5 Thoughts About The Pro-Trump Media's War Against CNN

The trolling campaign started last week after a controversial CNN story in which the news network allegedly tracked down the Reddit user who posted a wrestling GIF of Donald Trump beating up CNN, which was later retweeted by President Trump. After CNN contacted the user — who went by the name of HanAssholeSolo —the user deleted his posts and apologized. And though CNN did not publish the name of the Redditor, a line in the CNN piece said the news organization “reserves the right” to publish his identity in the future. 

Incorrectly perceiving the line of legalese as a threat of sorts, the pro-Trump internet seized on it, creating a #CNNBlackmail hashtag and plotting its revenge against the network. Pro-Trump media outlets seized on it hard — Infowars created a CNN Meme War contest, offering $20,000 ACTUAL U.S. DOLLARS for the best meme (when I tweeted about it, Infowars editor, Paul Joseph Watson, told me he was judging the contest).
Does any of this matter? If you follow the pro-Trump internet/media world closely, you know that every day is full of bitter skirmishes and outrages. But this whole situation feels different. I have spent a while thinking about this and figured I'd just list and a number of reasons why and try to explain it all to the best of my ability.

1. Pressure keeps building with every outrage.
It feels like internet has helped turn politics into a ledger of sorts, where — especially in the MAGAsphere —you have a running tally of outrages and fuckups. Everything builds on what came before it and nothing happens in a vacuum. The CNN/HanAssholeSolo blowup is a great example of this. Trump's choice to call out CNN and the media on the campaign trail and then as President made the network a convenient villain for his supporters, who've gone from trolling the network to believing whole-heartedly that CNN is an evil propaganda empire. Dozens of micro-skirmishes dialed up the pressure creating an atmosphere so combustible that it only needs a spark to set it off completely. Trump then delivered the spark last Sunday. SO:

Trump tweets a wrestling meme aimed at making fun of CNN. The media reacts with outrage and some call it a direct threat of violence against the press. The trolls are so excited by how mad it made the media that they react and double down with dozens of anti-CNN memes. CNN reports on the creator of the meme. Memeland is infuriated that CNN would single them out (especially furious that the global news network would punch downward) at a "normie" and calls for an all-out war. CNN's standard reporting (coupled with an poorly-worded bit of legalese) was an escalation in the minds of the MAGAsphere. And escalation against the pro-Trump media must always be met with more escalation. They would report on the reporters. Dox the doxxers. Etc, Etc. And they did, publishing reporter information and attempting to stage protests outside the CNN reporters' house and harassing the family members of the CNN reporters' family with death threats. 

There are no standalone slip-ups anymore. Every incident adds to the pressure of the incident before it and it builds and builds. Which means that now the bar for launching an 'all-out war' is lower than ever. 
2. It all happened so quickly.
The result of all this pressure is the speed at which this stuff explodes. I was camping in the woods on July 4th (when the CNN story was published) and when I checked my phone on the morning of the 5th it was as if I'd missed a week's worth of news. In my attempt to catch up I DM'd a number of people in the pro-Trump world. Here's what one said:

"Yeah I've never seen outrage start so quickly on twitter. As soon as the story broke a bunch of big pro-Trump accounts turned it into a massive scandal with a hashtag...Also amazing how the 15-year-old rumor spread from the fringes on the internet to Trump Jr. in like an hour lol"

3. It highlights a new breed of Twitter harassment/trolling.
The example above — of Don Jr. spreading the rumor over Twitter that HanAssholeSolo was a 15 year-old — shows how Twitter's harassment problem has really changed — perhaps in an unenforceable way.

The pro-Trump media is excellent at swarming an issue or person. They have some really high profile accounts, too, which sort of set the tone (Don Jr) but don't actually harass/break the rules. They spread a level of misinformation (the 15 year old rumor) which riles up the online army and gets the issue trending. And once the big surrogate accounts — anyone from Cernovich to Posobiec, to Don Jr. and many more — amplify the issue, it's often carried to extremes by people from places like Reddit or 4chan (which can result in doxxing and threats). And at the head of it all is Trump himself. But he's not directly involved.

