This tweet I happened upon over the weekend should help anxious liberals and Democrats keep things in perspective
It’s true that polling in swing states has tightened very slightly, and from an uncomfortably narrow baseline. But even before that became apparent in the data, it was easy to detect a turning of the vibes. I described it last week as “a psychic shift palpable enough to bleed into horserace coverage.” It’s actually been palpable enough to potentially explain the poll narrowing on its own.
To some significant extent this kind of liberal freakout is part of a quadrennial end-of-election ritual, where Democrats wear their neuroses as body suits, while Republicans claim the mantle inevitability.
But this year there’s another contributing factor: Twitter.
Twitter existed four and eight years ago, and in each of those elections you could scroll through your personal feed, or the algorithmic feed, and find right-wingers puffing their chests as liberals cowered. But this time, it’s all much more exaggerated.
As part of his vast and expensive efforts to buy the election for Donald Trump, Elon Musk has created a system that guarantees you’ll be swarmed with false MAGA bravado (and much worse), alongside algorithmically boosted, uncorrected slanders of prominent Democrats.
If you do this—let Musk’s algorithm feed you content—it will most likely start making you feel demoralized. I won’t call it a “psy-op” because that’s what half-witted MAGA loyalists say about any source of information that creates cognitive dissonance for them. But it is a man-made phenomenon contrived to make you wallow in helplessness and despair. And I know it’s effective because it’s literally my job to maintain healthy mental habits in the world of political information, and after checking in to get a feel for the algorithm this weekend, it begain having the intended effect on me within a few minutes.
It’s also a place where prominent, vibe-influencing political reporters still spend way too much time.
That’s not fully on them. For now, at least, I also have to log on. I intend to reassess after the election, but because of how Musk has insinuated himself into American politics, it’s hard to know how Trump’s biggest donor is attempting to influence the election unless you maintain a feel for how he’s torquing his extremely influential media platform.
If you don’t work in politics, this is a good reason to steer clear of Twitter altogether. If you need or would like to be on Twitter, you can still curate your follows for people who operate in good faith. Most of all, though, you should refuse to let Elon Musk manipulate you in any way, particularly in a way that’s intended to swing a close election. And the easiest way to deny him the satisfaction he’s chasing is to beat Trump.
FROM MUSK TO DON
There are two reasons I believe the Muskification of Twitter is making the vibes worse than they’d be if Musk had stuck to electric cars: