mekka okereke :verified:
It's cope to talk about how billionaires changed the outcome of the election. Because it's making excuses for the fact that the majority of white men and white women, voted for Trump.
But...
* Black folk are *much* more online than white folk.
* Black folk moved further *left*
🙂🙃
1/N
mekka okereke :verified:
This is like when people tried to pretend that Cambridge Analytica had a huge change in how people vote. Nonsense.
Black folk were the *most* targeted. How they vote didn't change.
Your granny was a Fox watcher before Cambridge Analytica.
Your granny voted for Trump again after Cambridge was gone
Everyone voted how they always vote. In 2016, 2020, and 2024.
What changes, is turnout.
2/N
mekka okereke :verified:
I had arguments on this BlueSky and Mastodon, where Black folk and Arab/Muslim/Palestinian folk said, "I will never vote for Biden again." and people literally said, "They're wrong! They'll come around!"🤡
I'll never understand the confidence to tell people that they are wrong about their own intent to not vote.
3/N
mekka okereke :verified:
I've shared the math so many times, and people are still confused about it.
Out of 100 Black men voters, ~80 vote Dem and ~20 vote GOP. This has been true for the past ~40 years.
If 20 of the Black Dem men say, "I'm never voting for Biden again!" Then:
* turnout drops by ~20%
* GOP share goes to ~25%
It looks like Trump is gaining and becoming more popular! But in reality, Biden is losing.
Switch Biden out for Harris, and you see things float back towards 80%.
4/N
mekka okereke :verified:
No billionaire caused those Black men to say "I will never vote for Biden again."
Biden did that to himself.
Harris tried to win them back, and did a decent job! But she own-goaled in October chasing imaginary swing voters.
And fundamentally, she could never win all 20 back. Detroit yes. Dearborn no.
6/N
mekka okereke :verified:
We're willing to make every excuse:
* It was Cambridge Analytica!
* It was Fox!
* It was Trump!
Every excuse rather than reflect on why no matter the decade, no matter the economy, so many people consistently vote for whichever candidate is perceived to be more harmful to Black people.
6/6
nickapos :clubtwit:
@mekkaokereke this is very true. This is exactly what happened in the latest UK elections as well.
mekka okereke :verified:
Foreign interference is very real, but not in the way folks think it is.
Again, the group *most targeted by far* by foreign interference, was Black people online. It had minimal impact.
But targeting racist people does work. Because they're violent, angry, gullible, and our government has no clue how to control them. We just kinda watch them throw tantrums. 🤷🏿♂️
The interference doesn't change their mind, but it does drive turnout, and does turn inside voices into outside voices.
Damu
@mekkaokereke do you subscribe to the Russia interference being a major impact, popular theory since I guess the 2016 elections?
Fifi Lamoura
@mekkaokereke Yep and the good quality research into online propaganda backs this up. But it's in the interests of lots of people who sell advertising to make everyone believe they have the power to control people. But adding fuel to a fire is easy to do, as is spreading disinformation or giving people license to be their worst selves. And because commercial social media is just advertising platforms designed to maximize engagement with ads, it's great for this purpose.
mekka okereke :verified:
So many things. This BlueSky thread covers only 3 of his greatest hits: Over-funding police, transferring Covid relief funds to the cops, and telling city police departments to form SCORPION units to beat us to death.
https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3l5asqirryi2z
After Jan 6, he told Black staffers that he would "Fire them on the spot" if they weren't sufficiently polite to insurrectionists.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113421618170563036
How he mischaracterized Black Gaza protesters.
Etc,
Chuck
@mekkaokereke Can you remind me what Biden said/did to alienate black men ?
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb 🇺🇦
"Everyone voted how they always vote. In 2016, 2020, and 2024.
What changes, is turnout."
That's the part that mystifies me. Both parties had massive get-out-the-vote operations, but fewer people voted for both parties than 2020.
mekka okereke :verified:
It wasn't about "Get out the vote" efforts.
Literally 1 in 5 Black people said that they were never voting for Biden again. Another 1 in 5 said they were not certain if they would vote.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/why-biden-struggling-among-young-black-americans
I broke down the rough math in the next post.
mekka okereke :verified:
It's amazing to me that most white voters have absolutely no clue how disappointed with Biden most Black men voters were, or why. 🤷🏿♂️
It's amazing to me, because if I were white and didn't want fascism, and the only thing standing between me and that fascism was whether enough Black men decide to vote or not, I would be so curious about what their decision making criteria might be.
I would wonder why they were enthusiastic in 2020, but not in 2024.
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb 🇺🇦
@mekkaokereke Well, I'll have to ponder that. Given that Biden stepped down in July, there was plenty of time for Harris to listen to their concerns and adjust the campaign.
mekka okereke :verified:
Yes! And she did a great job! Right up until October. 🤦🏿♂️
Then she literally said some of the things that made the Black man that she had just won back abandon Biden.
And I should be clear, it was disproportionately Black men. But lots of young voters of all races felt the same way.
mekka okereke :verified:
The outcome they wanted, was to tie the fate of US Dems together with the fates of their family members. They achieved that.
Nemo
@mekkaokereke
People know how they'll vote. Their decision was still wrong in terms of achieving the outcome they claimed to want.
What idiot can think Trump, a huge Netanyahu fan, recogniser of Jerusalem as capital of Israel, will be "better" for Palestinians? Sorry, but that's fox news levels of being wrong.
mekka okereke :verified:
There is nothing inherent in white folk that makes them be racist. White folk are not equally racist everywhere. Eg the US is particularly racist.
