Using Conspiracy Theories to Make Sense of a Loss

利用阴谋论来理解损失

On the Media

历史

2024-11-14

22 分钟
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Social media posts from Kamala Harris supporters and the left questioning the outcome of the election are going viral.

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  • Hey, you're listening to the on the Media midweek podcast.

  • I'm Michael Lowinger.

  • On election night, when things started looking not so great for Kamala Harris, and then when Donald Trump was declared the clear winner of the presidential election early Wednesday, there were the expected social media posts questioning the election results.

  • But this time, many were coming from Democratic voters.

  • Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but there's a couple of things that I've been seeing on TikTok over the last couple of days, and I want to just put it all in one video of the things that are suspicious.

  • You can do this information what you want, but I think when you look at it all together, it's like, how could all of the swing states voted in Democratic governors, senators, and President Trump?

  • Where are all of the, you know.

  • Votes if there was record voter turnout that didn't end up turning into, you.

  • Know, I wasn't going to chime in on all the math.

  • Not math and stuff, but remember this data breach that happened, like, three months ago that was, like, massive.

  • Did anything ever happen with that?

  • I wonder, like, what someone could do with a whole bunch of names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers.

  • Some of the posts went viral, but without boosts from election officials, like, in 2020, these bogus stories of election fraud will likely or hopefully fizzle out.

  • Anna Merlin is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism.

  • She says it's to be expected that people will turn to conspiracy theories to try to make sense of a loss they weren't prepared for.

  • The best example is the 2004 election.

  • John Kerry lost to George W.

  • Bush, and a big thing that happened in that election was that the exit polls were super, super wrong.

  • Pretty much every exit poll seemed to predict a Kerry victory.

  • And there was a lot of kind of postmortem devoted to this, like, why were the exit polls so wrong?