> The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to des

> The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people. He said that because in Germany it's actually quite mainstream to blame everything on social bots. When the German alt-right gained popularity, and alt-right topics became very popular on Facebook, the reaction of the German mainstream to that was to go "Those are all Russian social bots! There are no alt-right Germans! Facebook you need to fight those fake news and social bots harder!" [0]. By now those supposed "social bots" are going to elections and are voting [1]. The German mainstream reaction to that is to keep ignoring it, after marginalizing it as "Russian propaganda" didn't work. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/germany-facebook/543258/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/ge... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/europe/german-far-right-makes-election-gains-but-falls-short-of-victory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/europe/german-far-r...