Running the gauntlet of Trump, Twitter, trolls

“Murders, murders, murders. Killings, murders,” said President Donald Trump at a violent rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday. And that, readers, is the live-action embodiment of a hateful tweet.

Trump stoked the crowd of 6,500 with a collection of words and phrases like this, whipped up hate against media, and then watched as a BBC cameraman was violently attacked by a man wearing a Make America Great Again cap and shouting “F--k the media!”

Online, where it all started, tweets are words, just like Trump’s. They’re packets of words, then gangs of words, then armies of words, just like a Trump crowd being goaded into rage based on lies. In real life, as an impressive new data study by the CBC reveals, trolls in Russia, Iran and Venezuela may have been running targeted Twitter campaigns to create anger in Canada over building pipelines, immigration and refugee policies, and other sore-to-the-touch spots.

Note that the tweets are not always pro-pipeline or antiimmigrant. Troll campaigns are cunning. They can be anti-pipeline or pro-immigrant. As the CBC reports, Iran, for instance, has an interest in Canadian pipelines not being built. It is not clear who specifically was best-served by stirring division over U.S. Black Lives Matter but it happened.

Emotional reactions are key. Troll campaigns often retweet using respectable outlets but in a targeted manner that feeds personal anger and expands it in our peaceful nation. In a world described in ever more simplistic terms, Americans, unaccustomed to even registering foreign news, are particularly vulnerable. Here’s an early Tuesday New York Times headline: “Ethics Inquiry Opened over Justin Trudeau’s Actions in Bribery Case.” A headline is basically a tweet, especially for those who don’t read the story, which is most people.

It sounds as if the PM has been quietly exporting crystal meth in bulk to Michigan and paying off border agents using blockchain. Of course, the story is relatively dull. My dearest wish is that the PMO had indeed suggested former justice minister Jody WilsonRaybould do a plea bargain in the SNC-Lavalin case, saving thousands of Quebec jobs. I wish she had been told not to grovel to U.S. agents trying to arrest Huawei’s CFO. Canadian jobs come first.

But SNC-Lavalin is a complicated Ottawa quarrel among people who have never endured the terror of job loss. So it makes a great tweet, exactly the kind of summary - a tangled regional battle - that thrives on Twitter abuse.

Here are two CBC examples of foreign trolling:

Jan. 28, 2017: Canada Wants to Take Unvetted Muslim “Refugees” Detained at U.S. Airports

July 15, 2017: Globalist Trudeau Demands Americans Dump Borders and “America First” Slogan.

Re-tweeting these means amplifying, or gathering everyone of a similar opinion. It seems innocuous, even healthy. But if foreign states - and it’s not always clear how this is managed - are doing this to manipulate opinion in Canada, it may create Trump-level anger.

If you study the @atrupar video of the Trump rally, you can see how people reacted. Trump enthusiasts are chosen as a presidential backdrop and will always applaud, mainly for the video clips sent out by the media that Trump professes to loathe. But as the man charged at the BBC crew and struck the cameraman unawares, the older fans directly behind Trump froze, looking intent and possibly concerned. The beautiful young woman to his left, wearing sparkling chiffon and a U.S.A. cap, looked horrified. They did not cheer the violence they saw unfolding.

But the crowd did. The crowd went wild with joy, as they do in an Orwellian Two Minutes Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four. For the cameraman, it was two minutes of shock and fear. Someone will die at a rally like this one.

My job requires that I spend many hours on Twitter. I am rarely shocked or angered. But there is a more sinister reason for this than any notion that I am wise to Twitter’s ways and cannot be manipulated. Twitter has turned people online into experimental rats in a cage, battered by varying electric shocks so they blindly react and obey, or else, like me, grow almost numb to the pain of it.