Debate is discouraged

On the basis of all the Gamestop and WallStBets hoohah this week, I joined Reddit yesterday. The first place I went was to the Trump supporting community. There was a note in it that announced, “debate is discouraged”. It didn’t bode well, but I posted this piece from yesterday’s Slog. In a little over one second, this panel came up:

Looks to me like the “moderators” didn’t ‘AskTrumpSupporters’ about their decision. Also looks to me like they can read posts at fifty times the speed of a Supreme Court judge reading a Guiliani affadavit. Also seems to me that it’s a tad odd calling a community Ask Trump Supporters, and when you ask them ‘Anyone missing the Donald yet?’ somehow you’ve broken the rules.

One clue is provided by comparing the size of the Trump clan on Reddit with the Boys for Biden; the former are outnumbered by four to one. About ninety plus per cent of all the comments on there are to do with the Gamestop phenomenon, most of it seemingly involving teens delusional about screwing up Wall Street. I won’t be going back.

Although Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, it bills itself as “a completely independent spin-off”. In fact, AP still has a majority shareholding, so you can scrub the independence spin. The AP Group owns Condé Nast, the New York Times and New Yorker.

In the 2020 election campaign, AP increased its donations to the Democrats fourfold from 2016. The Group hasn’t supprted a GOP candidate this century.

Last March, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch (an apt surname) had his staffers run a Coronavirus hatchet job on Trump (‘He’s definitely melting down over this: Trump, germaphobe in chief, struggles to control the COVID-19 story’) bylined Gabriel Sherman. The piece – judge for yourselves – could’ve been written by Anthony Fauci – half-truths, baseless smears, inaccurate predictions….let’s just say it hasn’t aged well: one minute he’s a germaphobe, the next he’s a mask denier. Oh perleeeeze.

The rabid Trumpophobia on the New York Slimes needs no introduction, any more than the childish ‘parodies’ of The Donald in the New Yorker.

Advance Publications is a private company owned by the Newhouse family, surviving members of which are billionaires several times over. The Newhouse brothers Si and Donald liked Trump, seeing him privately as more a traditional Democrat than a Republican. But Si died in 2017, and when Donald expired last year, the gloves were taken off in this traditional DNC supporting group.

In the US media, you don’t so much confirm provenance by following the money as the DNA. Advance Publications is a Get Trump stronghold, and Reddit is simply part of it. I am now left wondering precisely how this ‘crowd betting’ David v Goliath BS really got started.

Stay tuned.

John Ward continues to search for a social medium that isn’t either unconstitutionally censorious, under-invested, foul-mouthed, counter-intuitive or merely a subcontractor for Military Intelligence.