[CN: suicide in thread] What fascinates us about these stories most is that this conspiracy is taking hold among older people, and older women in particular. https://twitter.com/_MAArgentino/status/1325144053479075840

We skirted around an issue in a thread last night, and that's the narrative about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and comparing it to the electoral fraud narrative Republicans have latched onto now.

As a rule, we don't believe in organised conspiracies. There were a lot of people doing a lot of things in elections during 2016, some with shady connections to all sorts of other things. But there wasn't a grand Putin-led scheme to put Trump in power.

What 2016 was a watershed moment for - both in the Brexit vote and the US election - was the weaponisation of private data. It was more or less the first time it had been tried, and it was *absurdly* successful.

It appealed to the sort of social engineering wonks who make up modern right-wing think tanks, and they excitedly embraced the concept, but we doubt they expected the returns they got.

What they discovered was an entire generation of late-adopters online who mostly accessed information online via Facebook. Mothers, grandmothers. And they found they could target this demographic with very specific messages.

They also launched their attacks via YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. to ensnare primarily young men and older men already enmeshed in the conspiracy theory ecology, but that "FB moms" demographic is a really dangerous legacy.

What we're dealing with is a population that has come to the internet late in life, that quite probably have been homemakers or worked only entry level jobs while raising children, that never pursued higher education.

Low-information voters in other words. And because the internet was once like the wild west, and is now like a wild west theme park run by an even more malevolent version of Disney, we just let them work out the rules for themselves.

Because that's what we did. We just made it all up as we went along and sailed with the tides of newsgroups, chatrooms, message boards, IM, memes, and now social media. And it is one hell of an ecosystem to throw your mother into.

Yeah, this is fundamental to it too. When we used to talk about internet illiteracy years ago, we used the example of the difference between a pop-up and an error message. https://twitter.com/gothytim/status/1325833127575613442?s=19

Remember those pop-ups that looked like a dialogue box? And said your computer was infected or whatever? Our home PC was always riddled with viruses because our stepdad just didn't know how to spot the fakes.

Facebook is sort of the same thing: updates and shares from your loved ones are interspersed with targetted advertising. To the uninitiated, they're indistinguishable. FB is where you see pics of your grandkids too, so there's positive enforcement going on.

FB is the nice place where you rediscover your old friends and reconnect with your cousin in New Zealand. It's also a means by which some deeply unpleasant people can beam hate directly into your eyes.

After 2016, this stuff has been talked about endlessly, and we can thank that realisation of the dangers for the mild efforts to crack down on social media propaganda and misinformation prior to the 2020 election.

The damage is done for many though. FB and YT videos have poisoned a generation of vulnerable internet users and led them down some truly disturbing rabbit holes.

Greater media literacy is the only real defence against this - recognising how internet communities form and how they grow, how conspiracy theories spread and multiply and fold back into themselves.