Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s post-withdrawal interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Thursday night will draw the most attention for her response to “organized nastiness” online. The Washington Post covers that story this morning.
Maddow asked Warren about online attacks by candidates’ supporters. She asked Sen. Bernie Sanders for his reaction the night before. Sanders said he was “actually disgusted” and “aghast” at online vitriol:
“We condemn that,” Sanders said. “We want our supporters to be [talking] about the issues.
“[We] don’t need ugly, personal attacks against Sen. Warren, or anyone else for that measure,” he added.
Asked if she had spoken to Sanders about the problem, Warren would only say the conversation “was short” and refused to characterize Sanders’s sense of it. Sanders described the conversation as “cordial.”
What will attract less attention is Warren’s prescription for addressing online demonization and for campaigns modeling “fundamental human decency and respect for each other.”
Warren told Maddow [timestamp 8:54]:
Has the time come for us to start thinking more creatively about this? Do you set up something, for example, from the campaign that every single day answers back to this? With the authority of that person’s campaign? And says, ‘We’re not doing this. I’m flagging these. We don’t like this. We don’t want this. We don’t want any part of this. We condemn it. How many times do I have to say this?”
Let’s work on doing this creatively … You don’t have a creative solution until you sit down and try a creative solution. And if the first one doesn’t work, move it aside and let’s try the second. And if that one doesn’t work, move it aside and let’s try a third. But throwing up our hands and saying, no we cannot do this? That cannot be a right answer.
“You’re suggesting there could be a plan for this,” Maddow quipped.
There’s still plenty of time in this cycle to implement that plan and leave vitriol to the Russian bots. It would make them easier for humans to spot.
Watch the last six minutes for Warren’s off-the-cuff analysis of what Maddow describes as a “global economic cliff-dive” precipitated by the coronavirus outbreak. Someone ought to be availing themselves of her expertise. It was masterful.
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