[alex_c]

>I can't believe how many took a margin call as some nefarious conspiracy

Why? We have the intersection of 3 things:

1. A financial system with opaque and often counter-intuitive inner workings (from an outsider's perspective)

2. A history of financial firms "innovating" (sometimes outright fraud, sometimes legal but leading to new legislation to restrict the "innovation"). Also the industry is not exactly known for being guided by strong moral principles.

3. A lot of money at stake.

If this is not a perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories, I don't know what is!

[gruez]

I think the problem isn't necessarily how people immediately believed the conspiracies at face value (although that's still kind of bad), it's that

1. almost a week later, there are still people in certain communities (eg. wsb) that still believe in the conspiracy, and haven't bothered to inform themselves of at least the counter-arguments (eg. DTCC deposit requirements).

2. prominent politicians decide to jump in themselves without doing due diligence on their part, for some cheap political points.

[dragontamer]

> 2. prominent politicians decide to jump in themselves without doing due diligence on their part, for some cheap political points.

Erm, the politicians who jumped in (Cruz and AOC) kind of do this crap all the time. Its no surprise to me. No different than Cruz jumping in to the "stolen election" crap a few weeks ago.

That's the thing about "Populism" today. Its about following and agreeing with meme arguments without having any deeper analysis. I think its fine when the memes are stupid / joke level (ex: Bernies mittens is kinda funny). But even in joke/stupidity levels (ex: Bernie's mittens), there's a level of conspiracy and unreasoned / counterfactual / direct lies that aim to shift public opinion. (On the right: Bernie's mittens represent how the pandemic has closed shops, believe it or not. Which is why the right is willing to meme the Bernie's mittens, corrupting the left's interpretation of the image)

Its how things operate in today's political atmosphere. I can only hope that we Americans grow up and learn to see how stupid this strategy is eventually. Welcome to meme warfare. (At least in my social circles, the Bernie mittens meme seems to be leaning towards the left-interpretation of the story. But there's constant meme warfare to change the meaning of these images).