Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor.

Again, here we can understand this group as people who have failed at the real world and have checked out of it and into the fantasy worlds of internet forums and videos games. These are men without jobs, without prospects, and by extension (so they declaimed) without girlfriends. Their only recourse, the only place they feel effective, is the safe, perfectly cultivated worlds of the games they enter. By consequence of their defeat, the distant, abstract concept of women in the flesh makes them feel humiliated and rejected. Yet, in the one space they feel they can escape the realities of this, the world of the video game, here (to them, it seems) women want to assert their presence and power.

Given the fundamentally different mechanics of Internet distribution, those Facebook numbers make a lot more sense: the extremes inspire passion which drives engagement; “broadly acceptable” doesn’t go anywhere. This has profound implications for products and politics. First and foremost, it is fundamentally misguided to simply view “digital” as another channel that you layer on top of traditional marketing/campaign tactics like TV advertisements. In fact, products and politicians designed for the TV age — that is, meant to be palatable to the greatest number of people — are at a fundamental disadvantage on platforms like Facebook. The products and politicians that win inspire passion, stirring up a level of engagement that breaks through on a scale that far exceeds an ad buy. To put it another way, above I mentioned “paid” media and “earned” media; what matters on the Internet is “inspired” media.

Misinformation and fake news triggers hot cognition— it bypasses your focus on accuracy and goes directly to your feelings,” says Joseph Kahne, a professor of education at UC Riverside who studies engagement with media and politics online. “If the misinformation confirms their prior policy position, they are far more likely to say its accurate.”

In the spreadsheet below, you can see (and download) the latest data describing TrumpWorld. Each row represents a connection between a person and an organization (e.g., The Trump Organization Inc. and Donald J. Trump), a person and another person (e.g., Donald J. Trump and Linda McMahon), or two organizations (e.g., Bedford Hills Corp. and Seven Springs LLC).Now we are asking the public to use our data to find connections we may have missed, and to give us context we don’t currently understand. We hope you will help us — and the public — learn more about TrumpWorld and how this unprecedented array of businesses might affect public policy.

In this environment, personalization has taken root, allowing us to target, segment, augment, and compartmentalize the world wide web into smaller much more marketable, and safer bubbles. We have even given the average citizens knobs and levers to pull and twist to further speed up and dial in the process, where they only see, hear, and engage in what they want, and what makes them feel safe. Exactly the version of the web and the world we want to see will be sold to us in real-time, bit by bit, transaction by transaction--it was fun while it lasted.

What emerges from his work is a fascinating picture of what is effectively a rightwing propaganda machine built from more than 300 fake news sites and containing something like 1.3m hyperlink connections. Albright also mapped the hidden online trackers hosted by these sites. This is similar to the tracking ecosystem behind most commercial websites. But in the rightwing case, these trackers are coming away with information not about consumption preferences but about the possible political or ideological predilections of site visitors.

Experimental research shows that, to achieve success in disseminating propaganda, the variety of sources matters:• Multiple sources are more persuasive than a single source, especially if those sources contain different arguments that point to the same conclusion.• Receiving the same or similar message from multiple sources is more persuasive.

Today’s American fascist youth is neither the strapping Aryan jock-patriot nor the skinheaded, jackbooted punk: The fascist millennial is a pasty nerd watching shitty meme videos on YouTube, listening to EDM, and harassing black women on Twitter. Self-styled “nerds” are the core youth vanguard of crypto-populist fascist movements. And they are the ones most likely to seize the opportunities presented by the Trump presidency.

For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.

These lamentations for simpler times – that all we lack is the right sort of spine-stiffening democratic leader, or rational culture, or cultural unity, or patriotic spirit – ignore the fragmented nature of our politics. Social and technological developments are not liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.

When it comes to news sources, the stories tweeted by Trump (and the staffers who sometimes manage his Twitter account) suggest that he is unfazed by news of questionable accuracy, likely to rely on hyper-partisan news, and apt to promote mainstream news only when it validates his opinions. While politicians from both sides of the aisle use their Twitter accounts to share content that furthers their agendas, Trump’s reliance on sources and stories of questionable accuracy stands out both in frequency and in engagement.

What happens when the industry destroyed is professional politics, the institutions leveled are the same few that prop up liberal democracy, and the values the internet disseminates are racism, nationalism, and demagoguery?

For the past 11 years, an eternity in internet time, Reddit has touted itself—repeatedly, and loudly—as the place to have “authentic conversations” online. For a variety of reasons, that sentiment has always rang hollow. Now, Reddit, in its goal to be a laissez-faire haven of (relatively) free expression, has been overrun by nationalist trolls. Its staff of volunteer moderators is losing hope in the site’s future.