Are they living too far away? Too poor to go there? Bots? Laziness? Are they not interested in military parades despite liking to denounce protesters?
What’s the big reason?
Grifters, who don’t care but act like they do for money.
Astrofurfing, who are being paid to say things.
Bots, who aren’t people so can’t attend.
Bots can’t attend a parade in person
youtube is one of the wrost offenders for botted comment sections, especially around political posts. maybe 1 in 20 are actually human. and most of those human comments are them remarking on the bot comments.
illusions are powerful until you know how they work.
Whenever I look at the comments of a Gamer’s Nexus video, Steve often remarks on the hordes of bots he banned, but when I go to other videos, I usually am unable to tell what’s real and what’s fake. I guess that the commenters that have scantily-clad women as their profile picture probably aren’t real, but are there other signs that I can look out for? Naturally, I don’t attach more than a grain of credibility to YouTube comments, but I just want to really get a feeling of just how botted they are.
A lot of those people are from rural areas and are afraid of cities like DC. Lmao. Source: I am From DC and now live in a rural area and my yokel coworkers thinks anything past the 66/81 interchange is a hellscape
Astroturfing doesn’t translate well IRL.
Difficult to attend the parade, flights from Russia are spendy.
The AI bots wanted to attend but the tech to give them robot bodies isn’t ready yet. It’s okay though, they were there in spirit.
Bots!
There is astroturfing, but there is also a lot of propaganda and story curation around the protests.
racism is easier to support online than in person.
the best way to resolve racist opinions is to coerce those with abhorrent views to see their targets as human beings exactly like themselves. having this happen physically, in person, is a requirement.
Fear is marketed. It makes money.
The gravy seals are the ultimate keyboard warriors.
Because ‘fuck those guys who are inconveniencing me, let me rant on youtube for free and maybe make some money’ is a lot more accessible than ‘yay that guy, let me spend a bunch of money to show up at his thing’.
People can post from anywhere, but need to be physically present to show up to a parade. And it’s easy for a single person to post multiple times. FWIW apparently the weather sucked too.
Weirdly, I haven’t seen news outlets provide estimates of the number of attendees. The closest I’ve seen is
attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend
from CBC. It sounds like it was low turnout, but I’m not clear how low.
Assuming the photos are legit, the No Kings protests clearly got a lot of people out.
It seems they intentionally avoided having cameras on where the crowds would be. This shot of the bleachers is pretty telling though.
Aside from the systemic reasons why the internet leans heavily right: when you deport people’s neighbors then politics is no longer a sports game and even the nonvoters understand this.
I’d love to know your thoughts why the Internet is systemically right leaning? I don’t spend too much time on the political side of YouTube, but similar to op I’ve been perpetually confused as to why Instagram runs so hard to the right.
The idea that the Internet being systemically right leaning is super interesting and may explain a lot.
As always, with any questions about Political Economy:
Follow The Money
I mean churches should be anticapitalist and before the turn of the last century they often were. But then property got expensive and churches would need loans… Now we have prosperity gospel and mega churches. The internet ran the same course but in just a couple decades.
Money. Plan and simple. The right wing is the side with all the money and they spend it on producing propaganda regardless of its economic viability. Just look at Prager U’s financials. They pay dozens of content creators to pump out content even though it’s not profitable. There’s not enough money in the left wing to counter that.
Mind, I don’t count Democrats as left wing.
