[Discussion] The Inconceivable Power of Trolls in Social Media

This is a follow-on to the nearly two year old topic "Trouble at the Kool-Aid Point." The intention is to provide a place to discuss the unreasonable power social media trolls have over women and minorities, with a primary focus on video games (though other examples are certainly welcome).

ugh

Oh yeah some people are using Boogie to attack her. Saying she is bad for picking on Boogie. In the video he says it was just misunderstanding being blown up by Anita haters.

I'm still really confused why Anita is such a lightning rod of hate for the alt-right. Is it because she's a female?

To be fair, I was also (and still am) confused about GamerGate. Their whole... purpose... made no sense. Let's get angry at journalism!

You'll need to look at Return of Kings and similar sites to really understand. It's based on some fairly hardcore sexism and racism. Like, really hardcore sexism and racism. If you're coming from the POV that women are subhuman and should only be used for sex and procreation, Gamergate makes a lot more sense.

LarryC wrote:

If you're coming from the POV that women are subhuman and should only be used for sex and procreation, Gamergate makes a lot more sense.

This. There's a lot of psychology to untangle, but it basically boils down to this.

Anita, specifically, is, I think, because she's one of the few names they know because she put herself out there earlier. They have a few talking points they've repeated for years in their echo chamber, she features in some of them. The guy who showed up to intimidate her with a dozens of his friends literally makes his living by ranting on YouTube about her and similar things.

Of course, a lot of other women are also getting regularly attacked. They just don't have as large a platform to defend themselves, so you don't hear about it unless you know them.

I'm still really confused why Anita is such a lightning rod of hate for the alt-right.

She's a strong, independent woman who suggests their hobby should change in ways they're not comfortable with.

(EDIT: Wrong! Removed.)

The weird part about Sargon of Akkad is that he's playing the victim card while apparently criticizing Anita for supposedly playing the victim card. This irony is not visible when you're seated within Gamergate and similar sexist points of view.

Sarkeesian is also attractive, so by preempting their sh*t she dares render herself inaccessible. Just see any pua response to rejection.

And she's a minority with origins in the middle East.

She's basically lab grown to trigger their bigotry and self hatred.

LarryC wrote:

The weird part about Sargon of Akkad is that he's playing the victim card while apparently criticizing Anita for supposedly playing the victim card. This irony is not visible when you're seated within Gamergate and similar sexist points of view.

What's hilarious and bizarre is that even Thunderfoot was apparently calling him out on the childishly stupid way he's behaving. (of course, he paints it as if Sargon is behaving just like the "like sjw snowflakes" he's supposed to be fighting, naturally)

LarryC wrote:

The weird part about Sargon of Akkad is that he's playing the victim card while apparently criticizing Anita for supposedly playing the victim card. This irony is not visible when you're seated within Gamergate and similar sexist points of view.

It's not that weird; hypocrisy and immunity to irony are staples of the "anti-SJW" crowd. They do all the things they criticize "SJWs" for doing.

Publicized moral outrage? Check.
Identity politics? They pretend "white male" isn't an identity when it clearly is.
Playing the victim? Any chance they get.

And so on.

IIRC, Anita is Armenian and Christian, not Jewish, despite the virulent antisemitic tropes thrown her way on a regular basis.

Tanglebones wrote:

IIRC, Anita is Armenian and Christian, not Jewish, despite the virulent antisemitic tropes thrown her way on a regular basis.

Oops, I stand corrected!

Warning: Contains quotes of the messages Anita Sarkeesian gets:

That is awesome.

The fine print: those quotes are from just a single week. Holy. sh*t.

wtf is wrong with humans!

"I shared my toddler's hospital bill on Twitter. First came supporters — then death threats."

1) her twitter name is "Ali" - short for Alison - so some insisted she was an Islamic terrorist (she's actually a white mom from New Jersey)
2) she used the hashtag #TrumpCare, which of course was irresistible to the deplorables
3) she is a mother, so some blamed her for her son's congenital condition
4) she shared a photo of a hospital bill, so some called her a manipulative, money-grubbing ingrate
5) and of course, death threats

There is a silver lining. The tweet going viral meant that at least one mother whose child had similar symptoms, but no diagnosis, got the support and help she needed for her child. Other parents of children with heterotaxy contacted her and learned where they could find support groups. Being able to help others helped her ignore the vile responses.

Still, what the hell?

What the hell indeed.

Two stories:
IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DELSOloXkAAGS0y.jpg)

Katherine Cross:
The Anti-CNN Harassment Campaign Is Using the GamerGate Playbook
This time the target isn’t video game reviewers. It’s families of reporters. And many of the same characters from the first time are back for Round 2.

For Twitter users, the #CNNBlackmail flap has been hard to miss. Angry Trump supporters, furious that the network “forced” the originator of the Trump-wrestling-CNN GIF to apologize even though it didn’t, fixated on a single line in the story posted to CNN’s KFILE: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should [his remorsefulness] change.” Cue the angry mobs that targeted not just the reporter of the story with death threats, but his wife and parents.

But for me, this all looked depressingly familiar. A mostly far-right swarm of Twitter users caterwauling about free speech, memes, and ethics in journalism? We’ve been here before.

Many of the same tactics and major players that made names for themselves in GamerGate—from Mike Cernovich to Weev—are being used to push a wide-scale harassment campaign against CNN.

Entahtahlment is as entahtahlment does.

There's something about human psychology that goes wrong in large groups.

It isn't just because of the internet. (See: lynch mobs, the Tulsa massacre, pogroms, and countless other examples of in-groups persecuting out-groups.) But the internet has sure made it more visible. And made it more convenient to invent details that justify our actions: someone is "just a kid" if they are attacking them, but if we're mocking someone no one stops to wonder if they're an 8-year-old.

