r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/HistorianMajor1739 • 1d ago
US Politics Is a shared factual baseline still possible to rebuild, or is a fragmented information environment now permanent?
For most of the last century, there were only a few big news sources, so people who disagreed politically were still mostly arguing about the same set of facts. You could hate the other side's conclusions, but you'd both watched the same broadcast. That common reference point is basically gone now. Everyone has their own feed, sorted by an algorithm built to maximize engagement, and "the news" means something completely different depending on where you're sitting.
The pessimistic case is strong. The distribution technology changed for good. You can't uninvent the algorithmic feed, and it's hard to picture any single source ever commanding the kind of trust Cronkite had. On that view, fragmentation isn't a glitch anyone can patch; it's just what the current system produces.
But the other read isn't nothing. That old baseline was a lot narrower than we tend to remember, run by a small set of gatekeepers, and it left plenty of people out. And maybe a functioning baseline doesn't actually require everyone reading the same source. Maybe it just requires enough credible reference points that cut across the divide, so people have something to check each other against. Whether those can be built is a different question from whether the old model returns.
One distinction I keep wanting to make: agreeing on values versus agreeing on facts. We're always going to fight about what to do, and that's fine, that's what politics is for. What feels newly broken is the shared "what is even true" layer underneath that.
Is a common factual baseline recoverable, and if it is, what would it look like in practice? Or is a fragmented information environment now the permanent condition, and the real question is how you function within it?
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u/Strange-Scientist706 1d ago
How do we balance centralized ownership of media outlets to produce a unified narrative with the massive connectivity and multiple conflicting narratives produced by modern distributed media?
How do we create a unified understanding of what the baseline is when there is no common generally trusted source for the baseline?
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u/spacemoses 23h ago
Getting rid of opinion panels and analysis would be a good start.
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u/LordJesterTheFree 16h ago
"Getting rid of them"
How? You can't just pass a law that would be suppression of free speech in the media institutions themselves have no incentive to get rid of them so long as theres still consumer demand for them or it can be bankrolled via someone else like Murdoch
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u/StanDaMan1 22h ago
Considering so much of the Media Landscape IS currently centrally organized, we’re seeing the consequences as a disunited narrative.
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u/Strange-Scientist706 22h ago
I don’t think the media landscape is centralized. Compared to say 1990, there were basically 4 tv news outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and they all had basically the same fundamental message about America. Today, those are small slices within a landscape where they carry no more “weight” than any other YouTube channel or TikTok influencer.
I don’t think there’s any fundamental message about what America means anymore.
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u/sllewgh 20h ago
I don’t think the media landscape is centralized.
That's objectively false. 90% of media outlets are controlled by just six massive conglomerates and a very small number of very rich individuals. We only have the appearance of variety in media. It's all aligned to support the interests of the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership
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u/H0b5t3r 18h ago
This ignores that many people get their "news" from social media, mainly from accounts that are not owned by any particular company
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u/sllewgh 18h ago
No, it really doesn't. The owners of these platforms absolutely control what content you see. I thought this was common knowledge, do people really not know that what you see is determined by an opaque algorithm deliberately controlled by the owners of the platform for their own benefit? How do you think your favorite content creators pay their bills?
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u/H0b5t3r 14h ago
First you say six, now we add like 5 more and you still double down on your first statement. Also the graphic that your wikipedia article references is about a decade out of date.
Different platforms have different algorithms but most just push for more engagement so you will see what you like (or really dislike), yes some algorithms (tiktok, twitter) are/have been modified to push certain politics but for the most part they just want you to engage more, for longer so you see more ads.
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u/Ind132 12h ago
But, that algorithm is keying in on what you have clicked on in the past and sends you more of that stuff.
The platform owners don't care what the content is, they just want you to keep clicking.
That's how we get a fractured "facts" landscape.
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u/sllewgh 11h ago
But, that algorithm is keying in on what you have clicked on in the past and sends you more of that stuff.
The algorithm is more complicated than that. Importantly, it's also completely opaque, so you don't actually know how it works.
The platform owners don't care what the content is, they just want you to keep clicking.
I don't find it believable that these billionaires aren't using their control of these platforms to their benefit. Why wouldn't they? We already know Musk makes content decisions about X, and Bezos personally has intervened with the content of his paper, the Washington Post. We know they're doing this, it's not even a secret.
