The Conspiracies Are Coming From Inside the House
Four years ago, when Russia’s internet trolls wanted the American electorate to lose confidence in democracy, they had to work hard at it—by recirculating cynical postings from obscure social-media accounts, or by making up their own.
The message then was that everything in American society had been rigged: elections, football games, the stock market, primaries, polls, the media, “the system.” But this litany of conspiratorial messages bubbled up from the lower reaches of the social-media universe—for instance, from Twitter accounts whose Russian owners had worked painstakingly to gain followers. According to one spelling-challenged troll on Twitter, unspecified software that was “RIGGED AGAINTS BERNIE” somehow “stole votes in ALL Hillary won counties” at the behest of the Democratic National Committee. The Internet Research Agency encouraged distrust and paranoia on Facebook and Instagram, too: “Funny how Clinton was favored before the vote was even cast, and how the Democratic Party has been working against Bernie to ensure this corrupt puppet’s victory,” declared one posting. To encourage its discovery by disaffected Americans, the author also included a barrage of hashtags from #theteaparty to #nobama to #hillary4prison.
[Read: The normalization of conspiracy culture]
In 2020, though, the vitriol, conspiracies, and incessant allegations of rigging aren’t coming from outsiders. They’re being driven by real influencers in the United States—by verified users, many from within the media, and by passionate hyper-partisan fan groups that band together to drive the public conversation.
The at the Iowa caucus last month revealed the blazing incompetence about nefarious plots. Several high-profile Sanders surrogates claimed that the party was stalling because it was unhappy that results showed Bernie Sanders winning; others went a step further, suggesting that local party apparatchiks were outright rigging results for Pete Buttigieg. Some of these insinuations were retweeted by high-profile social-media accounts, including that of a sitting member of Congress.
