My mom was having trouble with her computer about 4 years ago. I eventually got things restored and launched her Facebook. (She rather charmingly assumed that when a friend posted they had sent her a personal note, so found it exciting.)
Conceptually I knew part of the genius of Facebook is that each one of us has our own Facebook. First of all, everyone has different friends and subjects to follow. Then our comments and likes determine who gets to the top and who we rarely see. In place of the daily newspaper we once shared, we now have a minute by minute privately customized publication - and they're wildly different.
My mind was boggled by how different hers was. First, it had page after page of seemingly random posts. Random as in the URLs they pointed to were literally strings of words. None were Newsweek.com or sandiegouniontribune.com. And the posts were a mix of weird allegations ("Hillary is sick!") to weird "news" ("Melania wears beautiful summer dress" or "The First Lady's dress makes her arms look so masculine!"). None of it was news as I think of it. It was all praise or criticism of outfits or manners and the occasional distortion or outright lie. Through this window on the world, mom saw the Obamas as an embarrassment, Trump as powerful, Melania as beautiful and Hillary as a threat.
Facebook is market driven. One of the many things that I love about markets is that they are driven to create exactly what you want. You want a sandwich made with a croissant? We got you. Rye? Check. English muffin? Fine. You don't like reggae or hard rock but you do like the fusion of those two? Listen to Dread Zeppelin. (Seriously. Listen to Dread Zeppelin.) Markets treat every one of us as unique and the mix of things I consume is different from the things that you do. The same is true of us as producers, as employees. Specialization means that we all bring something different to the market in terms of what we make and take. It's a beautiful thing.
But politics is not about the thousands of ways each one of us is unique. It is about the dozen or so things we share in common. We have to agree on where the road will be built, what we teach in schools and who gets public assistance and who does not. What is brilliant and beautiful in markets is divisive in politics.
Facebook also enables conspiracy theories. Yesterday a friend who is a fan of Trump sent me a link to an article about 35,000 children released from tunnels under New York. As if this were a real story. The link was to a website with the name operationdisclosure1. It is a complete nonsense story, totally fabricated, and easily debunked, offered as proof that Trump is a hero and the world is full of evil from which he will save us. These are posts that only show up in the feed of people who've already shown their willingness to believe such things - so many of us don't even know about them.
QAnon has emerged as a weird amalgam of conspiracy theories. Folks who like or react to stories about 35,000 children coming out of underground tunnels in big cities are likely to get a stream of QAnon conspiracies. One of the common theories is about the deep state, the notion that the government is actually run by nefarious civil servants intent on stealing your money, guns, and freedoms. Just as he has done with the 35,000 children living underground, Trump is intent on freeing us from the imprisonment of this deep state.
If you are not fed a stream of nonsense, deep state means nothing to you. If you are steeped in QAnon, use of the term "deep state" is a sign that "you're one of us." You get it. It is like a random line from a song or video game or movie; meaningless to folks who are not a fan and a sign that "you're one of us!" to the folks who are. And Trump says "deep state" a lot.
Yesterday Trump was asked about QAnon. He said only positive, if vague things. A couple of people on my post about this are now arguing that he didn't really endorse QAnon. Technically they are right. (Trump didn't technically say Obama and Harris were constitutionally unqualified for office ... he just quoted "some people" as claiming they were born elsewhere. Repeatedly. Same with calling COVID a hoax or masks as useless or snake oil a sure cure for the pandemic.)
You have to know that everyone has a different media diet to understand what they hear. One person is being fed continual QAnon nonsense about the "deep state" that is working against Trump. Another hears nothing about this. When Trump says, "Deep State," it just sounds like nonsense to the person whose feed isn't full of QAnon garbage but is confirmation of the veracity of QAnon to the folks who feed on it. Millions of people are fed a steady diet of conspiracies and told that credible sources are fake news. Trump regularly affirms to his fans that this world is the real one, the only one they can trust. And their feed is a daily confirmation of that.
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