Anand Giridharadas: Persuasion Isn't Dead

The same survey asked whether Black people face greater obstacles to success than white people do, and 74 percent of persuadables said yes. "KKK was terrorizing us decades before #ISIS appeared, " it thundered. Major in transgender activism crossword club.com. They are who they are. Americans didn't need outside help to see one another in these ways. Crystal1Johnson would tweet 11 more times that day, a major increase relative to the real Crystal's posts, and in this noticeably different vein. Loretta J. Ross, a reproductive- and racial-justice activist, says we need a prodemocracy movement that relies less on the callout and more on the call-in.

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Jenna also turned political disagreements into conflicts over identity—"New study confirmed: Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state. " A report by the research firm New Knowledge provided to Senate investigators described similar goals: "to undermine citizens' trust in government, exploit societal fractures, create distrust in the information environment, blur the lines between reality and fiction, undermine trust among communities, and erode confidence in the democratic process. Major in transgender activism crossword club de football. "The IRA knows that in political warfare disgust is a much more powerful tool than anger, " Linvill and Warren wrote. But what seemed to me even more significant than the subject matter was how the trolls talked about these issues. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness. Torres was able to explain that her brother-in-law was just the kind of person who would benefit from a pathway to citizenship. Or you don't favor a pathway to citizenship, but you know what it means to be overlooked and shut out.

"Resale homes sales R up, " she wrote back in 2012. But over the next two years, the account sent another 8, 000 tweets and garnered more than 56, 000 followers, putting it in the top 1 percent of Twitter users globally. He's in the ICU, and they have no health care, they can't get worker's comp, and they're struggling. Major in transgender activism crossword clé usb. " If those who seek to unravel our society can figure out what moves citizens in this fragmented and confusing time, so, too, can those who wish it well. But their common aim was to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.

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Inside was the managed chaos of activism—an array of folding chairs, hand sanitizer, packets of sugar, a microwave above a mini-fridge. For these and other reasons, Americans have grown alienated from an idea central to democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds—by persuading. "Task: posting comments at profile sites on the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. " The 'Good Point' People believe that, yes, raising the minimum wage is essential for helping families survive, and, yes, raising the minimum wage is going to crush small businesses and fuel inflation. The error of this way, by Shenker-Osorio's lights, is a misconception of what a "moderate" actually is. Torres isn't trying to implant some foreign idea in the minds of the people he speaks with. What Torres and other deep canvassers are trained to do is conceive of the person in the doorway in a very different manner from how most of us might: as divided not against you, but against themselves. I spoke with her once on the phone. Indeed, one of the ironies of our time is that some of the most dangerous and antidemocratic movements have managed to make their causes appear welcoming and make newcomers feel at home, whereas some of the most righteous, inclusive, and just movements give off a feeling of being inaccessible and standoffish. When you ask people to rate their support for various issues (as opposed to parties, about which people are far more tribal), a fifth are committed to your side; a fifth are reliably for the opposition; and most people are "moderate, " which is to say their minds are in play. The group was pushing for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Many political campaigns seem to focus more on mobilizing sympathetic voters than on winning over skeptics. A woman said, "No, I don't know any immigrants. " It seemed to me that there was a faint sliver of hope in the Russian experiment.

If Russian trolls could pull us apart, can we bring ourselves back together? Johnson tweeted occasionally under the handle @CrystalSellsLA. The best political appeals, she says, are structured like this: shared value, problem, solution. The women made stops in California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas, according to a federal indictment issued years later. Moderate implies a taste for the tempered version of a thing. Then another group was asked if focusing on and talking about race doesn't fix anything and in fact makes things worse, and 69 percent said … yes!

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The ranks of the persuadable change from issue to issue, year to year. In a survey of persuadable Minnesota voters with which Shenker-Osorio was involved, one group was asked whether focusing on and talking about race is necessary for societal progress, and 85 percent said yes. Their trip had been well plotted: a transcontinental itinerary, SIM cards, burner phones, cameras, visas obtained under the pretense of personal travel, and, just in case, evacuation plans. Linvill and Warren, the Clemson scholars, put me on to Crystal1 as an exemplar of the IRA's left-leaning trolls. Each had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message—reportedly three posts a day per account if Facebook was their medium, or 50 on Twitter. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was more junior. Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was connected with Russian intelligence. In traditional political canvassing, campaigners might knock on supporters' doors to make sure they have a plan to vote, and quickly move on. Your "moderate" stance was a temporary state—a situation, not an identity. Many of those respondents then joined the 62 percent who answered yes when asked if Black people and Latinos who can't get ahead were responsible for their own destiny. If this theory of the 60–40 voter who needs help sorting things through has a patron philosopher, it is Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging consultant who is upending many of the left's long-standing assumptions about persuasion. In June 2014, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva arrived in the United States on a clandestine mission. The account went silent for two years. On another occasion: "Good morning!

