NEWS

This article is biased. And your candidate stinks!

Dan Horn
dhorn@enquirer.com
A frustrated woman uses a laptop.

This may be the dumbest article about politics ever written.

It’s biased and phony and filled with lies meant to hurt Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, or whichever third-party candidate is getting hosed today by the mainstream media.

The reporter is a FOOL and his editors should fire him immediately, but they’re morons, too, so they probably won’t.

And this issue, WTF?!? It’s a total non-story. Quit wasting time and start telling the truth about how Trump is a fascist who wants to destroy America and Clinton is a criminal who hates America.

Welcome to the world of online political discourse in the age of Clinton and Trump, where diatribes like this happen every day on Facebook, Twitter, news websites and a host of other forums.

It’s where opponents are liars or felons, the media are in cahoots with one side or the other, and civil conversation is interrupted by photo-shopped images of Trump peering out of a sewer or Clinton wearing prison stripes.

It’s a place where hearts and minds aren’t so much won as they are pummeled into submission.

The long-term consequences of all this online anger are, like everything else this election year, debatable. But those who’ve studied the phenomenon say it’s getting worse.

“The impact of the Internet has been huge,” said Carolyn Lukensmeyer, executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse. “What we’re watching now is incivility the likes of which has never been seen in American politics.”

That’s saying something, given a history of nasty politics that dates to the Founders. The difference today, Lukensmeyer said, is the delivery system: Social media gives political attacks an immediacy and reach never before possible.

Every tweet and Facebook post has the potential to go viral, every online comment has the power to anger or thrill strangers across the country.

Add two unpopular presidential candidates and an ideologically-divided nation to the mix, and things can get toxic in a hurry.

Troll manifesto: Defending online incivility

Consider an exchange in early September on The Enquirer’s Greater Cincinnati Politics page, a Facebook group with more than 2,800 members.

“Fascism is a great way to streamline democracy,” one commenter said of Trump.

“She is a corrupt felon who will do anything to win,” another said of Clinton.

“That’s some made up crap,” responded another.

And on it went. Someone posted an image of body bags and accused Clinton of killing more than 40 associates. Someone wondered if Trump had ever done an honest business deal in his life.

Commenters proposed conspiracy theories – has Clinton been replaced by a body double? – and tossed around words like “liar,” “racist” and “fanatics.” They finally hit bottom when one called Trump a “SON OF A B****” and another rooted for Clinton to lose more than the election.

“I hope she dies in a fire,” he wrote.

Complaints rise as election turns ugly

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans held out hope that social media would improve political discourse.

The theory was the Internet would bring people from different cultural and political backgrounds together. Online, they could share ideas and debate policy. They could learn from one another.

The optimists got some of it right. Social media gives candidates new ways to connect with voters and allows people to engage with a wider audience.

The numbers are staggering: According to Facebook, Clinton was mentioned 180 million times on the social network the week of the Democratic convention, while Trump was mentioned 203 million times during the GOP convention.

More voices are being heard and thoughtful conversations still take place. But as the political climate has turned darker, so has social media.

A national survey last month found 30 percent of social media users reported being harassed for expressing political beliefs this year, up from 16 percent in 2014.

Those pushing for more civility say harassment is just a symptom of an overall coarsening of the political conversation.

“This is a fundamental problem,” said Katie Vogel, the engagement editor who oversees social media at The Enquirer. “We are dehumanizing one another.”

She said the paper’s website and Facebook pages, like many media sites, rely on users to self-police by flagging foul language and harassment. The goal is to keep the forums as civil as possible without curbing free expression.

Anyone with a personal Facebook page knows how hard that can be, especially in this election year. Some have become so frustrated they’ve stopped trying.

Adolfo Olivas, the former Republican mayor of Hamilton, shut down his Facebook account when some friends defended Trump during the GOP nominee’s feud with Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father whose son was killed in Iraq.

Olivas is a Gold Star father, too. His son, Nicholas, died in Afghanistan in 2012.

Adolfo Olivas, former Republican mayor of Hamilton, Ohio, is photographed at his office in downtown Cincinnati.

“That was more than my soul could handle,” Olivas said of commenters who criticized Khan. “The reaction to it from some people was just utterly ridiculous.”

He said he might go back to Facebook after the election, but he’s not sure. It’s too easy to be uncivil, he said, when staring at a computer screen or a smart phone instead of looking someone in the eye.

“I fear it will fuel the devolution of democracy,” Olivas said of social media. “We now are more about the disagreement than finding a solution.”

