Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals

A Democrat in Michigan scrolled through a surge of nasty Facebook memes about Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week before fixing on one that captured his growing dislike of the candidate. It depicted her smiling face as a mask. Behind it was Hillary Clinton. Matt Walters, 64, a retired factory worker and supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), shared the image onward to eight Facebook groups and tens of thousands of potential eyeballs with a few taps on his smartphone — using a popular new mass-posting technique that allows ordinary Americans to operate with rapid-fire speed reminiscent of Russian bots and trolls in 2016.

In that small way, Walters contributed to a massive wave of hostile memes about Sanders’s Democratic rivals that both reflects the rising divisiveness in the party’s nominating contest and, in the view of social media experts, exacerbates it.

... The volume and viciousness of the memes — portraying Warren (D-Mass.) as a snake, a backstabber and a liar — reflect how Facebook identifies and rewards emotionally charged content to generate reactions from its billions of users. That serves the company’s ad-driven business model, which equates engagement with profit. But it also, in the view of experts who study Facebook’s effect on political speech, distorts democratic debate by confirming biases, sharpening divisions and elevating the glib visual logic of memes over reasoned discussion.

...The rising popularity of the tactic among Sanders supporters may help explain the scores of images bashing Sanders’s opponents that have appeared in nearly simultaneous bursts in recent weeks, pushed out by highly networked clusters of Facebook users, according to Davis’s analysis. He did not find evidence that the campaign itself was involved in this activity, focusing instead on the informal Facebook activity by supporters.

... No other Democrat’s supporters are engaged in behavior on a similar scale, which is more characteristic of the online movement galvanized by Trump. The president’s campaign aides have credited Facebook with his victory in 2016, when he poured money into advertising on the platform while also using organic posts on social media to speak directly to his followers, who responded with a torrent of posts backing him and lacerating his opponents...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/24/facebook-is-inflaming-divides-tearing-democratic-party/?fbclid=IwAR0BJgprXH53ZmcTNDTaTmICM44MlTvouMYyhQIRyqjXUpSeXU1spi604cs