A way I've been thinking of it is that Trump is like an assignment editor for the trolls. His message is filtered down to the big surrogates who use it to program the true fever swamps of Twitter and the message boards. The harassment, however, is usually done by anonymous trolls with burner accounts who'll just keep making more accounts because they have little to lose from having theirs suspended. It's a bit of a different brand of harassment from the 2016 campaign and before, which was much more of a blunt hammer approach where plenty of accounts (including Milo and Chuck Johnson weren't careful and broke the rules and lost their big accounts). It all begs the question: how on earth do you stop this if you're Twitter?

4. Trump's behavior on Twitter is definitely gross but does not violate Twitter's abusive conduct rules (they way the company chooses to enforce them) and he will likely not ever be suspended or banned so people should probably get comfortable with that notion.

If you want to read more about this I tweetstormed about it last weekend. Twice. Ugh. I am sorry for being the worst.

5. Neither side seems to understand basic things about the internet?

Perhaps most at issue in the whole CNN/HanAssholeSolo thing was CNN's awfully worded sentence (which the pro-Trump world took as an admission that CNN is blackmailing a random Redditor).

The poorly worded sentence was, of course, a profound misunderstanding of how the pro-Trump media works. As the Washington Post's Abby Ohlheiser wrote in a great piece this week on the issue, the pro-Trump media is looking for any tiny admission of impropriety and/or bias from CNN. And CNN served them exactly what they wanted. As Ohlheiser wrote: "on the Trump Internet, however, the subtext of the meme is that “blackmailing” sources is a normal part of mainstream journalistic practice. The difference is, they believe, that someone finally got caught."

The CNN line felt like something that came from somebody with little knowledge of the art of digital reporting in places like 4chan and Reddit. The statement read as wholly unaware of the culture of doxing and of the politics of reporting on the world of pseudonymous internet tricksters. It was no doubt an unfortunate example of the growing pains of a large and less nimble media company still getting its footing in the new areas of reporting. (Note: I'm not referring to the reporter, here, who is among the most skilled digital reporters working, but the broader CNN bureaucracy).

So CNN was clumsy in this instance when it came to understanding the internet. But they weren't alone. Similarly clumsy was the trolls' response and rationale, which was, in part: CNN went after a nobody and they had no business investigating a random Reddit user.

But that's also not how the internet works and MAGAland knows it. In fact, they stake their whole reputation on it. 

The line from the pro-Trump fever swamps on November 9th was that the trolls helped 'meme a president into office.' By their own logic that would mean that this network of trolls and frogs and shitposters played a vital role in the outcome of the 2016 election. This suggests that this group wields tremendous influence and the work that they do is very important. Trump's electoral win has empowered this group to believe — whether they're right or wrong, I have no idea — that they are a meaningful part of the political discourse. Anyhow, they'll be the first to say their shitposting has an impact.

By their own logic then, the machinations of the fever swamp deserve to be poked, prodded, and investigated. The MAGAsphere has argued — rather successfully — that what happens on the web matters and that the internet is very much real life. And that comes with consequences — namely, that what they do can be examined and questioned. This is a line of thinking that's been going on for some time, too. Reporters have been wading into the remote corners of the internet for years now to explore, document, and investigate the lawless communities that have had an outsize impact on the world around it. It's a tricky area — there are considerations of privacy and newsworthiness and plenty of pitfalls to avoid — but as this pro-Trump culture becomes more influential (eg: they make shit that the President himself tweets out), they invite responsible scrutiny. To understand the internet is to understand that you can't have the influence without the scrutiny. And it seems the pro-Trump internet isn't willing to reckon with that yet.

Ok. That's enough words for a Sunday afternoon. Have a good week, all!

Charlie