It is very easy to undo the systemic affects of racism. Seriously! Most people don't want to be racist.👍🏿
The types of things required to reduce racism are *exactly* the types of things that racists try to stop:
* DEI
* Intersectional feminism
* Historically accurate textbooks
* Denounce racism
* Hold racists accountable
Etc.
Painting_Squirrel
@mekkaokereke
Honest question: your analysis of the state of the world and what can be extrapolated from that certainly seems to be spot on pretty much always. But sometimes it feels that you're implying that there is no way that white people will ever change their behavior. It's just, everything could be so much better if we white people just stopped being so god damn racist all the time. Is there really no realistic way to achieve this? (Sorry, rambling, just very distraught atm)
Neal Lester
@mekkaokereke @AlgoCompSynth This election was lost in 2021/2022 when Biden refused to play hardball with senators he thought of as personal friends. That hole was just too deep for a short great (but not perfect) campaign to climb out of. Add Biden’s age to the list of rationalizations for avoiding coming to grips with this.
mekka okereke :verified:
1 in 5 Black people literally spent most of the early part of this year saying, "I will never vote for Biden again. That guy is awful. After all of his promises, he used his first term to betray Black people once again, worse than any politician in modern history other than Reagan. I'm done with him."
And some white voters that are allies of Black people, said the same thing.
But people are still asking "Where did the Dem voters go?"
JuliesBits 🇺🇲
In 2020, Biden barely won Georgia but even so Georgia switched from being a red state to being a blue/purple state. In 2020 I was relieved to see the state where I live make the switch. But this time Georgia voted for Trump.
There was incredible turnout in early voting. Lines were long and everything was hopeful that all this record turnout looked very positive for Kamala. Early voting tends to trend heavily towards the blue vote, right?
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
In 2020 5 million voters turned out in Georgia. In 2024 5.2 million voters turned out in Georgia. Kamala lost to Trump by about 200k votes. To me that explains the increase in turnout. It wasn't that Georgia had turned purple at all. Georgia had always been red, but buoyed by the change to purple in 2020, we were quick to believe we'd turned the page towards blue.
Nationwide, Trump not only won the electoral votes, he also won the popular vote this time. It is staggering to me. In trying to understand what happened I can't help but come to the conclusion that the reason for this (certainly in Georgia) is that Kamala is a black woman and THAT is the reason there was such a larger turnout in Georgia for Trump. I am sure that the BLACK and the WOMAN components both played a part in her loss, but it is impossible to tease the two apart. Combined, the two components are deadly.
There is such a vast divide here. In my naivete I thought we were further along the path to equality but there is still so much work to be done. I'm not giving up but I wonder if I will see any approximation of equality in this lifetime.
Mark T. Tomczak
@mekkaokereke This was pretty much the take in chaos monkeys, a book by a former ad exec at Facebook.
His take on the CA scandal it was that it was basically tea leaf reading. While there was certainly a risk that they could have hound some kind of fundamental breakthrough in shaping people's voting patterns through micro targeting based on social network, there wasn't very much evidence at all to suggest it worked. But what it did indicate is that the campaign was willing to spend money on everything--- They were trying tea leaf reading because they had already spent all the money they planned to on standard channel marketing, while the Clinton campaign thought that he was so obviously beatable that it wasn't worth the money to spend on counter advertising and grassroots campaigning in "fortress" states. The party instead moved a lot of the money from the presidential race to the down ticket races.
CA was a warning, not a cause of victory.
mekka okereke :verified:
Goalposts moving. Straw man building.
The claim is not "propaganda doesn't work!" or "targeted advertising doesn't work!"
The claim is that CA was not magic. If you target racist advertising at racist people, the predictable thing happens.
CA was pointed at Black voters and *didn't work*. It was pointed at non-racist white voters and *didn't work.*
If I say "Haitians are eating dogs!" that works on who you think it would work on. It increases their likelihood of voting.
marymessall
I wouldn't trust a Facebook exec about a Facebook scandal. Read "Mindfuck" by former Cambridge Analytica employee.
Yes, Cambridge Analytica proved that Facebook & Zuckerberg could not be trusted.
But really it wasn't about Facebook or targeting. It was about Steve Bannon billionaire Robert Mercer, & their propaganda startup, and about Russia & THEIR propaganda startup. And if you don't believe propaganda matters... Their propaganda has worked.
https://www.2016activemeasures.org/evidence-of-collusion#Bannon
mekka okereke :verified:
And again, the foreign interference mostly targeted Black users, and *didn't work*.
But the "Deplorable Debbie,* fake accounts did work, and the "Fake News," networks did work, for the same reason the CA stuff worked; racism is an unpatched vulnerability in the security fabric of the USA. Foreign governments can manipulate American racists to act against their own country. You are less susceptible to this manipulation if you are less racist.
mekka okereke :verified:
Everyone forgets that before Trump reclaimed the term "fake news," it used to refer to content mills producing fake stories and lies about Black folk, Democrats and others. Fake news eventually became an influence operation, but its start was much more benign: unscrupulous webmasters were creating sensational stories just for the advertising bucks.🤷🏿♂️ They quickly realized that the racist grandmas were much more gullible than non-racist grandmas.
Racist lies get more clicks.🤯
mekka okereke :verified:
My point is that Cambridge Analytica doesn't even exist anymore, and many of those "fake news" content mills have been shut down, and yet Trump was still elected. Because those aren't the problem. They were never the problem.
The problem is that we have so many people susceptible to this particular type of manipulation, because we refuse to address the real cause of so many of our issues: US racism.
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