(THREAD) BREAKING: The new position of the GOP—especially the Trump family—is social media manipulation changes votes and we can measure how many votes were changed to see if they switched an election outcome. Everyone clear? OK, now let's talk 2016 Russian election interference. 
1/ For two years, Democrats have tried to explain to Republicans what all social media and election experts say: that *systemic disinformation coordinated by a hostile foreign power*, when it is *facilitated through dissemination by a presidential campaign*, can affect elections.
2/ For two years, Republicans insisted the *largest foreign cyber-attack on an American election in history*, whose reach we can and *have* quantified macroanalytically and microanalytically—through Big Data as well as anecdote—couldn't *possibly* have affected the 2016 election.
3/ Despite all we know, presidential adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner once dismissively referred to one of the 3 Russian election interference campaigns the Kremlin coordinated in 2016—the others being a hacking op and campaign-infiltration op—as "a few Facebook posts."
4/ But *now*, up and down the internet, in and out of the White House, far-right circles are passionately discussing how social media platform operations conclusively and measurably change votes and swing elections. Yet they're two years late to the conversation—and that matters.
5/ It matters because—in duration, scope, national security implications, measurability, *and* academic consensus as to its contours—the Russian election interference scandal *dwarfs* a single academic journal editor making (wildly imprecise) claims about vote-switching in 2016.
6/ The conspiracy theory the GOP and the Trumps are now pushing says 2.6 million to 16 million votes—note the *insane* range there, calibrated on the low end to constitute *the amount Trump lost the popular vote by*—were manipulated via a secret cabal of U.S. social-media mavens.
7/ So here's a thought: how about we take pull-quotes from everything Trump is now saying, and everything Don Jr. is now saying, and everything far-right GOP politicians like Ted Cruz are saying, and apply it *first* to a conversation the nation began having *over two years ago*.
8/ Once the Trumps and the GOP has participated robustly in a conversation they skipped out on for years—how to measure the effect of the *largest hostile cyberattack on a U.S. election ever*—we can talk about a wild conspiracy theory pushed by a *single* academic journal editor.
9/ Media plays a major role here; it must—*sometime*—take a politician by his rhetoric and force him to own what he says. If Trump and GOP now say we can measure how many votes social media platform operations push, they *must* join the discourse on Russian election interference.
10/ The overwhelming majority of Democrats support three of the most important things we learned from the Enlightenment: reason, tolerance, and method. I'm sure we'd have no problem slotting Bob Epstein's theory into a *far* broader conversation involving *hundreds* of academics.
11/ As ever, it's media that'll direct what happens here, and media that can choose—as ever—to decontextualize news to make it clickable or *see the factual field* its own journalism developed.
If it does the latter, Trump and the GOP will be pushed to revisit data they ignored.
If it does the latter, Trump and the GOP will be pushed to revisit data they ignored.
12/ The error that media often makes is the error voters often make, with the difference that—for a journalist—it's a professional failure: treating "the news" as a series of single-node "breaking" events while ignoring the past news that forms—with the present—a matrix of ideas.
13/ The *idea* that social media platform manipulation creates a measurable impact on elections is one the GOP and the Trumps rejected for *two years* because it was politically damaging.
Now they embrace that *idea*.
Media: write *that* story.
Don't just cover tweeted claims.
Now they embrace that *idea*.
Media: write *that* story.
Don't just cover tweeted claims.
14/ The newest Trump-and-GOP conspiracy theory about how Trump's historic popular vote *decimation* in 2016 was in fact a popular vote *win* actually *is* major news—but it's news because it represents an ideological shift that the party and its leaders now must be made to *own*.
15/ I hope media takes this chance to open a new bipartisan dialogue about how social media manipulation influences voters. I've every confidence Bob's theory will be discarded as contrary to the facts—and our focus will finally be on the *real* conversation we need to have. /end
PS/ And yes, part of discussing the influence and reach of a social media campaign orchestrated by a hostile foreign power will be discussing how a presidential campaign—in 2016, the GOP one—can *massively* increase that influence and reach by knowingly amplifying disinformation.
NOTE/ I call this breaking news because it is. In the last 48 hours, Republicans' new—180-degree different—position on vote manipulation through social media shenanigans has spread from the White House to Congress, from Trump to Don Jr., from the GOP fringe to the GOP mainstream.
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