A viral campaign called #walkaway has people all over social media talking about why they left the Democratic Party. Started Brandon Straka over his grievances with the mainstream left and carried out into this month the trend has really pick up.But some are saying its fake and that people are not really walking away. So whats really going on with #WalkAway, is it real, and if so can it have an impact this November?SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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In May, a man named Brandon Straka uploaded a video to Facebook called the Walk Away Campaign.
In the video, he details his grievances with the mainstream left, saying they've become intolerant, they've turned on their own, and in some instances, are actually acting fascistic.
Since the launching of this video, he's been getting a ton of attention.
Almost immediately, he got hundreds of thousands of views, and as of today, between Facebook and YouTube, the campaign has nearly 2 million views.
The goal of the campaign is to get other people to use the hashtag walkaway and detail why they did or will walk away from the mainstream left.
Because of this, we've seen sort of a kickback.
There are now news organizations claiming that some of the people pushing this are bots.
They're robots that are simply propping up this trend and it's not real.
Others are saying it's true.
Many people are actually pulling away from the mainstream left.
So what is actually going on?
Is hashtag walkaway real?
And if it is, is it actually going to get people to leave the Democratic Party?
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Now before we get into all the partisan bickering, let's just take a quick look at what hashtag walkaway is.
We have this Facebook page for the walkaway campaign, this man here, Brandon Straka, and you can see there's about 26,000 people who like this, 28,000 people are following it.
The original video on Facebook, as of today, has 65,000 shares and 1.6 million views.
And, I'll be honest, that's actually not a whole lot relative to what Facebook videos tend to get.
But let's take a quick look at some of the things he says in his video.
unidentified
Once upon a time, I was a liberal.
Well, to be honest, less than a year ago, I was still a liberal.
I became a liberal because I felt I'd found a tribe whose values aligned with my own.
I staunchly reject racism of any kind.
I reject the marginalization of any human being based off of their gender or sexual orientation.
I reject tyrannical groupthink.
I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, and dogmatic mob to suppress free speech, create false narratives, and apathetically steamroll over the truth.
I reject the acceptance of junk science and superstition to advance ideological agendas.
I reject hate.
These are the reasons why I became a liberal.
And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.
The video goes on and talks about all of these different instances where the left has been just too extreme for Mr. Straka.
And hence, he is walking away and encouraging others to do so.
To me, this comes off as similar rhetoric we've seen in the past.
Cassandra Fairbanks, who was a big Bernie Sanders supporter, switched to Donald Trump back in 2016.
So it's not uncommon for people to post these videos talking about why they are leaving the left.
However, in this instance, Mr. Straka is encouraging other people to use the hashtag as well.
Now let's dive into the partisan bickering.
I'd love to pull up an objective source that I think is going to do a good job, but for the most part, Mainstream media and alternative media, they have their bias, and it's clearly reflected in how these articles are written.
From the Washington Post, the walkaway meme is what happens when everything is viral and nothing matters.
It starts by saying, on the pro-Trump internet last weekend, the walkaway hashtag was the
nexus of an exciting idea, that millions of Americans are walking away from the Democratic
Party, as one pro-Trump account put it.
And they did!
Students for Trump tweeted out, share your walkaway stories with us, millions of Americans
are walking away from the Democratic Party.
Walkaway the hashtag went viral this weekend as something of a delayed reaction to a popular
video renouncing liberalism by Brandon Straka, who described himself to the Epoch Times as
as a New York hairdresser and aspiring actor.
The video, posted in late May, now has more than one million views on Facebook.
In it, Straka says he was once a liberal, but now he is not.
The story points out one of the most viral walk-away tweets, for example, read as the generational reverse of the woke toddler, from Sofia Vargaros.
Both my parents are Hispanic legal immigrants, both were registered Democrats, and both this week told me they have decided to walk away.
16,000 retweets.
They go on to say, however, Now I need to point out that Dave Weigel has published fake stories in the past.