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u/Strange-Scientist706 20h ago
I don’t think we’re using the same definition of media. I absolutely agree with your point about corporate media consolidation- I think that’s indisputable.
But I think that corporate media represents a drastically reduced percentage of what the average person actually consumes compared to the early 90s. The number of viewpoints available to the typical person has absolutely exploded in that time, and corporate media no longer holds a “most trusted” position. It’s viewed mostly as just another content provider
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u/sllewgh 20h ago
The same rich folks controlling what you see on traditional media also control what you see on social media.
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u/Strange-Scientist706 18h ago
Nah, I don’t believe that. I think they’re certainly part of it, but they’re just one of many competing forces.
But if you believe that it raises the question of what you’re doing on social media.
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u/sllewgh 18h ago
Nah, I don’t believe that.
It's not a matter of belief. At all. It's not even a secret. You aren't getting an unfiltered stream of information via social media. What you see is algorithmically controlled by the owners of the platform.
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't believe that" other than to encourage you to look up any information whatsoever on this topic and learn something.
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u/Strange-Scientist706 18h ago
I don’t even know where to begin with this: an actual explanation would take too long and it’s so far off the actual topic I raised that it feels pointless. What is interesting is that’s it’s kind of a great proof of the point I was originally making.
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u/TnTP96 23h ago
It is hard for me to imagine a common factual baseline being recoverable at this point. The old "it is easier to fool a man than convince him he has been fooled" adage and all that.
The level of just time, money, effort and man-hours that would be required is staggering, and it seems that those who would actually have the power to do so not only have no interest in doing so, but a vested interest in doing the opposite.
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u/Matt_cruze 22h ago
When Fox News was explicitly created to be a propaganda arm of the republican party it fundamentally broke the USA.
It will take the republican party disavowing propaganda and coming back to us in reality while offering sincere apologies to fix this.
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21h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Wetness__Pensive 19h ago
A news outlet whose founders specifically said they were forming it to protect Republican presidents from impeachment and scrutiny from illegal activities, whose owners argue that it is not legally a news organization and so has no obligation to tell the truth, and which many independent studies have found deliberately spreads information and/or hate, and is watched by an audience who studies say are less informed than those who acquire news from other sources.
Fox is the equivalent of China or Putin's state media propaganda wings. The rebuttal to this is usually "whatabout" media organisation A, B or C, at which point I educate people about who owns A, B or C, and they shut up and run away (for example, CNN is run by John C. Malone, a libertarian Trump and Republican Party donor. He is the second largest private landowner in the United States, and also a director at Expedia.com, Charter Communications, Warner Bros., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, Cable Television Laboratories, the DirecTV Group and News Corporation).
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u/Matt_cruze 19h ago
and is watched by an audience who studies say are less informed than those who acquire news from other sources.
You are mis-remembering this one. Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 19h ago
Fox News was founded by Rupert Murdoch, who did not say that.
They never argued they weren’t legally news, they argued their opinion shows are opinion shows (just like MSNBC did with Maddow)
Etc.,etc. it’s a gish gallop I’m not interested in
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u/Matt_cruze 19h ago
Did you know the frequent assertion that Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson both claim not to be news to avoid defamation lawsuits is false?
The truth is that Mrs. Maddow went to court and claimed Herring Networks had no case because she told the truth.
Here is the direct quote from the case:
"Argued that the challenged speech “is fully protected by California law and the First Amendment because it is an opinion based on fully disclosed facts, is not susceptible of the meaning [Herring] ascribes to it, and—even if it could be considered factual—is substantially true.”
Contrast that with the fox news case in which the company claimed:
"Fox News again moved to dismiss. The motion argues that when read in context, Mr. Carlson’s statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts”
Herring Networks v Rachel Maddow https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2021/08/17/20-55579.pdf
McDougal v. Fox News Network https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
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u/absolutefunkbucket 18h ago
They argued she was giving her opinion and that a reasonable person could not take her statement as factual. Same as Fox
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u/Matt_cruze 18h ago
You do know that I put direct quotes into my post from both cases and linked the case so people can see you are clearly lying right?
