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.

    • 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.

    • 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.