Joohn Choe

20h

The headline here is that MAGA on Facebook seem to care a lot more about Islam than they do voter turnout, and it makes it look like they’re setting up to lose the midterms more than they are trying to actually win. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

I went looking through right-wing Facebook for bots and coordinated messaging. I found instead violent comments at about 100x the baseline rate. Full video + data: www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

showed the wrong chart for the initial 1,700-wide sample, that's this chart

and these are the numbers for the full 16,842-comment pull

The headline finding here is 150x baseline levels of violent rhetoric in right-wing spaces. That is, from a sample of comments on this week’s most-discussed right-wing posts I found the rate of violent & inciteful content (4.4%) is ~150x Meta's reported baseline for Facebook (0.03%).

patreon.comDisinformation dashboard: Oct 23 2026 (early look, in progress) | Joohn ChoeDisinformation dashboard: Oct 23 2026 (early look, in progress) by Joohn Choe on Patreon. Join Joohn Choe's community for exclusive content and updates.

So, I'm running 16,842 comments now through a classifier. It's taking a minute, but I have provisional findings and the full 22-page dataset on Patreon, paywalled while analysis is pending. Link here www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

reuters.comMeta apologizes after suspending "No Kings" Instagram accountMeta apologized for suspending the Instagram account of the "No Kings" protest movement over the weekend, attributing the shutdown to a sharp increase in activity that looked like automated bot traff...

this is also relevant to what happened to the No Kings account like, whether or not it was by mistake is definitely a question but given how badly - measurably - Meta is dropping the ball on violent content from the right-wing it makes the hypocrisy here stand out a bit more

Well that's Friday news cycles for you

patreon.comOn Vivek Ramaswamy (or, The Wages of White Adjacency) | Joohn Choe“America became white... because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.” - James Baldwin "The

If I write something with the title "On..." and it's not, like, "On the Iran war's effect on the bond markets and the two way predictive relationship they have" or something Generally speaking, that means it's 𝘰𝘯. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

patreon.comOn Michael Tracey | Joohn Choe"We are Jane Doe." - Atsuko Okatsuka By this morning, Friday, Oct. 2, Michael Tracey, an irresponsible grifter-clown with a Substack, had po

Other articles in this series: On Michael Tracey

patreon.comOn Eric Schmitt | Joohn ChoeOh, haha, the silly Senator made a gaffe. The late-night talk show hosts riff, the engagement farmers bellow into their echo chambers, and w

On Eric Schmitt

The problem with the white-adjacency bargain is that if you mess up to the point that, like, NANCY MACE is high-roading you, which, ouch, the maintenance cost of that bargain starts to outstrip your usefulness real, real fast. You can actually see it erode in realtime.

Where that puts Ramaswamy, given how the polls and the backlash from the ad is going - Larry Sabato just changed his rating for OH-GOV to "leans D" because of it - is in a place where the bargain is destabilizing because the maintenance cost is too high. Because that ad was so unbelievably dumb.

The telling moment, I think, to understand Ramaswamy's role in the Republican Party is Ann Coulter's appearance on his podcast in '24 where she straight-up says she wouldn't vote for him because of his race. Guess what he did.

The bargain Ramaswamy gets into by agreeing to support the party, even alongside bigots like Coulter - even when the bigotry is targeted at him - is called, in scholarly literature, 'white adjacency'. Think of it as a usefulness vs. maintenance cost equation.

BREAKING (seriously) fact check: Deepfake reported to originate from GRU/Storm 1516 attacking James Talarico identified - here's how to tell, who made it, and what it means www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

Dunking on Ted Cruz is, like, the easiest thing to do, I know, but if you look at how he's attacking Abdul El-Sayed in context, it ends up showing more about Republicans in the midterms than anything about El-Sayed, or even Ted Cruz. Full video and sources: www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

Bottom line up front: Analysis of 6,065 right wing and MAGA Facebook posts with 27 million reactions suggests a highly uncoordinated demand-driven information space at a surprisingly close distance to the midterms, in stark contrast to known coordinated national messaging campaigns like in 2018.

patreon.com"MAGA In Disarray", or, Data Drop Batch 1 Analysis & Commentary | Joohn ChoeData drop (free Patreon post): https://www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/data-release-sep-172830900 James Talarico quote in today's 'The Daily' po

Sadism, ‘othering,’ and oppositional discourse in general dominate the dataset. There is also remarkably little exhortation to vote as well as demonstrably low appetite for political “horse race” content. I posted the full video (with more charts!) on Patreon free. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

Here's what I've learned in the past three weeks gathering right-wing Facebook content at scale, and why it matters for the midterms.

3. Perhaps as a consequence of the gap between what right-wing influencers want to talk about versus what actually does well with their audiences, there is much, much less of a concerted get-out-the-vote or really any kind of mobilization effort at all.

In fact, posts casting doubt on voting substantially outnumber posts actually asking people to vote: the classifier tags 47 posts as election-integrity (noncitizen voting, fraud charges, mail-in ballot suspicion), as against ~39 identifiable actual calls to action to go vote. It's waaay down there.

Here's what I've learned in the past three weeks gathering right-wing Facebook content at scale, and why it matters for the midterms.

2. There is a substantial gap between what the right-wing influencer and news org pages publish on Facebook, and what their audiences actually react to. The topic that users in this audience reacted to most in this dataset (against baseline) is the Ilhan Omar home search, by a wide margin.