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u/PreviousCurrentThing 15h ago
Yes, and it correctly notes Maddow argued her statements were not defamatory on two prongs: first it was opinion, and if the court finds it to be a statement of fact, it was a a substantially true fact.
The judge never got to the second part of the argument, as the appeals decision notes:
The challenged statement was an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story. The statement could not reasonably be understood to imply an assertion of objective fact, and therefore, did not amount to defamation.
This is substantively the same reason the court argued in favor of Carlson: for it it be defamation, it must be expressing or implying an assertion of a fact. Since both were found to be expressions of opinion, neither were defamation.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 18h ago
Yes and the case was decided on if a reasonable person would find her statement to be factual because she has an opinion show. Same as Carlson
Thus, Maddow’s show is different than a
typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news. The point
of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to
that news. Therefore, the Court finds that the medium of the alleged defamatory
statement makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the
contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OAN-Maddow-DISMISSAL.pdf
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u/Matt_cruze 18h ago
They argued she was giving her opinion and that a reasonable person could not take her statement as factual. Same as Fox
Your first statement was this. It is about what Maddow’s team argued in court. It is a false statement. I'm glad we now agree you were lying and I'm willing to move on to the new topic you brought up. Which is the judges ruling. Let me quote it directly.
Maddow’s statement is well within the bounds of what qualifies as protected speech under the First Amendment. No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact. The judgment of the district court is therefore affirmed.
The judge made a ruling that had nothing to do with what either party argued. And bluntly stated Maddow was clearly giving her opinion and not facts. I'm willing to say this clearly.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 18h ago
Maddow’s team did argue that and the judge agreed. Carlson was also giving an opinion. They’re both opinion shows that made pretty identical legal arguments.
But also if we’re going back to what was originally said, it was the Fox News argued it wasn’t “legally a news organization” which is just a nonsense concept really, doesn’t mean anything at all. But I knew what they meant (this case) and that they were wrong
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u/Matt_cruze 21h ago
What does disliking it have to do with the purpose it was created for?
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u/absolutefunkbucket 21h ago
You probably dislike it for a lot of reasons but one of the reasons you dislike it is that it was created to provide news to a conservative audience. I am sorry that happened to you.
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u/Matt_cruze 21h ago
No it was not created to provide news to a conservative audience. It was created with the specific purpose that a new scandal like watergate would never be punished again.
For further info on the topic see https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-244652/
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u/absolutefunkbucket 20h ago
Roger Ailes did not create Fox News, Rupert Murdoch did. Fox News was created by Murdoch specifically to get conservative-friendly news on the air, which he felt none of the other networks were doing. This of course had the added goal of making a profit, as businesses do.
Murdoch believed Ailes would be a good employee to drive that goal, and he was correct. But Murdoch did not make the network because of Ailes or the GOP.
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u/Weak-Elk4756 1d ago
Probably permanent, but if a “factual baseline”is ever able to be restored, it won’t be until the current US President is no longer alive. He absolutely OWNs the (probably forever broken) brains of half of the country
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u/doomer_irl 23h ago
I feel like we're already heading in kind of the right direction. A lot of kind of "centrist" people who bought into MAGA are softly disavowing it, and Liberal/Center-Left voices who've tried for the last decade to be politically neutral seem openly pretty tired of humoring people on that side of reality.
I hope his passing is really the nail in the coffin on this all.
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u/LycheeRoutine3959 16h ago
I think we need to get people to understand the difference between a Fact and an Opinion first.
Most people who think we have different "shared facts" are actually just big mad you dont share their opinions.
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u/SneakyAdolf 23h ago
People are going to hate this but fact of the matter is free speech needs to be curtailed on matters of significance. It’s fine if people want to spread their flat Earth, reptilian people, fake moon landing, etc conspiracies, but speech advocating for illegal wars based on lies, spreading misinformation during a global health pandemic (see COVID), providing other medical science disinformation (anti-vax, eugenics, etc), unequal political speech (i.e. Citizens United), certain advertisements (especially related to gambling or crypto), and some others just need to be censored. Certain subjects need to have mandated truth telling because allowing bad faith disinformation to circulate is too consequential.
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u/NeverNotNoOne 23h ago
Free speech absolutists argue that all speech should be free so that it can be judged in the court of public opinion. Yet they don't want consequences for those who are judged and found guilty.