Mike Moroski

Trading politics for puppies

Mike Moroski hasn’t gone as far as Olivas, but he has sworn off discussing the presidential election on social media. He said he got worn down by the constant, angry buzz on his Twitter and Facebook feeds.

What bothered him most, he said, was his own contribution to that angry buzz.

Moroski, a Democrat who runs a nonprofit for homeless kids, once compared Trump to Voldemort and called him a “coward with fascist leanings” on Twitter. He also sent tweets to Trump’s adult children accusing them of “never working a day in their lives,” at which point Moroski’s wife suggested he might need to dial it back.

He did some soul searching and decided she was right. “I’m a 38-year-old man,” he said, “and I’m picking on his daughter?”

So Moroski wrote a long Facebook post officially bowing out of the presidential election. “I truly do wonder if Facebook SHOULD be just pics of puppies and family photos,” he wrote.

He ended the post with a photo of three adorable puppies.

He said he has no regrets. “It has had a measurable and noticeable impact on my mental state,” Moroski said. “I don’t even know if it’s possible to have a healthy conversation on Facebook.”

Not everyone thinks tough talk on social media is a problem. Some say a little intemperance helps drive home a point, while others see the bickering as harmless entertainment.

“I think people get a little too much into it, a little too heavily invested,” said Kyle Hufford, a Finneytown gun shop owner and treasurer of the Cincinnati Tea Party. “Even though the stuff I say may sound a little rough, I’m just kidding around.”

He said that’s what he was doing when he wrote on Facebook that he hoped Clinton would “die in a fire.” Video gamers sometimes use the expression and Hufford said he was just repeating it to make a point: He despises Clinton.

“I don’t really want her to die in a fire,” he said. “It was just a fun thing to say.”

When some fellow Republicans asked Hufford to tone it down this spring, he responded with a "public service announcement" on his Facebook page that defends trolling, the act of trying to upset someone online. Essentially, his post was a Troll Manifesto.

"To everyone who thinks I am a d***head, I have a couple of things to say," Hufford wrote. "When I say something on Facebook, I am being sarcastic and just trying to get a rise out of people. It's fun. Maybe I should find more constructive things to do with my time."

Hufford said the key to his online happiness is that he doesn’t try to change anyone’s mind, because most of the people he communicates with through social media already have a strong opinion.

They aren’t looking to hear differing views, he said. They’re looking to fight for theirs.

'Crooks,' 'liars' and 'morons'

It’s a pattern researchers are seeing, too.

While more Americans are getting news from social media – 62 percent, according to Pew – only 4 percent said they have a lot of trust in what they find there. For some, social media is more about picking a fight than learning something new.

Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes

Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes, a Democrat who routinely posts comments supportive of Trump, said there’s nothing wrong with that. He sees social media and the arguments that happen there as an unfiltered counterweight to traditional media, which he considers biased.

“All I ask for is a fair shake,” Rhodes said. “I have a lot of friends I disagree with, but it never gets personal.”

It does get heated, though. A recent Rhodes’ Facebook post took Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, to task for calling Trump sexist. “Hey Chelsea, who’s your Daddy?” Rhodes wrote, referring to her father’s philandering.

What followed was a string of bipartisan vitriol, including crude commentary about Trump’s relationship with his daughter, Ivanka, and descriptions of Chelsea Clinton as a “moron” and a “useless piece of trash.”

Lukensmeyer said such behavior online is rampant this election year, at least in part, because the candidates themselves engage in it.

Trump, in particular, has turned trolling into an art form. His tweets refer to opponents as “Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Marco” and “Crooked Hillary,” and he’s been criticized for tweeting racially and religiously insensitive remarks.

Clinton, for her part, recently caught flak for referring to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

“Incivility has now been made socially acceptable by the people running for president,” Lukensmeyer said.

She and others are trying to do something about it. Her institute, founded after the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabriel Giffords, has encouraged the candidates to be more civil on the campaign trail and in their debates.

Prominent Democrats and Republicans have urged the candidates to ease up on harsh rhetoric, and Catholic Church leaders have launched a “Civilize It” campaign to “change the tone” of the debate.

Civility advocates say they aren’t recommending censorship, just a more respectful conversation. Olivas said it shouldn't be so hard. He has a good rule of thumb for people who might not be sure if they’re behaving appropriately.

“Don’t act like a 3-year-old,” he said. “If you have something to say, say it. But say it civilly and be willing to listen to the other side.”

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