I have called him out for this and made several videos about it.
I feel it's important that you know this before I use him as a source.
someone with a different name. The account has since been suspended by Twitter.
Now I need to point out that Dave Weigel has published fake stories in the past.
I have called him out for this and made several videos about it.
I feel it's important that you know this before I use him as a source.
However, he said, Here's another fake account trying to make WalkAway happen.
16,000 retweets for Sofia Vargaros, a bot with a profile pic stolen from, I am not kidding, a book about getting rich from penny stocks.
And it would appear that this, in fact, is a fake social media account.
And when I mean by fake, this is clearly not the person who is running the account.
However, there is one critical error in the Washington Post and in Dave Weigel's tweet.
This is not a bot.
If you're not familiar, bot is short for robot, and robot accounts, bot accounts, are automated.
So they tend to post the same message over and over again.
They're very generic and seemingly random.
A sock puppet is an account run by someone else with a fake identity in order to push some kind of ideology or marketing or whatever, just generally to manipulate people.
In this instance, it is most likely that a real human was running this account using a fake picture and a fake name to try and make people think that the child of immigrants was seeing her parents walk away.
When in reality, who knows who was actually running that account?
The Washington Post concludes by saying, The pro-Trump internet is really good at convincing its
audience that going viral signals popular opinion.
That its movement is and always will be hashtag winning.
In this case, walk away is the answer to the possibility of a blue wave in the 2018 midterms.
It doesn't need to be true to be effective.
After all, the hashtag has now become an article in the Washington Post.
And that's true.
A lot of people will vote simply based on who they think will win.
A lot of people want to have the popular opinion just to fit in.
In which case, if you can convince the masses that your side is winning, that people are leaving the Democrats, they might actually switch sides in an effort to appeal to the mainstream.
Obviously, Breitbart's approach to the story is in the other direction.
Their title is, watch, walkaway movement to abandon liberalism goes viral.
The story is basically the same as the Washington Post, outlining what happened, who Brandon Straka is, highlighting C.J.
Pearson, but at the bottom it says, some Democrats say they are still expecting a blue wave come November.
If social media is any indication, there seems to have been a sea change.
I did some digging through various analytic services to try and figure out if WalkAway was actually popular.
And here's what I found.
First, let's take a look at TrendsMap.
We can see that all across the country, over the past 24 hours, there has been massive interest in the campaign WalkAway.
Now, let's play the 24-hour period and see what it looks like.
There's actually a decent amount of activity, especially in major cities.
And when this is compared to other trends, it looks fairly typical of top trending terms.
In which case, it would seem like there are a decent amount of people who actually are using the hashtag walkaway.
But what number?
That's the hard thing to figure out.
Using a service called hashtags.org, We can see an estimated tweets per hour based on a 1% sample size.
We can see that there's just above 8,000 for the most part, and then in the wee hours of the morning, it falls down to only a few thousand.
That makes sense.
Most people in America are asleep.
But during prime time, They're estimating around 12,200 tweets for the hashtag WalkAway.
A lot of people have said, there should be enough tweets here to trigger a trend on Twitter, but why aren't we seeing the hashtag appear in the trending slot?
It's possible that there aren't enough tweets to actually make a trend, but that's not really true.
When we look at worldwide trends, and I don't use any filters, this is the natural trend system, We can see that only with 9,000 or 2,000 certain phrases will appear on the worldwide trend list.
So, if hashtags.org is correct in their estimate, they could be wrong.
But if they are correct, that we're seeing 12,200, why isn't hashtag walkaway appearing in the trending list on Twitter?
One thing to consider is that appearing in the trending list requires a massive uptick in the amount of tweets.
It's not so much about how many tweets you're getting, but how quickly the amount of tweets are appearing.
They want to talk about trends.
These are things that are becoming quickly pertinent, and not things that people generally talk about all the time.
