The Washington Post is out with a post-mortem on one specific part of the Jan. 6 insurrection that the House select committee investigating the coup attempt conspicuously chose to underplay. Committee staffers had at one point put together a 122-page memo on the failure of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to react when faced with burgeoning evidence that their products were being used to organize pre-planned violence. A full accounting of what social media companies knew and when they knew it, however, was dropped from the final Jan. 6 report.
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That final report instead focuses heavily on Donald Trump's actions and largely brushes aside the Republican Party-wide extremism that allowed the coup attempt to come to violent fruition. It is true that Trump was the motivating force behind the violence, but there's also no question that he had widespread help from Republican lawmakers who pushed utterly fraudulent misinformation in order to create an extremist appetite for nullifying the election.
If the Republican response to Trump's calls for the erasure of an American presidential election based on Rudy Giuliani-spewed hoaxes was to stuff Trump in a sack and deliver him to Mar-a-Lago whether he wanted to leave or not, Jan. 6 would not have happened. The Republican response from the top of the party downward, however, was to parrot the false claims, embellish them, and repeatedly fill the White House with messages of support for election nullification.
By the second half of December, the Republican eagerness to push democracy-eroding misinformation was an integral part of a conservative social media freakout that was transforming into militia-fueled plans for an armed descent on Washington, D.C., to stop the transfer of power. When Trump himself focused those efforts into a "march" intended to coincide exactly with the constitutionally demanded joint session of Congress that would certify the election's results, telling his loyalists that it would "be wild," those violent plans quickly coalesced into what would become the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Social media companies knew it was happening. Site moderators warned managers of the calls for violence, and they warned them again as the violent plans began to focus on that particular date.
We know the results: Top social media companies like Facebook and Twitter were loathe to take action because the extremist calls were, of course, inherently coming from the conservative side of the political spectrum. Quivering over yet another situation in which their moderation efforts would be attacked as biased, executives allowed moderation teams to respond in force only after the violence had already come to fruition and rioters were celebrating their successes.
The Washington Post report doesn't break a lot of new ground, but it provides a good overview of what we have already learned in previous bits and pieces. It singles out one particular ongoing lie being pushed by new Twitter owner Elon Musk: Musk has repeatedly insisted that previous Twitter management was biased against conservatives, but the committee assembled reams of evidence showing Twitter's reluctance to clamp down on rampant disinformation was precisely because the calls were being fueled by partisan Republicans and by Trump himself. Trump's account "was the only one of Twitter's hundreds of millions" that had been blocked from moderator view in the company's core moderation tool, sparing him the usual consequences of his countless rule violations.
What most stands out, however, is that the Jan. 6 committee, Congress as a whole, the Democratic Party, and nearly all of the nation's political press are continuing to fail in precisely the same ways that Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms failed to respond to the violence.
"[I]n the end, [Jan. 6] committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations."
The failure of social media companies was in tolerating misinformation meant to justify the erasure of a United States election because enforcing their own rules against dangerous misinformation and hoaxes would have required action against some of the most prominent Republican officials, activists, and pundits in the nation. The hoaxes being promoted were themselves partisan. There was no balancing group of non-Republican hoaxers that could be targeted at the same time to prove the companies were applying the rules equally.
The Jan. 6 committee—which managed to acquire participation from only two coup-opposing Republicans after the rest of the House Republican caucus sought to sabotage the probe from the outset—largely brushed aside the widespread Republican extremism that saw anti-democracy hoaxes pushed by numerous House lawmakers themselves. In order to keep whatever small shred of alleged bipartisanship could be mustered in investigating a violent insurrection, the committee chose to say little about the means by which the hoaxes that fueled the violence spread. It could not do so without implicating the Republican Party at large.
It was an explicitly partisan coup backed by some of the House Republicans now being placed in top committee posts. In order to create a public accounting of the coup at all, the committee felt obliged to focus mostly on Donald Trump and those closest to him, a group that could be cleaved off and held to theoretical account without having to delve too deeply into whether one of the nation's two major political parties is itself now a primary source of disinformation and hoax promotion.
The irony of a House select committee curtailing the scope of its blame-casting to limit the extent to which Republican partisans could insist that their probe was partisan—thus leaving out the bits about how social media companies acted with cowardice when facing calls for violence promoted in large part by Republican partisans—is a lot.
This is where we are, though. Law enforcement has been generally eager to bring justice to the militia-backed seditionists who committed the actual violence on Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 select committee collected a mountain of evidence to show that Donald Trump and his closest advisers intended their acts not as means of righting some supposed electoral wrong, but as a seditious plan to erase the election's results. It was one that would see Trump gather the violent crowd at the time and place that would put maximum danger on lawmakers and his recalcitrant vice president.
The phalanx of House and Senate Republicans who most assisted Trump's team in spreading known hoaxes and egging hoax-believers into demanding illegal and violent acts to address them, though, have skated by with barely a scratch on them. They continue to be interviewed by the Sunday news shows and by roving Washington journalists not as seditionists or coup supporters, but for their thoughts on things like regulation and the debt ceiling. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who inserted himself directly into Trump's attempts to have Georgia's official vote counts altered in his favor, appears two years later to be in no known danger of prosecution or censure.
And the reason remains the same: Any real accounting of the roots of the Jan. 6 coup attempt must address the widespread support the nullification of a constitutionally governed election was given by innumerable state Republican lawmakers, a tremendous chunk of Republican punditry, dozens of members of Congress, and a substantial percentage of the Republican voting base.
The insurrection was transparently a partisan Republican act. There is no way around that. It was an act of violence intended to benefit the Republican Party even at the expense of United States democracy. It was intentional. It was planned.
Musk and other democracy-agnostic gadflies remain bent on pretending none of it was consequential or even out of the political ordinary, and that it is those who find fault with the coup attempt who are being the unreasonable ones. It is a game. The purpose is to keep the public way paved for a second or third attempt—a new normal in which responding to election losses with new hoaxes and new threats of violence is merely another political tool to be used.
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On the first episode of season two of The Downballot, we're talking with Sara Garcia, the strategy and outreach manager at Crooked Media—home of Pod Save America—about everything her organization does to mobilize progressives and kick GOP ass. Sara tells us how Crooked arose to fill a void in the media landscape, how it not only informs listeners but also gives them tools to take action, and some of her favorite shows that she loves to recommend to folks.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also discuss the Republican shitshow currently unfolding in Congress—and starkly different outcomes in two state legislatures that just elected new House speakers via bipartisan coalitions; the landslide win for the good guys in a special election primary in Virginia; why George Santos faces serious legal trouble that will very likely end with his resignation; and the massive pushback from progressive groups and labor unions against Kathy Hochul's conservative pick to be New York's top judge.