Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse
Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter.
As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened.
The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the former South Bend, Ind., mayor and the technology company behind the app at the center of the electoral meltdown.
If that was too subtle, another of his tweets simply repeated “RIGGED!” 35 times.
President Trump wasn’t far behind. Though he didn’t immediately suggest malfeasance, he claimed it as a personal victory: “The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works.” His 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, used the episode to sow doubt: “Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process,” he told The Washington Post’s Anne Rumsey Gearan.
Meanwhile, memes featuring Hillary Clinton hunched over a keyboard circulated with the hashtag #IowaCaucusDisaster.
All credible reporting seemed to confirm the explanation that a technical snag, not a dirty trick, was to blame. But it didn’t matter. Iowa conspiracy theorists were already working overtime long before voters headed to their caucus sites Monday evening, thanks to another technical glitch that prompted the Des Moines Register to cancel the release of its vaunted Iowa Poll on Saturday night.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang circulated the hashtag “#ReleaseThePoll,” claiming without evidence that it had been killed because their respective candidates did better than expected.
Calmer voices could be heard amid the shouting, but you had to listen carefully. [Continue reading…]
It doesn’t take a conspiracy … to surmise what happened: Connected insiders using buzzwords to sell an unnecessary and overcomplicated solution to a nonexistent problem is the political system working as it always does. The difference here is just how public and spectacular the failure was.
Some caucus chairs, like Iowa state senator Zach Wahls, said they had no problem reporting results via the app. However, Wahls also tweeted that iPhone users had to download the app via TestFlight, an iOS environment that allows developers to share and test their apps with other users before they’re officially released. Developers often share their games and apps with Motherboard with TestFlight for pre-release review purposes. This, again, is a nonstandard way of installing apps. Even though we have installed many apps this way, there are often problems installing them. Given our experiences with TestFlight, it is not at all surprising that asking hundreds of people to install an app using TestFlight could result in some problems.
The DNC and Iowa’s Democratic establishment has failed at their most basic duties: Instilling a sense of competence, trust, and normalcy in the electoral process. The decision to use an app that it didn’t need, to hide the creator of this app, and to delay the reporting process has led to unmitigated chaos. It’s critical that Iowa used paper counts for its official tallies, but with so much of these campaigns relying on a media and momentum narrative, the failed app has caused enough of a mess to do real damage. [Continue reading…]