Because if a trend was determined based on how many people tweeted about it, Donald Trump would probably be number one all the time.
I decided to dig in to related hashtags using the service hashtagify.me.
We can see that some of the top influencers tweeting it are RealCandaceO, Real James Woods and the Wayne Dupree Show.
The most used hashtag in relation is MAGA.
Make America Great Again.
If the most common hashtag is MAGA, I have to wonder, is this really Democrats who are
telling their stories about how they walked away?
Or is it Trump supporters who are encouraging others to walk away?
We've seen at least one statement from someone saying that millions are leaving the Democratic Party, and that's possible.
But based on the trending information, seeing 12,000 tweets during primetime yesterday doesn't say to me that we're looking at millions of people, and it might actually be a much smaller trend.
But, as many of you probably already know, walk away is real.
It absolutely is real.
Donald Trump won the election in 2016, and there have been numerous stories about people walking away from the left to join the right.
From August 24th, 2017, this story from NPR.
Here's how many Bernie Sanders supporters ultimately voted for Trump.
It starts by saying fully 12% of people who voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election.
That is according to the data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study,
a massive election survey of around 50,000 people.
For perspective, a run-of-the-mill survey measuring Trump's job approval right now
has a sample of 800 to 1,500.
Most polls use very small sample sizes relative to this one.
And this is saying that 12% of Bernie Sanders voters, actual voters, not just supporters, voted for Donald Trump.
Walkaway is real, and it's been happening for a long time.
Does that mean there won't be a blue wave?
Not necessarily.
The people who have moved over to the right may have already done it.
Many of these hashtag walkaway stories might be from people who walked away a long time ago, in which case any support we're seeing for the Dems might be new support.
There actually might be people joining the Democratic Party in response to all of the negative press and the actions of Donald Trump.
The walk-away campaign on Facebook and YouTube has just over 2 million views.
That's not a whole lot.
It is a big campaign, no doubt.
But looking at your typical political trending videos from like NowThis News, from Vox, from HuffPo, they get tens of millions of views.
Comedy videos that are woke get tens of millions of views.
So do I think this is a massive campaign that's going to push millions of people out of the Democratic Party?
Absolutely not.
However, it doesn't take that many people to swing an election.
And walkaway is a real phenomenon.
We've been seeing it for the past several years.
So even if a small amount of former Democrats move to supporting Republicans and Donald Trump, it is likely that will be enough to push Republicans over the edge to win in November.
But I'm not a pollster.
I'm not a political analyst in that regard, so don't take my word for it.
All that's just my opinion.
The only thing I can really say is that WalkAway is real.
It's been happening for years.
However, there are bots and there are sockpuppets within the hashtag campaign.
So be careful.
Because if you're on the left, you might actually be seeing people pull away from the Dems, and this could spell trouble for you in November.
And for those on the right, you might be building up a false sense of security.
And if this is a bot campaign or a sockpuppet-pushed campaign, you might not have the support you think you need.
Everyone's gotta be careful when it comes to politics these days because you never know what is real and what is a manipulation.
But let me know what you think in the comments below, and we'll keep the conversation going.
Admittedly, I know a ton of people who have walked away.
I see comments from you guys on my YouTube channel every day talking about how you were a leftist, a centrist, lifelong Democrat, and moved over to the Republican Party.
And I've talked about this over the past several days.
Hence, the throughline I'm doing, right?
This is kind of the news cycle of the week.
Rhetoric from the left, in my opinion, is resulting in the platform in which leftists can stand on shrinking.
And as that platform gets smaller, moderate leftists and liberals don't have a place to be.
And then there is another party with open arms, the Republican Party.
So, again, comment below, let me hear your thoughts on the matter, we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned, new videos every day at 4pm, and if you made it this far, Every day at six, I'm going to have bonus videos that are much more simpler, much less researched, but a bit more fun on my second channel at youtube.com slash timcastnews.
