Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign
www.nytimes.com
A team of meme-makers has been flooding social media with pro-Trump posts riddled with sexist and racist tropes. Donald Trump is cheering them on.

Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.

Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.

  • geekworking@lemmy.world
    392·
    11 months ago

    So it’s probably Russia, or maybe NK, or another dictatorship or Fascist state who wants to destroy democracy. Or perhaps it’s just some straight-up traitors.

  • Pratai
    4·
    11 months ago

    So…. There’s this shit going on- and my dad just disowned me because I said “America sucks.”

    • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      It’s usually a bit more diplomatic to explain what’s imperfect, and describe a better vision for how things could be.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    He was delighted, he said later in a podcast interview, to see Mr. Trump play the new version at his final rally before the midterm elections, pausing his speech to watch it with well over a thousand supporters gathered at Dayton International Airport.

    Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.

    Many also faithfully tune into Mr. Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, “Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man.”

    In August, when Mr. Trump was indicted on conspiracy charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, several team members produced a music video targeting the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis.

    In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors — a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia — mentioned that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.

    If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul S. Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.

    The original article contains 2,716 words, the summary contains 247 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
    119·
    11 months ago

    Trump is a festering wound that will keep producing pus if you keep poking at it. Wash your hands, wrap it up, take your antibiotics, and ignore it until it goes away.

    Or, in the immortal words of Paul Anka and Lisa Simpson, “Just don’t look!”

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        No, we need to aggressively stamp out fascism, but you won’t do that by arguing with xitter memes or amplifying their message by making it a news story.

        Read the metaphor again. I didn’t say don’t treat the wound. I said stop poking at it with your dirty fingers.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          As I’ve told conservatives, I’ll stop talking about Trump when they stop worshipping him and making him their leader. Until then, I’m just criticizing the opposition leader.

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          Problem is, you’re not their intended audience. Their audience is the hate-filled assholes that they can rile up, hopefully into a self-sustaining hate movement. Then all they need to do is the occasional steering and maintenance.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
            1·
            11 months ago

            And engaging in a Xitter debate amplifies their message, convinces no one, and wastes your time and effort. Focus on real issues, real debates, and don’t let the trolls drag you down to their bullshit.

        • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
          41·
          11 months ago

          You don’t engage directly, but it’s important for people to understand what they’re seeing.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
            2·
            11 months ago

            Is there anyone anywhere in the world who hasn’t heard of Trump? Anyone who doesn’t already understand exactly what he wants and where he stands? People are not going to be convinced by memes, it’s just for the people who already support him. They’re trying to reframe the debates, and recenter the political landscape around their narrative.

            And by engaging with it, you feed into it. You lend it your power. You concede that their ideas are worthy of your time. They are not.

    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
      81·
      11 months ago

      All I need is for him to not be the presumptive Republican nominee, to not have influence on the Republican party, and to no longer have an army of stochastic terrorists just waiting for the right signal. Then I can finally in good conscience listen to the unending stream of myopic advice from people on the internet who think we should just ignore him.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        I don’t think anyone should ignore Trump or the rise of fascism. I’m saying that you don’t feed the trolls with attention. We should get updates on the various court cases and pay attention to justice being done. But if he and his followers pitch a nutty on social media, that’s not news, and paying attention to it amplifies the message. Debating the crazy nonsense shifts the Overton window further away from reasonable discourse.

        It’s how he was elected in the first place. Covering Trump was good television. Lots of viewers tuned in to see what ridiculous fucking bullshit he was say or do next. Making a spectacle of it, building the circus tent around it, made it more powerful because it has no shame. It has no desire to speak truth or be virtuous. Trump and his troll army want you to get down into the mud and wrestle until you’re too tired to fight actual, serious people. Shining a light on it won’t kill the disease, it will encourage it to grow.

        Think of it like a child’s temper tantrum. You don’t get down on the floor of the department store and argue about why they can’t have ice cream before dinner. You deal with the tantrum, whether it’s taking them home or otherwise punishing bad behavior, but you don’t engage in the tantrum.

        • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
          1·
          11 months ago

          I see your point, but if we don’t talk about it then we don’t know it’s happening. There’s no one here in this thread arguing with anyone about it, it’s just people learning one more thing to remember if (somehow) they are still on the fence about whether they would vote for him.

        • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
          2·
          11 months ago

          You think the other potential nominees are any better?

          The comment was: You should ignore Trump

          That’s what I replied to.

          I’ll die of old age before there’s any chance a Republican in any election local on up gets a vote from me. I witnessed what conservatives enabled and supported in recent decades, and I saw how it all culminated in recent years. I see how many of them still say they would vote for Trump just because of R next to his name even if they claim they don’t support his policies or don’t like him. They can’t possibly reform themselves enough to get a vote from me within my remaining natural lifespan.

          You think the other potential nominees are any better?

          So no. But that’s not the topic.

  • Tedesche@lemmy.worldEnglish
    317·
    11 months ago

    While I agree that some of this group’s antics are reprehensible, whenever I see articles calling this stuff out in Right-Wing groups, I always think about that statue that was put up in NYC in 2016 of Donald Trump, depicting him naked and with a micropenis and how not a single publication called that out as sexist or inappropriate. This kind of despicable characterization of political opponents does happen on both sides, but we all just get riled up when the other side does it.

    We’re all hypocrites.