It's easy to mock the "we've got Twitter at home" social media knockoffs that attract fascists and gaming-themed erotica aficionados, but one conservative warned that these copycat platforms pose serious threats to democratic society.
Donald Trump is getting in on the action with his nebulous TRUTH Social platform, but other right-wingers who've been banned from Twitter and Facebook along with the twice-impeached one-term president are flocking to alternate sites where they share outlandish conspiracy theories and election disinformation, wrote The Bulwark's Tim Miller.
"All this is popping up while the tech censors and DC regulators are playing a losing game of whack-a-mole and missing the unintended consequences," Miller writes. "The pesky trolls will always find new rocks to crawl under and the rodents multiply in the shadows."
This creates an alternate social media universe where people like Christian Walker, the sassy son of Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, become widely viewed purveyors of slanderous political sleaze.
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"These wheels-off videos can get more views than mainstream media organizations," Miller writes. "Christian took some heat over one of his latest videos where he complained about rising gas prices while wearing a $1,300 Givenchy sweatshirt. He responded by clapping back at all the lazy poors who were just jealous."
As easily mocked as those videos are, Trump fans seem to take them seriously, and many of them were consuming his anti-Joe Biden videos at the National Mall on Jan. 6 or scrolling similar content on other right-wing social media platforms.
"They put police, people who worked in the Capitol, and themselves in harm’s way," Miller writes. "The same is true for all the unvaccinated who are dying unnecessarily because of misinformation. The QAnon man who went so crazy he killed his kids. And on, and on, and on."
"This is what happens when trolling and grievance peddling can make you a celebrity," he concludes. "When it becomes the basis for political campaigns. When spreading this bile is big business with billion dollar market caps. And as the MAGAverse continues to expand into a shadowy world all its own, the incentives are aligned for even more real world radicalization."