Reality Is Not The Same for MAGA as It Is For Us

A look behind the curtain at how MAGA gets their information

Courtesy of CNN

While Donald Trump is setting up failed ceasefires between Israel and Iran, and reports are coming out that Trump’s entrance into the war allegedly didn’t even destroy Iran’s nuclear program, I think it’s safe to say that everything is a mess right now. You might be scared; your loved ones might be scared; anybody paying attention might be scared.

What’s not making that any easier, though, is this idea that MAGA supporters, and even just casual users of the internet, are becoming more and more susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. Sometimes it’s through something sinister, like a surge of AI-generated footage showing chaos raining down upon Israel by Iran that the BBC has deemed is not real. This isn’t new for Iran, who have been considered, for quite some time now, pros at the disinformation game.

But where it truly starts to get sinister is when it happens subtly. The alt-right pipeline is well documented at this point, yet it’s still finding ways to shape the minds of people all across the world in distinctly sinister ways. Take, for instance, this investigation by Tal Axelrod, a man, and Erica Pandey, a woman for Axios (gender mentioned for a reason). They wanted to find out why so many young voters went so hard in 2024 for Trump, so they created brand new accounts on TikTok and tried reverse-engineering the pipeline; meaning, they started by following everyone in Trumpworld, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and my best friend Charlie Kirk. Their accounts began with TikTok knowing which of them was a man, which of them was a woman, and that both were interested in MAGA.

Candace Owens has devoted countless hours to her coverage of the Baldoni/Lively lawsuits, positioning Lively as an aggressor filing a frivolous lawsuit. Fun fact: Baldoni dismissed his lawsuit, but Lively did not dismiss hers. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Russian bot farms amplifying anti-Lively sentiment, and an exposé from the New York Times revealing Baldoni has people on his team who specialize in smear campaigns, Owens has never been more popular - and therefore has never been a better example of a “red pill” creator. (Graphic by Yahoo)

At first, it was all Trump and doom and gloom, all the time. But what the algorithm did next was lead them backwards to what could have led a more susceptible mind to Trump. For Tal, he received an excessive amount of masculinity content containing “David Goggins berating men with motivational speeches [and] podcaster Chris Williamson interviewing guests about male struggles.” For Erica, it was exclusively three topics on her For You Page:

“1) right-wing critiques of modern feminism pulling women away from marriage and motherhood

2) debates around trans women in sports

3) the ethics of abortion.”

What’s even more insane is that it took less than an hour for the algorithm to morph into this. Which means one thing: videos about these topics are built to inherently radicalize you. A woman might look up videos about Blake Lively’s lawsuit and find a clip of Candace Owens pushing a pro-Justin Baldoni narrative; she might then stick around for Candace’s violent antisemitism and anti-feminist takes. A man might look up exercise tips and tricks, only to find members of the Manosphere berating him for not being manly enough. God forbid he finds Just Pearly Things and has to then deal with *gasp* a WOMAN berating him for the same things.

The issue, of course, isn’t having an interest as a man in fitness or as a woman in lifestyle content. The issue is that right-wing ideas have so firmly stuck their fangs into these topics that just looking up MAGA content on TikTok is enough to reverse-engineer the pipeline, essentially giving the game away in minutes. TikTok’s algorithm can be aggressive, but it’s not the only one. As a bit of an experiment, open (or download) Threads right now, find any post about any topic, and just open it. Don’t like it. Don’t comment. Just open it. Then go back and refresh your For You page. There is a high likelihood that whatever you just opened is now going to be your entire feed. IYKYK.

What makes ALL OF THIS EVEN WORSE… is bots. It’s always bots. But according to The Kyiv Independent, trolls and bot farms from Russia are taking over the algorithm in MAGA World in a huge way. Between May 1 and June 10, over 675,000 posts were flagged by researchers as “promoting false-flag explanations for shootings, bombings and other violence… [that] usually allege that the U.S. government, Israel, or “globalists” staged events to tighten control or discredit conservatives.”

Russian disinformation campaigns have been a plague online for years, most prominently ALLEGEDLY granting Trump the keys to the kingdom in 2016. But this time, it appears that bot farms are trying to fan the flames of discontent we saw on January 6, 2021, again, with comically patriotic accounts, with “profile pictures of U.S. soldiers or bald eagles” spreading pro-Trump memes, before pivoting to anti-Biden, anti-NATO, and anti-left rhetoric that has all been flagged as AI-generated,

“Within an hour of the 24 May murders of Israeli diplomats in Washington, MAGA-branded accounts—later tied to Russian or Iranian IP ranges—pushed the idea that the killings were a Mossad self-attack meant to drag America into war,” they write. “Those messages drew 200,000 engagements before any official statement appeared. The pattern repeated on 3 June, after a Jewish rally in Boulder was fire-bombed.”

Folks, it’s not just the war in Iran we’re currently living through: it’s the war on the truth, and it’s a war that we’re losing more and more every day. The best thing we can do for our loved ones is provide roadmaps to identifying mis- and disinformation, but the truth is even likelier that most of them simply do not care. This kind of rhetoric feeds confirmation bias in a way the truth simply cannot, and the only real solution is going to lie with Congress, Big Tech, or both placing broader restrictions on AI-generated hoaxes and blatant disinformation.

Yet considering that many of the better anti-disinformation policies went the way of the dodo when Trump came back into power, I think this could be a war that we the people will lose in a huge way.

STAY CONNECTED

Join the Discord

Follow me on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X