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hannahcarter11

Marjorie Taylor Greene may be politically safe, but her conservative Georgia constituen... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Marjorie Taylor Greene Conservative

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene has turned herself into one of the most visible Republicans in the country -- stoking an endless stream of controversies that has caused headaches for a defeated party trying to find its footing while she rakes in campaign cash without fear of consequences.
  • Greene's political security in the district -- where 75% of voters supported former President Donald Trump last November -- doesn't mean that all of her constituents are relishing her role as the GOP's flamethrower or that they approve of the recent anti-Semitic comments that she has used to rally her supporters.
  • Some questioned the motives behind Greene's attention-seeking maneuvers and said they were open to supporting a different Republican for her seat -- though no formidable challenger has emerged yet.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • She's already been stripped of her committee assignments by a vote in the House, rendering her an essentially ineffective legislator, but she's largely gone undisciplined by party leadership in Washington, DC, as congressional Republicans bow to Trump.
  • Unbowed by reprimands from her GOP colleagues, she made a fresh comparison between Democrats and Nazis, claimed that the cartels "love" President Joe Biden during a discourse on immigration, and then did a racist impression in what she described as her "really bad Mexican accent."
  • nside the Oakwood Cafe that morning, 78-year-old Phil Neff, who supported Trump, paid for his breakfast amid the morning bustle. Afterward, he told CNN he believes that Greene "has more interest in herself than serving the community," but added with a note of resignation: "That's what the people chose."
  • "I don't think anybody should be comparing anything for the Nazis and the Holocaust. It's different worlds," White said during an interview in Rome, Georgia, hours before Greene's rally. "She has been ineffective, and she'll continue to be ineffective as long as she is as controversial as she is. She doesn't garner support of other Republicans."
  • But Greene also has plenty of defenders within the Republican base -- despite her past embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric, and past Facebook comments and videos unearthed by CNN's KFile in which she indicated support for executing prominent Democrats.
  • In the few short months she's been in Congress, Greene has created major headaches for her party, not just by lobbing her inflammatory criticisms at Democrats, but also by undermining Republican leaders in the GOP conference.
  • But just as Republican voters often excused Trump's outlandish statements as proof of his authenticity, some voters in this conservative Georgia district praise Greene for her candor.
  • "I don't necessarily agree with that statement," Deal said in an interview in Rome with CNN's Martin Savidge when asked about Greene's comparisons between mask requirements and the Holocaust. "But I do agree with her right to say it."
  • "It does feel like people are getting some of the rights taken away that they're used to," Shults said.Sandra Campbell, another Georgia voter, said she believes Greene and Trump are representative of the "real America."
criscimagnael

TikTok Ukraine War Videos Raise Questions About Spread of Misinformation - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ok-ukraine-misinformation.html

shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • “What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”
  • But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago.
  • TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”
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  • Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.
  • The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.
  • “People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”
  • TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.
  • For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years.
  • The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.
  • That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.
  • But audio can be misused and taken out of context, Ms. Richards said.
  • “Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”
  • “I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”
  • “I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”
Javier E

Opinion | The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right's 'replacement' game - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lson-replacement-rhetoric-scam

replacement scam racism gop immigration

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • a key fact about this narrative: It gets an important truth exactly backward.
  • The aging Whites this story targets will be relying on social insurance programs whose durability will heavily depend on immigrant taxpayers to sustain it, meaning they have a great deal to lose from decreased immigration.
  • With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees.And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments.
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  • The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.
  • But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.
  • That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.
  • To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.
  • The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.
  • Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”
  • What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination
  • There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”
  • As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”
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