New article in The Atlantic features insights from Open Measures
Senior researcher Jared Holt spoke to the magazine about reactions to America's unusually botanical Reflecting Pool
A recent article published in The Atlantic detailed how MAGA media figures have changed their tune around the botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, presenting those rapidly changing talking points as phases in a 13-step political spin cycle regularly seen in pro-Trump punditry.
The piece featured insights from Open Measures senior researcher Jared Holt, supported by findings produced with our platform’s new Research Assistant. Holt used the Research Assistant to quickly generate a summary of evolving narratives about the Reflecting Pool across 2,500+ posts in our datasets and talked to The Atlantic to provide additional context and commentary about those findings:
These recurrent steps extend beyond Trump into the broader MAGA coalition. Recently, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, an organization that tracks online extremism, used a generative-AI research tool to spot patterns in posts about the Reflecting Pool by right-wing accounts on a selection of right-wing social-media platforms such as Truth Social. The tool broke down more than 2,500 posts into three buckets:
Phase 1: Triumph and Restoration
Phase 2: Defending the ProjectPhase 3: Sabotage and Culture War
“For the MAGA faithful, Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool was supposed to be a shining example of his efforts to restore America from its decaying state,” Holt told me. “When it became clear the renovation had been a disaster, MAGA influencers shifted their talking points to instead portray the situation as being emblematic of their critics’ depravity and derangement.” The pattern, Holt noted, is similar to how the MAGA media system responded to the ICE killings in Minnesota earlier this year, or how it has tried to spin the war in Iran. “The primary function of this media ecosystem is to hype up and pacify Trump’s base. And these days, as public support for the administration craters, it’s doing a lot more of the latter.”
Check out the full article, here: