Election Day [Week][Month[s]] [Year] 2020 follow-along thread

[Skywatcher]

Per AP/Google, Biden is slowly closing the gap in PA. Within 74K now, was 76K a few minutes ago.

[Mahaloth]

@RadioWave

It’s kind of cool that we’re just minutes or hours away from having our first female vice-president (elect) who’s also African-American and nobody’s making a big deal about it. Who would of imagined that fifty years ago?

Asian-American, too. It’s a pretty big deal.

[DavidNRockies]

Charlie Brown Teacher Speaking

[Procrustus]

@Lamoral

Wow, this is by far the most dejected behavior I have ever witnessed from Trump

This almost makes me wish I was watching him. Almost.

[Kimstu]

@urbanredneck2

I dont know where that stuff is from but its sounds pretty left wing.

Psssst: if you want to know where a linked quote “is from”, you can just click on the link. In the case of my cite, it would have taken you to the Wikipedia article on the #WalkAway “movement”.

@urbanredneck2

You can ignore walk away all you want but its real and its there.

It’s there, sure, and it’s “real” in the sense that it has a website and a leader, activist Brandon Straka, and a donation link so gullible conservatives can give them money.

What there’s no evidence for is the claim that #WalkAway represents any kind of significant shift on the part of American liberals changing their political affiliation. There may be a few hundred or even thousand actual disaffected liberals in it, but fundamentally it seems to be just political theater to persuade conservatives with little awareness about social-media “movement manufacturing mechanisms” that liberalism is just about to crumble, and they should donate money to help it along.

As this article analyzes the setup,

Pro-Trump & Russian-Linked Twitter Accounts Are Posing As Ex-Democrats In New Astroturfed Movement […]

A closer look at this emerging narrative—a self-described “grassroots movement” of former Democrats fleeing the party—revealed an astroturfed campaign driven by pro-Trump Twitter users and amplified by automated and Russian-linked accounts. […]

The “WalkAway Movement” officially started in May 2018, with posts dating back to May 19 on the group’s Facebook page. (Unofficially, the blueprint for this campaign has been in the works for quite some time.) Since its creation, the Facebook page has also added a public group for members to post content. As of June 30, the Facebook page had nearly 12,000 followers and the public group had almost 19,000 members. That breaks down to an average of 266 new followers a day and 422 new group members every day—quite a lot for a brand new “grassroots” movement. […]

A short time later, the campaign jumped over to Twitter […] One of the first tweetsthat gained significant traction appeared on May 31, and was obviously meant to elicit the attention of influential Trump supporters (11 such accounts were tagged in the tweet). […]

At that point, nothing about the hashtag would have been particularly noteworthy to the casual observer, besides the fact that it was pretty clearly manufactured by Trump supporters.

That all changed on the weekend of June 23, when a flood of tweets using the hashtag suddenly appeared within a span of just a few hours. Even more remarkable than the sheer volume of tweets and the speed at which they appeared was the engagement rate associated with each tweet, which ranged from several hundred to several thousand times the average Twitter engagement rate. […]

The vast majority of (early) tweets using the hashtag #WalkAway were sent by accounts with less than 100 followers (many with less than 25), which in itself is an aberration and indicates that many of these accounts were likely created or repurposed recently, possibly for the explicit goal of amplifying this hashtag. Most of the tweets sent by these accounts had far more than 100 likes and retweets—and that’s not even looking at other types of reactions. […]

I’ve tracked a lot of hashtags—including organic and non-organic movements—and I’ve never seen anything even close to this. This is not what a viral hashtag campaign looks like; this is what a manufactured and artificially amplified digital operation looks like. […]

Over the next several days, the hashtag was been picked up and amplified by Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, as evidenced by its prominent position on Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard, which tracks activity in a network of 600 such accounts. […]

In addition to being amplified by accounts linked to Russian influence operations, the “WalkAway Movement” also got a boost from Russian propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik . […]

The #WalkAway hashtag has also been among the top hashtags tweeted by accounts classified as bots and trolls by software developer Christopher Bouzy’s Bot Sentinel tool. […]

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone using the hashtag is a bot.* There are obviously humans participating in this astroturfed campaign, but their tweets are being amplified by automated accounts, artificially expanding their reach and creating the impression that the “movement” is larger than it actually is. […]

Pro-Trump hashtags, like #MAGA and trump, were also among the most consistent and common themes—another giveaway that this movement of self-declared “former Democrats” was actually a creation of Trump supporters posing as ex-Democratic voters. […]

