It makes sense given the nature of the various environments of the platforms.
Facebook which wants to be a common carrier so that it isn't responsible for the content posted on its platform, has repeatedly reaffirmed that it does not want to and will not ban or fact-check political ads. Facebook gives a token of control to its users by allowing them a little bit of control over how many political adverts that they see.
Twitter on the other hand has outright banned them; which means that as the art of politics is like the flow of water or electricity, it follows the path of least resistance. Twitter can not in principle regulate opinion because that would mean that it not only has to take a political stance but the sheer scope would be impossible.
I have noticed the downright obvious fake accounts posting opinion, which mainly recycle the same half dozen opinions and the same hashtags in reply to posts (usually from verified journalists at news media groups); to a sort of second wave set of accounts which have all been created from about August 2018 onwards, which act as political attack dogs for the right.
I find it rather implausible that a whole heap of Liberal Party aligned people all just decided to join Twitter at once.
The 2019/20 Australian Bushfire Horrorshowcatastropextravaganza has had the rather strange set of narratives being pushed almost in unison by these accounts. First it was the Greens being accused of not allowing control burning (which makes no sense considering that the Greens hold government in precisely zero legislatures in Australia), then it moved to bushfires being normal (which is true but ignores the fact that this is the single biggest bushfire event in the history of the nation and the worst drought in the history of the nation), then it moved to trying to say that this was all the work of arsonists (despite the fact that 0 people in Victoria, 3 people in Queensland, and 24 people in NSW have been charged with arson since September), and now it has moved to some kind of cheering that the Prime Minister has announced a Royal Commission (despite the fact that he met fire chiefs back in September who forewarned him about the contingent possibility of bushfire).
The really weird thing is that these accounts post similar arguments in any given week from Tuesday onwards. I am assuming that this is different to the outrage cycle which happens symbiotically between Macquarie Radio and News Corp, where readers of newspapers complain to the radio stations from about 8am in the morning. That follows a normal weekly cycle, with mostly older radio callers being outraged from Monday onwards.
The coordinated Twitter complaint cycle probably begins on a Tuesday I suspect because Australia is so far to the east on the globe, that we have already passed through Monday morning by the time that these people wake up. I can imagine paying people in India or Pakistan to play the Twitter game, for pennycents an hour.
The reason why someone would want to run a coordinated misinformation campaign is obvious. One can blame Russian interference, which might have been a politically expedient excuse for the 2016 US Presidential Election (and useful for Russia) but that can't be seriously posed as an excuse here because our next Federal Election isn't until 2022. No, the reason here is more likely to be from entities which do not want to have to face the prospect of decreased profits as a result of the government acting on this crisis. Those entities include the mining companies and the entities who fund and effectively own and operate the Liberal Party.
There simply hasn't been any serious scrutiny at all from any of the News Corp stable of newspapers, nor Sky News, nor Channel 9 (Fairfax still shows some degree of editorial independence), nor Channel 7, nor Network Ten, nor Macquarie Radio. The groups which are bothering to scruitnise the government are SBS, the ABC (which is also the target of Twitter fake account opinion writing) and the Guardian Australia. The really curious and scary thing is that the most truthful reportage on this crisis is coming from the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera.
I have found it interesting that if you post links of statistics from government agencies, these accounts will almost instantly apologise for getting the facts wrong and then post a similar opinion to the one that has been just shown to be wrong, about an hour later. This shouldn't surprise me as I am sure that the amount of due diligence needed to keep track of this kind of thing is longer than most people have the patience for. If someone in a Twitter complaint factory operates say 200 accounts, they could systematically rotate through all of them and as far as the algorithms that look for bots are concerned, those accounts would look normal.
Politics is the art of persuasion to operate and control power, in the aim of enacting policies. The idea that the media would be used to manipulate the electorate's opinions is hardly new, it's just that the battlefield upon which those opinions are being fought on has changed. Buying the labour of people on the cheap to fight a political argument that they don't care about, is a rational tactic if it means that your side wins elections. It is also mutually beneficial to someone who is working in such a place because operating a computer is a far nicer occupation than being out in a field.
I have no way to prove this theory but it all just seems far to coordinated and suspicious to me that opinions should be posted in such a methodical system. It also seems suspicious to me that these opinions should be so alike, when you consider that the country is literally on fire. It should be insane to people that a government should be excused to such a degree. I find that to be incredible.
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