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Some of your favorite political candidates pay online abuse armies. Why?

It’s a good question. I believe the tactic to be highly ineffective. We talk a lot about the future on Medium. Social media is changing; the online abuse trolls are one trend that reflects a peculiarly primitive aspect of human nature.

The people who do this are paid minimum wage or less, they don’t believe a word of what they say or do, and they are today’s version of Victorian-era moralists or 50’s “red-baiting” Communist hunters. There’s no accident the past three years of our political discourse has been consumed by “Russia.” The people encouraging it are the children and grandchildren of 50s McCarthyites. My parents stood up to the Hollywood blacklist in the 50s. Are you a “creative” who is knuckling under it now? Just like the people (Disney, Reagan, many others) who turned in their friends back then, you can correctly judge what the long-term future will think of you. The horse of actual freedom and progress long ago left the barn. They really could jail and destroy people back then. Now they bleat online fruitlessly.

In 2017, I interviewed Samantha Bradshaw of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) about online political influence. I earn my living writing digital content and am building a practice based on my previous traditional publishing, nonprofit, and business writing. While I’m not a “content strategist,” engagement is a critical factor for the businesses I’m working for.

The current crop of abusive political trolls reek of terror. They also speak volumes about the candidates they represent. These aren’t the “candidates of the future” — or let us hope they’re not. Let’s continue to work to make that a reality.

We’ve been accustomed to President Trump using Twitter to address his opponents and communicate policies. Before you start writing your response about Trumpism, this article’s about the state of Twitter dot com and human use of the service, not Donald J. Trump.

There’s even a Twiplomacy report that details how Trump’s use of Twitter has influenced world governments and leaders. Twitter is the #1 social media platform for world government leaders. It’s also the primary way a significant segment of society in the U.S. and internationally, get news.

So, I think that’s one reason for the outsized presence of David Brock-style disinformation and abuse armies on Twitter dot com. They’re not there to influence “regular people”. They’re there to eliminate legitimate political discourse. They are expected to maintain and reinforce disinformation distributed by traditional media. For example, Washington Post “fact checked” a claim Trump made in 2016 that Elizabeth Warren “made a quick killing in foreclosed real estate.” Like all such similar claims, the supposed fact-checker relied on sophistry, and the main purpose of the fact checking was to add to the avalanche of “Trump lies” “evidence” maintained by the publication. Bottom line at this point? This is leverage in a titanic battle of Bezos v. Trump deal making. It has nothing to do with us (the people).

Traditional media is easily controlled by traditional candidates. Social media? Not so much. Witness former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s humiliation when he tried to equate an empty Detroit charitable food pantry with “empty shelves in socialist countries.”

I was the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization in my hometown that had a food pantry for 10 years. It isn’t good news for a pantry to be that empty, especially not in the fall approaching the holiday season. It’s terrible news. It means there are many hungry people in Detroit and few people willing or able to donate. If Trumpy was smart, he’d see this and fill the pantry with food from the 40% we throw away in this weird 3rd World/First World country every day. Then he’d Tweet out his generosity. Wouldn’t he? Why keep letting these photo ops happen? Why does Flint still not have clean water?

I’ve wracked my brain trying to understand why so much money is spent on U.S. political campaigns since there’s so much evidence that votes are pre-determined in so many jurisdictions and 90% of people — using common sense, and needing to survive — don’t care.

I think it may be related to the military-industrial complex (MIC). Just as that festering cesspit of human evil, greed and rapacious devastation bleeds the everyday people of our country dry as it exploits and devastates others around the world, so too does this monstrosity swallow up resources that could be better-spent on productive efforts like making food, clothing, and homes and selling them at a fair price to those who need them (for you Capitalists out there).

If you are a Capitalist and “conservative” these troll armies are destroying the ability of people in actual business to do business. Absorb that and get it. Stamp ’em out.

If you think that’s good, more power to ya! Just like 9 wars around the world — putting aside the families with children wrongfully slaughtered with your tax dollars — take resources from non-violent, non-exploitive, normal businesses and endeavors. Just like allowing insurance companies to make massive profits while squeezing the pay of actual doctors and nurses to an extreme while denying basic medical care makes it undesirable for people to go to med school or nursing school just to get a subsistence-wage job and watch patients die when refused insurance approval for treatment or medication.

Just like housing developers will build empty apartments that only 2% of people can afford while more than 50% spend half of their income or more on rent.

At what point do the Waltons of the world realize they can’t keep their massive stores open if nobody can afford to buy their junk? At what point does Amazon Jeff Bezos or the World’s Smartest Man Bill Gates realize even their endless upward profit funnels are going to crash and burn under these circumstances?

Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris haven’t realized that hiring the world’s worst people to say and do the world’s most ridiculous and abusive things aren’t going to help either of them to become “The Most Powerful Person in the World.”

So here’s what happened this a.m. (following Harris supporters saying I was racist because I pointed out her fake accent in a video — you can find dozens of videos where she sounds different and equally fake every time).