ALTHOUGH not explicitly stated, there are echoes in Rebecca McQuillan's article ("In a crisis, populists like Trump and Johnson are not up to it", The Herald, May 29) of the old adage that what happens in America today happens here tomorrow. Many people nonetheless will like her be dreaming of a "Trump-free Christmas". The problem, however, with commentators who write so much about populism and populists is that they make little attempt to analyse it or to explain its roots. It is easy (and pointless) to ridicule Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, much more difficult to attempt to examine the social, political, economic and cultural forces which produced them.
It is an unpleasant fact, but a fact nevertheless, that Mr Trump retains broad support in many areas of American life and it is complacent and premature to predict his defeat in November. Ms McQuillan ends her piece with the comment, "as for Mr Johnson, six months after the election the populist veneer is coming off and his erstwhile supporters are seeing to their cost what's underneath". This is no doubt true, but the big question is, what conclusion will they draw? Darker forces than Mr Johnson may be waiting in the wings.
Brian Harvey, Hamilton.
I HONESTLY burst out laughing when I read that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg criticised Twitter regarding their ongoing dispute with President Trump ("Facebook's Zuckerberg criticises Twitter over fact-checking Trump tweets", The Herald, May 29). Such rampant hypocrisy must be called out.
Recently I attempted to post on Facebook an article by a respected academic which clearly showed that the US media was so biased against Donald Trump that more than 90 per cent of all stories across the media were negative towards the President and that stories which showed positive achievement were either not reported or spun in a highly negative manner. I then received the following message: "Your content couldn't be shared because it goes against community standards." It offered the chance to dispute this decision, so I attempted to do this and was told "there was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can". This message has been the standard response for months.
I was now intrigued and sourced another article about the research, this time from a Democrat-friendly site. Unsurprisingly the article was posted immediately without any problem. I tried the experiment several times and, in each case, where the source was a Republican-leaning source it was blocked in the same manner but accepted from Democrat-friendly sites.
This clearly proved to me that, whatever Mr Zuckerberg says, Facebook censors content perceived to be friendly towards Donald Trump. Incidentally, it would also suggest that if this is not intentional then the technical people in Facebook are incredibly incompetent if they can't fix a simple problem in under several months.
David Stubley, Prestwick
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