Fact-based impeachment can't penetrate the pro-Trump Web - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html
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shared by Javier E on 14 Dec 19
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the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.
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The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.
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The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.
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“There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”
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Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.
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Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.
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the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.
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But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”
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“The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”
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“That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”
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Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol
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The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.
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That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president