Tuesday, January 5, 2021

"Trump Pushed QAnon and 4chan-created Conspiracy Theories"

From Ben Collins, Brandy Zadrozny and Jane C. Timm's 1-4-21 NBC News report entitled "Trump Pushed QAnon and 4chan-created Conspiracy Theories in Georgia Call":

President Donald Trump cataloged a series of false conspiracy theories during an hourlong call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday in which he sought to overturn the state's election results, and they were familiar to anyone following the far fringes of the internet.

Trump floated fragments of several baseless conspiracy theories that were primarily pushed by QAnon followers over the last two months, including a widely debunked theory about voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.

The wide-ranging slew of theories, spawned on extremist forums like 4chan, were repeatedly referred to by Trump as “rumors” that are “trending on the internet.” He claimed they were reasons Raffensperger should “re-examine it [the election] with people that want to find answers.”

And while Trump has embraced conspiracy theories for much of his tenure as president, Saturday's call offered a look at just how much he is now relying on some of the most outlandish theories from obscure corners of the internet to make his case for election fraud.

"Trump manages to distill down to a 10-minute monologue what would take the average person years to pull together,” said Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Donovan noted that many of the baseless claims floated by the president have been embraced in recent weeks by pro-Trump media.

“Everything from fakes, forgeries and machine hacking to collusion across parties, it's all laid out in detail with rapid fluidity,” Donovan said, noting the conspiracy theories laid out in the call “are very popular on right-wing media like Parler and Newsmax.”

Trump “pulled together all the major talking points,” Donovan said.

To read the entire report, click HERE.

No comments:

Post a Comment