Casey Newton: “Sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.”
“Welcome to the shitpost election.”
“To shitpost, of course, is to attempt to derail online discussions by posting fake, outrageous, and often low-quality material. And it is not new to this election. Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey funded a group dedicated to creating shitposts about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. In 2019, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom had to deny that she killed squirrels for fun after a shitpost on the subject went viral.”
“And if the past few days have made anything clear, it’s that political shitposting is not exclusively a province on the right. Anyone who has opened X over the past few days has likely seen dozens of posts ‘joking’ that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance had sex with a couch.”