But also … good point! It's people like me. In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them. Reporting on this army of persuaders, I began to look differently at those Russian trolls. Maybe you want a pizzaburger, the mathematical midpoint between a pizza and a burger. Their methods included confronting politicians such as Senator Kyrsten Sinema and knocking on the doors of her constituents. What they shared was their dissent from the great write-off. Jenna had a different set of preoccupations. Managers issued detailed instructions about content and obsessed over page views, likes, and retweets. But Shenker-Osorio thinks about it as a rule of 20–60–20. "The IRA has used Trump—and many other politicians—as vehicles to further these twin goals, but it is not about Trump himself. " Meanwhile, Jenna tweeted that President Barack Obama was "risking the lives of Americans to bring his sunnis in, " and that "Osama bin Laden's letter looks more like a … Bernie Sanders speech.

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Two months into tweeting, with more than 6, 000 followers, the account posted: "Everyone has a beard now and I wonder, is that #beard trend connected with #ISIS or just a coincidence? " And it took a swipe at "social justice warriors"— "A tip for SJWs: not all things're about sexism or racism, things can be just things, stop turning everything into an argument for equal rights. Trump, still a relatively new presidential candidate, had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. " "White people can see aliens, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster but can't see racism, oppression or white privilege, " she wrote. When I began to read the posts myself, I saw even more clearly how the Russians had gone about this work. What struck Torres was how the woman's hostility to immigrants lay on the surface but, right below it, was the seedling of another view. But they saw the great American write-off from a distance, recognized its potential, and exploited it. The second week of December 2015 was a tense one. For canvassers, these dissonances are grist for the persuasive mill. Plenty of evidence proves that persuasion remains possible, and tenacious people on the front lines of democratic life are showing how it's done. According to the analysis provided to the Senate, the Russians were trying to amplify "a roster of social issues, " among them Black culture; police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement; the pro-police/Blue Lives Matter movement; anti-refugee content; arguments in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton; arguments in favor of Bernie Sanders and against Clinton; Texan culture; Confederate history; Muslim issues; LGBTQ issues; religious rights; and gun rights. "#BlackLivesMatter, " the account declared.

But they also recommended that I look into another of the agency's top performers, its tenth-most-retweeted account—a right-leaning troll named Jenna Abrams. It suggested a shadowy nexus of difference; not only were your fellow citizens unlike you, but they might be in cahoots with jihadists. "If we ask them to plant their flag on one side or the other, if we approach them that way, they're going to do so, because that's what makes us feel like rational, thinking humans—having an answer to a tough question. In just a few words, the tweet married contempt for city-dwelling hipsters to a fear of terrorism. "Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart. Measured by retweets, Crystal1 was the second-most-powerful Twitter user in the entire sprawling Russian effort, with some 3. Aiding Donald Trump was indeed among the IRA's objectives, but it wasn't the mission's focus. When I explained that I was looking into how her identity had been stolen and weaponized by Russian intelligence, she hung up and stopped answering my calls. Her profile photo shows a Black woman in her 30s or 40s with short blond hair. Today he thinks of his role as helping hostile or indifferent voters see the humanity of people like him, and he has been amazed at how often he succeeds.

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A new Crystal Johnson had emerged, less interested in real-estate advice than in deep-rooted racial injustices. As a result, social movements on the left that need to grow to win devote more energy to keeping people out than pulling people in. And then suddenly it became one of the most influential accounts operated by the IRA's troll farm. There is so much we have to be thankful for. " They believe that, yes, immigrants enrich our lives, and, yes, immigrants cost us jobs. Follow ISIS example?

They had encouraged the view that the basic activity of democratic life—the changing of minds—had become futile. People associate "moderate" with the middle of the road, the center, but Shenker-Osorio thinks that's a mistake. On December 10, @Crystal1Johnson was back in action. Crystal Johnson is an actual person, a real-estate agent in Georgia.