How Conservative Trolls Lost Their Mojo

If there’s one thing trolls know, it’s that there’s power in seeming dumber than you are. During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump pretended not to know who David Duke was. More recently, Dinesh D’Souza retweeted trailers to his film that contained hashtags like #bringbackslavery and #burntheJews and claimed afterward that he “didn’t see” them. A tiresome alt-right provocateur got banned from a service for sending a journalist $14.88—a coded Nazi reference—and later claimed it was “a joke.” The thing about this strategy is that it works: It even fooled the FBI. A Gamergate troll who sent women dozens of death threats and bomb threats a) confessed to doing it and b) admitted he knew it was a crime. But he said his threats were “a joke,” so his name was kept confidential by the FBI, and they let him go. Sometimes the mistakes really do seem dumb—Georgia Rep. Drew Ferguson tweeted an image of Nazi soldiers to celebrate D-Day, then corrected it. But the larger mission of claiming stupidity is to blur intentionality so much that it becomes impossible to parse.

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