By comparison, the most posted-about narrative was "midterms horse race and messaging," which is #8 in terms of aggregate reactions, behind posts about the Xi Jingping visit last week and posts about unrest in France this week.

Here's what I've learned in the past three weeks gathering right-wing Facebook content at scale, and why it matters for the midterms.

1. MAGA-land is in disarray and reacting to the news cycle, rather than exhibiting any kind of a shared script. This is demonstrable statistically: 40 of 3,242 distinct captions appear on more than one page, and 36 of those 40 are Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, his own company.

Beyond a kind of "backbeat" of ambient bigotry and what looks like sadism, the narrative that dominates each day of right-wing ecosystem coverage is almost entirely determined by whatever's in the news; this, too, is demonstrable.

At this point I have 6,065 posts across almost three weeks with somewhere around 10,172,539 reactions (the reaction count was rounded on some earlier data pulls). This is sufficient to share as a resource (as in, "here have the CSV") and to make some moderate- to high-confidence findings.

This is from about 25 high-engagement right-wing Facebook pages between Sep 23 and Oct 15, 2026, including NEWSMAX, One America News, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, Terrence K Williams, Libs of TikTok, Benny Johnson, Dan Bongino, America’s Voice News, Team Trump and The White House.

You say "male loneliness epidemic" I say "annoying-male sequestration custom"

The Sgt Joker@thesgtjoker.bsky.social

Tommy is the epitome of the “men” who the media claim are suffering from “male loneliness.” I say let them suffer.

Throwback: The Different Kinds Of Gun Guy On Social Media Beardo Appendix Carry Hipster

"I Turned Kinesthesiology Techno-Babble Into A Successful Career, And You Can Too!"

AKA 'The Guy With A New Kia Sorrento's Worth Of Shit On His Gun'

Throwback: The Different Kinds Of Gun Guy On Social Media Beardo Appendix Carry Hipster

Radicalized Potato Salad With Raisins

Instructor Zero (Invites To The Cool Neighborhood Cookout)

Throwback: The Different Kinds Of Gun Guy On Social Media Beardo Appendix Carry Hipster

Tactical Stripling

The Guy Who Always Exaggeratedly Looks Left And Right After Reloading Because It's The Only Time He Looks Left

I'm still working on a data-based look at MAGAland on social media this morning, so just take this as 'vibes' for right now, not a finding: What I'm seeing, subjectively, in my feed, is giving a pretty clear pattern of just not having a good narrative now for them. Of course I have examples -

The saving grace of it all, from the viewpoint of watching midterms approach from this side of the pro-Trump/anti-Trump fence, is that at least they don't look very coordinated. Or, really, even coherent.

niskanencenter.orgDid the 2022 election show us a winning Democratic campaign strategy? - Niskanen CenterDavid Shor looks at the results of the 2022 election to provide new data showing whether various aspects of Democratic campaign strategy were successful.

It's a far cry from coordinated "immigrant caravan" messaging in '18 (remember that?), maybe more like the '22 midterms in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision. As in, the one that Democrats outperformed in. Those midterms. Take it with a grain of salt, and go vote.

en.wikipedia.orgWhite adjacency - Wikipedia

It's legitimately hard to tell Harris and Williams apart; they both constantly post content attacking Black women, apparently in the hopes of advancing their status with white supremacist audiences. There is a name for this practice.

And they're both unquestionably better than "mainstream" conservative media like Fox News or even OANN at exploiting the way that the feed favors high-engagement, provocative, hateful BS content. Look at their reaction, commenting, and share rates. That's what the algorithm looks at.

Terrence K Williams, whose entire schtick is sadism and ignorance; he's using the same tactic but his engagement is 2x - 3x that of HodgeTwins because he posts on a strict content schedule and recycles his best-performing content, like -

David J Harris Jr, another conservative influencer. here using undisclosed AI imagery (you're supposed to disclose it, you take a feed ranking penalty if you don't); he plays to a slightly stupider audience than even Williams, he'll actually state stereotypes and myths as fact to cue his audience.

Libs of Tik-Tok woke up this morning and decided to lead off the 10AM - 1PM social media primetime slot (on the East Coast at least) with... A typo. In a text. From a State House candidate in Massachusetts. Yeah good one Chaya you're really stickin' it 'em.

The Hodge Twins, conservative social media influencers who used to do workout videos on YouTube in the late 2000s, are literally posting liberal Twitter verbatim and prompting their audience to laugh at it, which is a less-successful version of a ragebaiting game played much more cannily by -

Fox News Flash looking frankly desperate to try to re-spin El-Sayed's viral heckler-handling masterclass; apparently the kind of statements that get people fired from CBS News are just ordinary for Fox News

Setting Democrats up with an easy dunk like this (“not bomb Iran at Bibi’s behest’, see how easy that is) makes me think 1. Republicans really might just lose the Senate, 2. AES rattles them, and 3. This is why people think “Tommy” from the El-Sayed video was a plant; AES is that well positioned

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

JD Vance: "I see what Abdul El-Sayed says about the war in Iran. I see him criticizing decisions the president has made, the military has made. But fundamentally we are where we are.I'd like to know what's Abdul El-Sayed's solution for the problem we have right now? It's easy to criticize"