Erica, we hardly knew ye. You were a white blonde “She/Her” in your 20s. You had good hair, straight teeth, and a perky smile. A “Proud Democrat,” you had worked as a field organizer for Joe Biden and as a volunteer for the Obama Foundation. Your whole life was before you, especially if you planned on working in comms.
Sometimes you said terrible things that made me wonder if you’d taken out a subscription to the Washington Post. “Ashli Babbitt f***ed around and found out. She was a terrorist piece of garbage who attacked our Capitol and died a traitor trying to overthrow democracy. Do you agree? Yes or no?”
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At least you gave me a choice. You believed in democracy. You agreed with President Joe Biden that “the fascist ultra MAGA” are a threat to America. You also sounded like NPR when you told me you were “fully vaccinated and boosted, still wear 2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine,” and that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court “are literal NAZI’S!”
I was troubled by this. That’s not how we use an apostrophe. And did you mean the conservative justices were literal Nazis, or that they just reminded you of them? I tried to imagine Clarence Thomas stomping around in jackboots and singing a fascist heel-clicker such as the “Erika” march, but for some reason it just didn’t stick. And then you were taken from us.
Erica Marsh had over 130,000 followers on Twitter when she/her suddenly disappeared in early July. Now people are telling me she never existed at all. They’re saying she was a bot, and that her photo was generated by AI. They’re saying Erica Marsh was a character on the early-2000s TV series One Tree Hill. They’re saying Erica Marsh is also a real person who works with veterans, first responders, and the families of the fallen at the Travis Manion Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. She enjoys “hiking, paddle boarding, beach days, hot yoga, traveling and West African drumming.” These sound like the sort of things the Erica I knew would do. Perhaps the fake Erica’s creator stole the real Erica’s name and background.
Was “Erica Marsh” a Democratic activist cranking out slightly exaggerated Democratic talking points to troll Republicans and grammar Nazis? Or was “Erica Marsh” a Republican activist seeking to troll the Democrats by slightly exaggerating their wackier talking points? “I’m not a parody,” she insisted shortly before her digital demise. This is literally the philosophical conundrum in which a Cretan tells you “All Cretans are liars.” Yes, I do mean literally.
Erica is not the only perky troll goading people into believing the worst about the other side. In one of her last tweets before her tragic disappearance, Erica called the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions a “travesty.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx & Slay, Queens) called the verdict “ludicrous.” Erica Marsh claimed that “No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed.” Joy Reid said, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Reid may spew out the word salad like bots with the norovirus, but they are real. So is Jen Psaki, who was under contract with MSNBC in her last weeks as White House press secretary. In her old job, Ms. Psaki denounced “disinformation” when it might damage her boss. In her new job, she spreads it on his behalf. On July 3, Psaki claimed that Republicans are “trying to recruit” Muslim Americans by pitting them against the trans lobby. This assumes that Muslims are dumb and that Republicans, whose dumbness is otherwise an article of faith on MSNBC, are fiendishly cunning.
It is becoming hard to tell the difference between satire and reality. One reason for this is Twitter. Now, you may not get your news from Twitter, but Twitter is where the people you get your news from get their news. Twitter is upstream of the official news media in the way that a blocked drain is upstream of a sewage farm, only not literally. Twitter is where the narratives are shaped. As the medium shapes the message, so the message shapes the messengers. Social-media politicians are human algorithms, self-programmed to maximize division and loathing by agitating the “hive mind” and summoning the “swarm.”
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Whether “Erica” was a Republican or a Democrat, she was bait to both. She existed to gather information about the people who clicked on her posts and liked them. Information about individual users can be “scraped” then amalgamated to show which kinds of voter respond to what kinds of stimulus. The most promising narratives are pumped downstream by the bots and surface in legacy media. The New York Times did not become the Erica Marsh of newspapers by accident. It was a business decision, and it paid off.
In February, a full 50% of respondents to a Gallup/Knight Foundation poll disagreed with the statement that national news organizations “do not intend to mislead.” Only 23% of respondents believed that the media acted in the public interest. This crisis of trust will worsen as AI spreads and the Erica Marshes march through your phone. The implications for democracy are obvious. The “Eroica” march is the funeral march in Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Ask not for whom the belle trolls…