If “political hobbyism” isn’t impactful how did MAGA come to power? Why does russia have a military arm specializing in radicalizing people who participate in “political hobbyism?”
The truth is, political messaging, no mater the venue, needs to be countered at every level. Be it on the darkest depths of the internet or in a local venue that is just as unlikely to ever coalesce into something meaningful.
Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.
Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.
Misinformation, lies, and propaganda is counter messaging and narrative reinforcement.
You want to disaude me from believing that most MAGA are “political hobbiests” and not some overwhelming political force working all angles of the political spectrum; show me numbers. I won’t be convinced by you just flatly stating, “this is my stance.”
Finally, you’ve done nothing to address that there is known foreign adversary operations to effect election results all over the world and they operate right here on the internet.
If “political hobbyism” isn’t impactful how did MAGA come to power? Why does russia have a military arm specializing in radicalizing people who participate in “political hobbyism?”
The truth is, political messaging, no mater the venue, needs to be countered at every level. Be it on the darkest depths of the internet or in a local venue that is just as unlikely to ever coalesce into something meaningful.
Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.
Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.
Misinformation, lies, and propaganda is counter messaging and narrative reinforcement.
You want to disaude me from believing that most MAGA are “political hobbiests” and not some overwhelming political force working all angles of the political spectrum; show me numbers. I won’t be convinced by you just flatly stating, “this is my stance.”
Finally, you’ve done nothing to address that there is known foreign adversary operations to effect election results all over the world and they operate right here on the internet.