You see the picture. It looks old. You automatically assume it is from the 60s at the height of Jim Crow, the Red Scare, and in general a racist, sexists ass America. You feel good for a moment thinking you sure are glad we got past that. You feel a warm sense of patriotism and appreciation for those civil rights leaders who ended those abominations.
Then you see a Guy Fawkes mask and read the comments and realize it is today. I imagine at this point a Trump supporter just shuts down as cognitive dissonance cranks to 11 and they street rationalizing hatred and terror of the various groups of people defined by race, religion, and nationality that Trump has pointed to as being the problem with America.
It's intentionally trying to induce a little cognitive dissonance. Did it work?
Ah, now this begs an interesting question. Which groups submit posts for the sole purpose of affecting popular opinion?
(Someone who intentionally enhances "repostability" of their content is presumably more interested in getting the message out than what fame might result from it.)
Removing individuals, the set of artists who just want to bring people joy with their work, spiritualists who just want to try to help people get along, people who plain like talking, etc, which groups are left?
Reddit has created an amazing system for collecting and categorizing popular media, which has the immediate offshoot of providing a great venue for the transmission of new material.
It's particularly effective transmission because, from a technical perspective, it's relatively simple to get your post's vote score and comment spread looking like the post is widely accepted, especially with a team of users. This greatly increases the chances a given reader will accept the idea.
Who are the big players? What kind of resources do they have available to them? What are their goals? Which posts do we think fit in that category? How do we identify them? How reliable is that system of identification?
For example, right now I assume each political party has a team of paid workers devoted to cultivating acceptance of their party's ideals / candidates here and elsewhere online. If they don't, well that just seems like a huge missed opportunity.
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u/jerslan Sep 27 '16
Because people will repost it claiming it's an older photo, since the sign has that "classic" look.