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Notes -
Popping the Filter Bubble
Part 1 of what may become an ongoing series
Before @seething_spendcel published their post on the Henry Nowak I had actually started writing a post of my own as it had been easily rank in the top-5 if not top-3 of culture war stories for over a week based on the amount of coverage it was getting yet there had been literally Zero discussion of it here. Now I see @Quantumfreakonomics talking about this being a "Slow news week" and how "The current thing is still Graham Platner" and I am suddenly motivated to bring up another top-3 culture war story that does not appear to have been discussed here.
So let's talk about Spencer Pratt and the Unburning of Pacific Palisades.
For those just joining us Spencer Pratt is an MTV Entertainment executive who got his start in reality TV. He lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, and he is currently running for Mayor of Los Angeles. His platform is simple, Karen Bass (the Incumbent) is both corrupt and incompetent. He claims that she has been redirecting funds intended to rebuild the burnt-out neighborhoods to her friends while championing policies that make life worse for ordinary Californians.
Those who pay attention to Right-Wing Twitter are no doubt familiar with the proliferation of AI generated ads like this, and the meme about Spencer Pratt contributing money to his opponent's campaigns so they could run more ads like this.
Anyway the important thing that you need to know is that over the last 6 weeks Pratt has gone from being a complete outsider with a snowball's chance in hell to being neck-and-neck with the incumbent, and then last week just days before the polls officially opened, a miracle occurred Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".
Speaking of "glitches". Californians are famously incompetent when it comes to anything involving voting be it Elections or the Academy Awards, polls in person voting was this Tuesday but with the majority of votes being cast by mail it's unlikely we will have an official result till next week and right-wing tweeters have noticed something interesting...
39.3% vote in…
Karen Bass: 117,579
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
42.4% vote in…
Karen Bass: 130,429
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
0 out off 13,000 votes for Pratt would seem to stretch credulity and Gov. DeSantis is calling Shenanigans
It is undoubtedly some boring, stupid, arcane bug that would make every critic's eyes glaze over and convince no one. Decent chance it was on the imagery provider's end, serving up stale data which the batch ingestion pipeline saw as new and labeled it as such.
More fundamentally, I don't know what the actual execution and motivation of this scheme would look like. Some rogue individual undermining the logged and audited data controls? A conspiracy from top executives? And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%? (As far as conspiracies go, there are much higher impact levers Google has that could make it a loss by 20.1% instead; why Google Maps satellite view?)
To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
If you're referring to Amy Coney Barrett and Merriam-Webster's usage note in the entry for 'sexual preference', please note that at least that particular lexicographic outfit considers their vocation to be describing how words are used, rather than prescribing how they ought to be used; thus they were not, like Willy the Word Decider, decreeing the term to be doubleplusungoodspeakful, but noting that many other people had taken offence at its use. (This is the same reason that certain four-letter words for below-the-waist bodily functions are listed as more taboo than four-letter words referring to the loss of eternal salvation: the man on the Clapham Omnibus will take more umbrage at "Fuck $NAME1" than he would at "God damn $NAME1".
There were other cases. The most obvious one is perhaps the case where the dictionary swiftly ‘updated’ its definition of recession to include a non-standard but not totally made up one that didn’t embarrass Joe Biden as he campaigned for reelection.
Plus the Wikipedia edit wars around whether or not Kamala Harris was “border czar” when it would embarrass her (though that’s more two-sided) and the redefinitions of “Cultural Marxism” from part of the Wikipedia series on Marxism to “Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory”.
Meriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions veer left and include left-wing extemporising: https://archive.vn/FI0tu
Wikipedia notably excludes most right-wing publications from being neutral sources while keeping lots of left-wing ones.
It’s a common pattern: the activists rush forward, then the respectable “we just report the world” orgs immediately provide cover by recognising activist claims and laundering them into respectability. So Joe Public thinks “I don’t remember that word meaning that”, goes to the dictionary, see it does mean that (as of 10 seconds ago), and goes, “ah, guess I must have been wrong and the Republicans are making a big fuss over nothing”.
Do all of these individual actions have plausible explanations? Yes. Would they rush to change the definition of certain words to help Trump in the same way, or consider right-wing usages and mores valid in the way they do left-wing ones? Not a chance in Hell.
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