beliefs or simply take what was already simmering and thrust it into the open?
Mr. McGee argued that he always thought this way. Before Facebook, he said, he watched conspiracy-laden videos on YouTube. Facebook merely helped him find his people.
“People are engaging me, encouraging me to share what I think, but these are the inner workings of my mind,” he said. “I’ve been feeling this way for years. That’s why it’s so easy for me to make posts, because I’ve been suppressing this stuff forever.”
And yet when he talks about Facebook, he focuses on algorithms and optimization, not community or ideology. It’s worth considering: Would he be attempting to influence others so forcefully without Facebook’s incentives?
While Mr. McGee was walking away from the National Mall last week to charge his phone, Facebook permanently took down Win the Win, saying it violated rules against “dangerous individuals and organizations,” along with a few other prominent Stop the Steal groups.
But driving home to Tennessee after the rally, he said, he was in good spirits about the future. He’d already started a different group, with a nearly identical name, and it now has over 1,300 members. He also started an online chat room.
On the phone, he was calm and even deferential to his political opponents. He readily acknowledged the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But his posts shortly after he hung up exhibited a darker tone. In his new Facebook group, he suggested that Mike Pence may be replaced by Gen. Michael Flynn and that Mr. Trump’s semiconcession video was previously recorded because his hair was blonder earlier that day.
&🔥&🚨BREAKING: Sources claim Trump signed the Insurrection Act 9th January 2021 (This is not a drill) The pieces are in play, we have held the line, We are preparing to witness the great cleansing. #winthewin
0 0 After Mr. McGee returned from D.C., most of his family cut him off. They started a separate text message group without him. And when they had a party the next week, he wasn’t invited.
“My entire family disowns me now. Especially after D.C.,” he told his chat group. “The fact they know that I’m one of the people that went to Capitol Hill? Yeah, I’m completely banned from my family, if that’s even possible.”
But he has no plans to stop posting. If anything, his ambitions have grown. He said one day he’d like to run for the Senate. “My perception of the group, and what it is and what it offers, is starting to change,” he said just before it was banned. “It was election only, and now it’s becoming even greater than that.”
Days later, in his chat room, one woman claimed she ran a multistate group interested in far-right militia tactics. She was recruiting members of Win the Win, and Mr. McGee could join if he passed a thorough interview and background check. He could even become the captain of his local chapter.
“We’re ready for anything. We have tons of gas masks. Tons of bullets. Tons of magazines. Tons of A.R.s,” she said, referring to semiautomatic rifles. “Anybody who’s interested, hit me up. Hit me up on Facebook.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
"how" - Google News
January 14, 2021 at 05:00PM
https://ift.tt/3oJN3dY
Opinion | How Facebook Incubated the Insurrection - The New York Times
"how" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MfXd3I
https://ift.tt/3d8uZUG
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Opinion | How Facebook Incubated the Insurrection - The New York Times"
Post a Comment