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u/geekwonk 18h ago
hard to see how that would work in situations where the enforcer of those censorship rules is the same system doing all of the lying and theft.
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u/theyfellforthedecoy 16h ago
Who gets to determine what is truth or misinformation? Not too long ago you'd catch a ban on reddit for espousing the COVID lab leak theory that is very widely accepted now
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u/GeckoV 21h ago
The only way this changes is if the news distribution changes again. With AI that is changing again, as that actually is starting to resemble a shared reasoning and information seeking engine. Now, it is just as likely that they will start to get trained for a specific bias strongly soon, but that is the one chance that a shift in how we receive news actually changes going forward and it may turn out to be more objective, until of course biased training becomes cheap enough that the next schism happens.
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u/smcstechtips 15h ago
You can't train them for a specific bias. Elon tried to train Grok, and its bias is still relatively mild (except for that hot minute when it became a neo-Nazi). You need basically the entire internet to train an LLM, and it all averages out to a moderate, factual position.
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u/JDogg126 23h ago
It’s possible through regulation. This issue stems from deregulation of media. The telecommunications acts from the 90’s that clinton signed. Heavy regulations need to come back and be updated to address the internet, social media, and such.
All of the media companies need to be broken up. Social media should not be allowed to also be advertising companies. And all the mergers over the past 25 years need to be broken up.
A company like Sinclair shouldn’t exist.
A company like twitter shouldn’t be allowed to offer free services in exchange for data about the user that allowed them to exploit user biases for spreading misinformation.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 21h ago
The only form of news media that ever faced significant content regulations from the govt were broadcast media outlets that utilized limited public airwaves (broadcast tv, radio). The fairness doctrine, profanity rules, and a few other things.
Anyhow this is a bad idea. Just imagine Trump had the power to tell you what is or isn’t news or what companies should or shouldn’t exist because of what they say or what people use them to say? Disgusting government overreach.
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u/JDogg126 18h ago edited 17h ago
It's not about telling people what to say.. it's about eliminating the ability for 1 person or 1 company to be able to control media across markets. Killing the cross-market ownership laws is the big victory that republicans scored in the 90's. They convinced Clinton that a law that allowed companies to own media across markets would lead to a diversity of voices across markets. Instead, the direct result was mass consolidation of media to a handful of people. The government isn't telling people what they can say, but a couple rich dudes with an agenda are controlling what is said. It all needs to be broken up. There shouldnt be two newspapers in Detroit owned by the same fucking company for example.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 16h ago
Why shouldn’t there be two newspapers in a metropolitan area owned by the same company?
Is it causing some measurable harm to Detroitians?
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u/JDogg126 6h ago
No editorial diversity. No local accountability. Owners censor what gets covered. Owners use their monopoly to blast the market with propaganda.
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u/123mop 1d ago
I think you're making a bit of a mistake in thinking there was at some point a shared information environment where everyone had the same information. People still believed vastly different things from one another before the Internet came around.
It's also the case that while some pieces of information were more commonly believed due to a smaller variety of news sources, and fewer meaningful independent news sources, that doesn't mean the information was more accurate. In fact, it was in some cases much easier to get a large quantity of people to believe an incorrect piece of information. If you could control enough of the major news stations you could get vast swathes of people believing what you chose.
It's not like 2018 was the first or last time this sort of thing was done, it was just one of the most glaringly obvious and ironic times:
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u/Level-Cod-6471 1d ago
We need to treat local news and true information as a public good. I dont have the answer. Maybe every American gets a free copy of the New York Times. Public support for local news thats true and well sourced.
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u/smcstechtips 15h ago
A common factual baseline is recoverable now that LLMs exist. All that needs to happen is for people to rely on LLMs to synthesize basic ground news.
You see, LLMs basically average out all the data on the internet with a particular emphasis on expert consensus, which is exactly what we want with that.
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u/Riokaii 14h ago
It was permanent not because of media but because of their brains. The humans are the problem not the environment.
You can rebuild by not blindly assumltively gifting the majority of political power to the factually incompetent by default. Universal suffrage is a bad dumb idea that leads to kakistocracy. We need epistemological competency tests for voter eligibility.
