> Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xeno

> Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. This is where the argument collapses. It's well known that the right-wing have carefully and diligently constructed their own parallel reality [1]. There are endless right-wing news sites, blogs, and forums that tirelessly aggregate these people and pump them full of propaganda [2]. Facebook here is acting, at best, as a viral multiplier. Even if Facebook were to disappear tomorrow there are a plethora of sites ready to leap in at a moment's notice. Facebook's disappearance would not degrade the propaganda effort. Heck, there's always email. Cory doesn't have the courage to say it but his real issue must be with the internet as a whole. Propaganda is the internet's real killer app. You can see just how nicely this works: propaganda relies completely on repetition and copying [3]. And what is the one thing the internet does better than anything else? It may feel good to blame Facebook but this will ultimately accomplish nothing. Propagandists will literally build their own social networking sites if Facebook goes away. The sort of people who obsess over immigration aren't going to simply log off. They are connected now and there are plenty of people out there eager to connect with these people and validate their most elaborate paranoid fantasies. Where there is demand, there will be supply. [1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/maj... [2] http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-and-junk-news/ http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisansh... [3] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...