Some thoughts about politics and society
Local news has narrowed down to the one topic, which although interesting, gets a bit one-note after a point. So this post is about a couple of things I’ve been noticing.
I was struck by the response to this Twitter thread which began with a posting from CBC news: “Speculation about motive in mass shootings could encourage copycats, some psychiatrists suggest.” It’s a fairly mild-mannered backgrounder on the Nova Scotia shootings, but the response is scorching. People are claiming a) it’s communist propaganda, b) it’s fake news, c) it’s a coverup, d) CBC takes orders directly from Justin Trudeau. Cries of “I am tired of EXPERTS!!!” and Who are these “experts”?????? (Multiple punctuation is never a good sign.)
Speaking of Trudeau, despite his apparent popularity in the polls, any thread regarding him soon turns into a hate fest. He’s accused of groping schoolgirls – even, according to one tweet, murdering some of them. This is led to some extent by media like the Toronto Sun: Liberal Party has morphed into a cult – the comments when this was tweeted are a litany of accusations, threats and anger.
I wonder who these people are who think Trudeau has “ruined Canada” and so forth. How many of those Twitter accounts are bots, how many are sockpuppets? And why the extreme, inflammatory rhetoric? It should be possible to criticize aspects of government actions without rushing to the extremes of despair and depravity that I’ve been seeing. But most tweets are on the extreme end like this.
The other thread is a different topic. This week, Trudeau announced money for charities. This was reported in the anglo media but hardly a peep on the francophone side. This seems to fall in with Quebec’s tendency to rely less on charities, and in this sense, I’m a true Quebecer. Charity is a sickly word that implies condescension. A society that functions properly for all its members should not need charity at all, although I see that charities fulfill needs in some niches in our society right now. But we should all work toward making them obsolete.
walkerp 13:15 on 2020-04-23 Permalink
I will waste a few minutes going through and testing a lot of those accounts and while I have very little aggregate data, I am pretty sure most of them are from bot farms and fake accounts, with a few old men angry at clouds from Alberta to keep it real. No real human spends their entire feed just retweeting angry Justin conspiracy theorists. Twitter is a real cesspool.
Where do they come from? I can only speculate. I think they must be an offshoot of the same teams working to plant destabilizing propaganda in the west in general and they have a special focus on Canada. It is possible as well that some of them are homegrown, coming from Ezra Levant and the criminals that orbit around him.
The other thing that happens is that one troll gets on quick probably via an automated system, then a bunch of real users react quickly to his lies, which pushes the post to the top of the responses. So you end up seeing way more propaganda at the beginning of a thread. Scroll down a bit and you start to see much more human responses.
What I do is report the tweet to Twitter.
Simply click on the drop-down arrow on the upper-right hand of the tweet
Select Report Tweet
From the next screen, select “It’s suspicious or spam”
From the next screen, select “The account tweeting this is fake.”
Then Block or Mute as is your fancy and click on Done.
Twitter wants the traffic, so they do not really try to block these bots, but the more reports they get the more they will have to deal with them.
Tim S. 13:16 on 2020-04-23 Permalink
Well, we know that social media engagement is driven by emotion, and that it’s deliberately structured to push people towards like-minded opinions, mostly by focusing on and demonizing an other. Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, about Cambridge Analytica, is really, really good at explaining this. I’m close to people whose social media feeds seem to get darker and darker, and while I can handle ideological differences, it’s the mood changes – the anger and contempt – that develop after 30 minutes of scrolling that really disturb me.
John B 09:16 on 2020-04-24 Permalink
There’s a baseline of people who really hate Trudeau for a few reasons, especially in the west. Many, (maybe all), are at least partly because he’s Pierre Trudeau’s son. Reasons I have heard in real life are:
1) He’s doing a National Energy Policy 2.0. Trudeau Sr’s National Energy Policy basically started Western Alienation, and made almost the entire west hate him.
2) Trudeau Sr’s concept of multiculturalism, (vs the melting pot model in the US), is going to destroy Canada. Junior’s embrace of it, and of refugees & irregular border crossings drives this crowd nuts.
Western Alienation is a real thing. It helped to have a Prime Minister from Calgary, but in the current situation basically the whole government is from Ontario & Quebec, and it’s really frustrating for westerners to have rules, that don’t align with their beliefs, dictated to them from a place that’s a week’s drive away. Combine that frustration with Twitter, and/or Rebel, and we end up with the kind of comments you’re seeing.
I haven’t heard it in real life, but I bet there’s a big group here in Quebec that hate Trudeau because his father rolled out the army in the streets of Montreal.
On a personal note Trudeau doesn’t some across as authentic. Anytime he speaks it seems way to smooth and prepared, to the point of being greasy. Not being able to see the real person that must be behind the show doesn’t help people see him as a human, and I imagine it’s easier to attack an idea that people don’t like, (the super-polished son of Pierre Trudeau), than a real person.
JaneyB 13:08 on 2020-04-24 Permalink
Can concur. I’m from out West. Indeed, fury about the NEP and bilingualism is still very alive. Even metrification can be still enraging. ‘Toronto style multiculturalism’ (sanctimonious as opposed the century-old non-Franco, non-Anglo melting pot of the Prairies) is disliked as simple grandstanding – a cultural no-no for the most part in that region. JT sounds stagey and fake to most people though he considered genial (unlike PET who was smart, cagey, and confrontational). Even with all that though, the tweets mentioned above don’t ring true at all. The anti-Trudeau sentiment out West is normally terse and curmudgeonly and never shrill or conspiratorial. Levant is an outlier, succour to random cranks only; the Sun is not bought for news. Those Twitter accounts, Globe comments etc are almost entirely bots. No question.
walkerp 14:15 on 2020-04-24 Permalink
“The anti-Trudeau sentiment out West is normally terse and curmudgeonly and never shrill or conspiratorial.”
Yes, very well put. Excellent bot litmus test as well. 🙂
dwgs 21:49 on 2020-04-24 Permalink
I’m pretty solidly left, a child of NDP voting school teacher and a blue collar father and even I have little time for JT. The man is an empty vessel.
Chris 00:01 on 2020-04-25 Permalink
>I’m pretty solidly left … and even I have little time for JT
I don’t see any contradiction there. The Liberals are hardly a Left party!
dwgs 08:35 on 2020-04-25 Permalink
True enough, Liberals of today are probably roughly equivalent to the PC of my youth. I like a political leader who has had to deal with some personal adversity in their life, whose character has been forged by some hardship. I don’t see a lot of that when I look around these days.
GC 08:38 on 2020-04-25 Permalink
You can also support a party’s platform and, at the same time, not think much of its leader. A distinction that seems to be lost on many of our neighbours to the south.