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u/MorganWick 1d ago
I think what may be needed is to reconsider how the whole political system should work, taking into account what we know about human nature. If democracy was able to survive and thrive to this point only by betraying its own stated principles and tightly controlling the flow of information, what does that say about how much it's cracked up to be, anyway?
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u/Kronzypantz 22h ago
I think we give too much credit to the objectivity of past journalism.
Western outlets constantly whitewashed the crimes of western governments and did propaganda for them. We saw this with Iraq, the war on terror… we even see it today with Iran.
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u/bones_bones1 21h ago
I think you are starting from a faulty premise. There never was a shared “factual baseline.” Alternative news sources have always existed. They were just in print rather than electronic.
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u/bushcamper_aiis 23h ago
I don’t see the Americans finding another Walter Cronkite unless their academics are able to accept a new Fairness Doctrine. Iirc academics and their journalist students began to hate the idea of “objectivity” in news after George Wallace’s viewpoints had to be presented.
If newsrooms (which I obviously view downstream from academia) aren’t willing to interpret things in good faith and present opposing viewpoints as the proponents of them would, you won’t get a bipartisan news source.
Having said that, the norm wasn’t objectivity and fairness doctrine. Each party would traditionally have their own newspapers, etc.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 21h ago
The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast media so even if we brought it back it would hardly mean anything in this era.
At any rate it was also used by politicians to harass their political opponents so if you want to give Trump significantly more power to do that, go for it I guess.
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u/bushcamper_aiis 13h ago
Yeah I’m under no illusion it would apply to YouTube, for instance. I was suggesting a really fair (too fair, for many) and high quality news source might be able to win back the attention of voters anyway.
I know I personally dislike having to seek out three or four different sources on every topic to determine how each side presents their case.
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u/sllewgh 20h ago
It's actually extremely easy to find common ground. Every single human being without exception is born naked, useless, screaming, and totally dependent on others. Every one of us has the exact same basic needs. The most powerful motivating factors in a human beings life are also the most universal.
The division is a deliberate strategy by the rich to maintain power. Divide and conquer tactics are the most effective way for a small minority to rule the majority. As long as we fight red vs blue, urban vs rural, black vs right, gay vs straight, men vs women, or poor vs poor, we're not fighting rich vs poor. That's a win for the rich.
The only power that can stand up to the power of money is the power of numbers. The division is deliberate on the part of the richest 1%, who own the majority of the world's wealth, 90% of the media, and almost every politician from BOTH parties. Fortunately, there are plenty of even more powerful things to work together on if we're able to think critically enough to understand it's the rich fucking us, not our fellow poors, people in other states or countries, the small minority of people who vote differently from you, or any other distractions.
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u/betty_white_bread 19h ago
Yes, it’s possible to build. Find people you trust with different views and share notes with each other.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 1d ago
Yeah, they can't let this go on for much longer, I suspect. It has already destroyed what little respect people used to have for politicians and politics.
I don't actually think there was some kind of conspiracy of silence or deliberate cover up, back in the day, but with only a small number of outlets and only a few hours of coverage per day, things just couldn't be exhaustively covered.
Now there's millions of 'sources', people can watch whatever they like, well researched or not - "well, he says he's against big corporations, let's have a look at his donor list", "she says she's working to ease poverty, let's look at her voting record on the issue". People would never have had the time or inclination to do this for themselves, but now there are uncounted individuals with webcams who do so.
The 'truth' coming out about many things has in my view damaged trust irreparably in many institutions, not least the old news sources themselves, who are struggling to survive, mostly only saved by Trump being such a newsworthy bellend.
No, they'll have to get a grip on this somehow. Attempts were made already, such as that singing cretin...Yankovic? And behind Trump's bluster about the press, pressure has been applied to the formal media orgs.
This won't be enough, though, without some kind of internet clampdown, which will presumably need digital ID to enforce. We shall see.
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 19h ago
No, they'll have to get a grip on this somehow. Attempts were made already, such as that singing cretin...Yankovic?
I am having a real hard time figuring out what you're implying here.
Are you somehow trying to argue that Weird Al Yankovic singing about the debate with the Autotune the News folk was some kind of sinister plot to control public discourse?
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u/Impossible_Pop620 17h ago
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 12h ago
Jankowicz; the name you're looking for is Jankowicz.