By the early morning hours of July 2—just one day after the Breitbart article was published—the link was already the 4th highest trending URL and the #4 most-shared URL overall on Hamilton 68, demonstrating the close ties between Breitbart and channels of Russian influence. […]

It’s tempting to brush this off as a stunt, largely because that’s exactly what it looks like. The narrative—“I was a Democrat/progressive for my entire life but I decided to abandon my values and switch parties when the least popular, least qualified, and most unprincipled Republican president in modern American history took office”—is patently absurd, and some of the testimonials-by-tweet are, quite honestly, laughable. Furthermore, most of the accounts tweeting under the hashtag are either brand new or didn’t even bother to delete the evidence that they were already Trump supporters before “joining the movement” to walk away from the Democratic party.

Given that the clear primary purpose of the manufactured #WalkAway “movement” is to extract financial support from gullible conservatives in exchange for reinforcing their distorted image of liberal politics as precarious and toppling, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to fight urbanredneck2’s ignorance on the subject? Yes, urbanredneck2, you are actually totally right about #WalkAway being a critical threat to US liberalism and all we liberals are actually very scared of it and you should totally give them lots of money if you want to turn lots more liberals red!

But seriously, the stakes are a lot higher than just a bunch of conservative grifters scamming conservative marks seeking reinforcement of their fantasy that there’s actually a vast number of liberals secretly agreeing with them. As the author of the article goes on to say,

For one thing, there is reason to believe that this psychological operation — and to be clear, that’s what this is — represents a trial run for future social media manipulation efforts. […]

Developing effective methods of digital manipulation requires an understanding of the target population — and what better way to understand the nuances of a target population than embedding yourself amongst them and running a trial to gauge responses? […]

The “WalkAway Movement” also provides a glimpse into the issues and methods that are likely to be used in future psychological operations and disinformation campaigns, particularly as we approach the 2018 midterm elections. […]

While the “WalkAway Movement” isn’t likely to convince—not to mention convert—many people, it offers important insight for those interested in understanding psychological operations aimed at manipulating and influencing social media users. This includes people who are interested in developing better defenses against manipulation, as well as those who want to develop more effective methods of manipulation.

Perhaps the most important observation is how quickly Russian propaganda outlets and Russian-linked social media accounts took notice of the campaign and started promoting it. While not exactly surprising, this tells us that Russia is still actively monitoring U.S. social media and looking for opportunities to amplify narratives that are aligned with the Kremlin’s goals.

[Railer13]

I can’t believe that I’m watching him, but it’s making me smile.

[Malden_Capell]

It’s not worth it. He’s repeating himself every few minutes using slightly different words.

[bobot]

@not_what_you_d_expect

I’m not even drunk.

There’s still time!

[Boycott]

Biden has flipped Erie County in PA.

Trump held a big rally there in the penultimate week of campaigning.

Biden is all but certain to win the state now.

[Whack-a-Mole]

That is what heartens me the most.

For Trump to be like this and give such a lackadaisical speech I can only assume his inner circle has crunched the numbers and told him it does not look good. If it were the reverse I think Trump would come out as his usual brazen self.

If his inner circle is sending him that message it is likely good news for Biden.

[Max_S]

“Poll workers in Michigan were duplicating ballots”. Can someone definitively shoot down/explain that claim?

~Max

[DavidNRockies]

When the President gives a televised address from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, behind him you can see pictures of his (several) lovely family(ies).

Midst those pictures sits a brass placard that reads, simply, “The Buck Stops With The Black Guy.”

[jsc1953]

This is the first time I’ve turned on a Trump news conference purposely because I wanted to hear him. I’m getting giddy with anticipation.

[Win_Place_Show]

“Don’t vote by mail” - Trump, to his voter base.

“Funny how most of the mail votes are for Biden” - Trump, claiming fraud.

[bobot]

@Max_S

“Poll workers in Michigan were duplicating ballots”. Can someone definitively shoot down that claim?

With a fucking Xerox machine! Duplicating bastards!

[kambuckta]

I keep expecting him to just wipe the mic off the podium and just say, “Oh, fuck it” and storm off the stage.

[Whack-a-Mole]

No.

He needs to prove that claim.

IIRC an earlier legal challenge was shot down by the judge because there was absolutely no evidence of the claims.

[susan]

Aww, but he says there’s “so much proof, so much evidence.” (I had to turn it on.)

[AHunter3]

Whoo! GA diff has just dropped to 0.1% Trump lead, a gap of 3635 votes. This could happen.

[I_Love_Me_Vol.I]

So Trump is reading someone else’s news release? Who’s it from Ivanka? Putin?