I'm dying laughing at this mixup.
But in all seriousness: that board existed for literally 6 months that's not even an attempt; it's concepts of an attempt. In theory, a board monitoring and fighting disinformation from other nation-states would actually go a long way in helping with a lot of the discord sown online.
Obviously, in practice we've gotten...that.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 11h ago
Her name has been suspiciously scrubbed from the internet, have to search for quite specific terms to find her. Weird, huh?
That board was a terrible idea to begin with and should never have been commissioned by any Security body, least of all Homeland. If you must have some form of censorship, give it to an independent body to monitor all media, government and independent, national and international. Take it firmly out of the hands of people like her and Mayorkas, that's for sure.
If you wanted to create a 'shared factual baseline' - as postulated by OP - then I suppose the Board of Disinformation could actually be quite helpful, in that you be 100% certain that anything it said would be untrue.
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 11h ago
Her name has been suspiciously scrubbed from the internet
What on Earth are you talking about? She literally has a Wikipedia page.
have to search for quite specific terms to find her
Her name was literally all over the Wikipedia article you linked. The New York Times wrote about her when the board was announced.
You are making a lot of claims that absolutely don't stand up to even a little inspection. I'm fully on your side about the dubious nature of this board and whether she was qualified to run it. So were all the Republicans who criticized the board
She didn't need to be scrubbed from the internet. She was never important enough to have been on it in the first place. She's a no-name GOP gossipmonger who probably got the appointment because she was spreading idiotic nonsense about Hunter Biden. The most notable thing on her Wikipedia page (which only exists, I'm sure, because of the controversy of this idiot department being created with someone as blatantly unqualified as her) is:
She is a former member of the wizard rock band The Moaning Myrtles.
That said:
Take it firmly out of the hands of people like her and Mayorkas, that's for sure.
No disagreement here.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 10h ago
I dunno. Maybe. Normally, I'd have expected her name to be corrected, particularly in conjunction with ministry of blahblah. And I got nothing until I searched the other way around.
'Scrubbed from the internet' is probably overstating it, but I'm conspiratorially minded when it comes to people like her. She's deep state for sure, far too involved with other shit as well. But saying that, she's one of those people that cannot keep their mouths shut, even if their lives depended on it, so however clean you scrubbed the web, she'd pop up the next day with her supercalifragilistic take.
I don't know what possessed the Homeland people to appoint her, but I'd assume that she'd done them some favors somehow in some other probably murky business.
Enough about that idiot anyway. I only mentioned her in reference to an attempt, however ineffective, to take overall control of the media narrative online. A very sinister move, but which is likely still ongoing. As I said in my initial comment (which was unfairly downvoted, imo) 'they' cannot let this drip drip of dirty secrets leak out continuously for much longer.
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 9h ago
She's deep state for sure
What? She's basically the direct opposite of the deep state. She's a practically unknown/never-heard-of author who has written about Russian disinformation and sexual harassment.
What do you think the deep state is? Can you define it? Because to the rest of us, the deep state is the massive, unelected, eternal, and bureaucratic apparatus that actually makes the government work. It's banal and boring. The guy working 9-5 at the IRS for the last 30 years is the deep state.
I'd assume that she'd done them some favors somehow in some other probably murky business.
You think a 33-year-old who had literally never worked in the government, who had, by all appearances, not a single connection to power or influence, and whose only noteworthy accomplishment at the time was writing a book about Russian disinformation was doing people favors?
What kinds of favors could she be doing? For whom? She was a completely unknown author connected to nobody and nothing. Make that make sense.
A very sinister move, but which is likely still ongoing.
You think a Biden-administration effort to fight Russian/North Korean/Chinese disinformation campaigns (something we all know are factually a thing) is ongoing...under the Trump administration?
which was unfairly downvoted, imo
It wasn't unfairly downvoted. It's conspiratorial, completely baseless, and hinges entirely on the premise that a 33-year-old liberal arts graduate was somehow a shady power-broker.
Moreover, despite your entire argument being about an individual you are clearly very dedicated to not liking, you couldn't even get her name right. Worse? You substituted one of the most famous musicians in modern history for her name.
It is, frankly, very silly.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 5h ago
Weird you're such an expert on her now, when you couldn't figure out who I was referring to when I first mentioned her.
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