(I say us and them because the deadly in-group/out-group treatment is a human thing. But that's not a both-sides thing. Or an excuse: I think it's unacceptable. I just believe acknowledging my potential failing is the first step in overcoming it. I ran across this twitter thread recently, which I think speaks to how I'd prefer people dealt with the cognitive dissonance: as an emotional sign for a learning experience, not as a reason to lash out.)

And so we've ended up in a place where literal Nazis with swastika tattoos attacking people on the internet and using "you call anyone you disagree with a Nazi" as a defense when someone points out their anti-Semitism.

I Found HanAssholeSolo’s anti-Semitic Posts. Then, the Death Threats Started.
This is what it’s like to report on extremism in the Trump era.

It took only a few minutes to figure out that HanAssholeSolo, the person behind President Donald Trump’s most retweeted tweet, had also used racial slurs and posted derogatory comments about Muslims. Then, there was the one that caused all the problems: a thread titled “Something Strange About CNN…can’t quite put my finger on it…,” with a graphic of dozens of the network’s talents with tiny blue Stars of David.

Shared more than 300,000 times, and the subject of debate over whether it inspired violence against the media, HanAssholeSolo’s animated GIF reengineered Trump’s 2007 WrestleMania appearance into a living, breathing political cartoon in which the ostensible leader of the free world clotheslined a man with the CNN logo for a face and then proceeded to beat him with his fists. Allies argued it was a joke and all in good fun, but the post I uncovered painted it in a new, more sinister, light.

My reporting on the Stars of David meme quickly went viral. At this moment it’s been shared more than 14,000 times by the likes of CNN’s own Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who’s had his own run-ins with the president as of late. In the past, when a post or story of mine has garnered that much attention, I’ve always dealt with the inevitable criticism and harassment that follows. Sure enough, it wasn’t far behind.

Before the hour was up, I was receiving messages from the usual customers: anonymous accounts with Pepe avatars and bios declaring themselves “ethnonationalists” and “white identitarians.” Despite my Southern Baptist upbringing, they assumed I was Jewish because I’d uncovered anti-Semitism, and so the threats and memes predictably featured pictures of Adolf Hitler, scenes from the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic garbage. I was peppered with the usual slurs and insults before a user calling his or herself “Pepe’s Imam” told me: “There’s a civil war coming, leftist. Memes are the least of your problems.”

I hope this goes here. Maybe it deserves it's own thread. We'll see.

Can someone explain Jordan Peterson and his following to me?

I was on YouTube today happily looking at trending videos when I saw this video.

I scrolled down to the comments and saw two comments that confused me.

Post-modernism a.k.a. the death of Western Civilization, the greatest plague to humanity, a disgusting ideology which must be fought on all fronts. It's a hemlock which must go undrunken, my friends.

Followed by.

Let's clean our rooms.
Agreed

I found this so confusing, that specific phrase and the acknowledgment of it that I went to Google and literally searched for "Clean Your Rooms" and eventually found my way to this.

I watched a couple more of these and a couple of things struck me.

First off, some of what he says makes complete sense to me. Kind of like negative Buddhism. See the world for what it is and then at all costs do something about it. When my mom passed away this year it focused my mind like nothing I'd ever experienced. I don't have children. Maybe this is something parents go through, I've thought that before. But faced with the immediate crisis of my disabled father being alone and knowing that I had to do something to keep my family safe through this crisis, my mind fixated on doing the most important things, the best things.

I've lapsed some since then (mostly being sucked into politics), but my focus has been pretty good still. And I feel like this was a really good thing for me. It piggybacks on a health crisis that also focused me fairly strongly on what mattered. Either way there's something there.

In this period of crisis my wife and I got settled into Portland, we saved enough money for a down payment on a house in 3 months, and we cut our budget down by 50%. We both learned how to cook 4 or 5 new dishes, our diets changed a lot and our day to day habits have gotten better and better. We're on a 2 year self-improvement bender that got supercharged by the last 6 months. A strange side effect of dealing something terrible, I suppose.

So what Peterson is saying in some of his videos, about focusing on what's important, discarding other things, not wasting time, etc. feels true. I've lived it recently. And yet, there's something off here. Something about the way he talks and about the way he hectors Marxism and universities that rubbed me the wrong way. It caused me to to dig deeper. Once again, I've literally never heard of this person until today.

So I dug deeper. I dug deeper and I found out about the controversy over trans pronouns, something I probably read in the Transgender thread, but just didn't connect because I didn't know who he was. I read his wikipedia page and some other stuff and now I'm genuinely curious about something.

It feels like there's a connection here between the Gamergate, MRAs, the alt-right, etc. Just some of the terms that keep popping up, I've seen them before. The way people word things in comments. A few stray Pepes here and there. Now I'm genuinely wondering if there's some philosophy I've been completely unaware of bubbling under the culture.

Maybe it's as simple as he's against so-called "political correctness". Maybe it's as simple as him being adopted as a hero by people that have cross-cutting interests against liberals, feminism, etc. I just want to know more what the hell is happening here and if my read on it is correct.

What about focusing on taking care of yourself (something, once again, that speaks to me) also speaks to the denizens of 4chan? Am I making a connection that's not there?

DSGamer wrote:

Maybe it's as simple as he's against so-called "political correctness".

Jordan Peterson has been making waves here in Canada as a vocal opponent of bill C-16, which would add gender identity protection to the Human Rights Act and the criminal code. Many others have a far greater and more nuanced understanding of the issue and his criticisms than I, but to me his position seems to boil down to Freeze Peach—I wanna say what I want so don't make me feel bad for acting like an asshole. The mantra of all those who cry "political correctness!"

As for his following, since he's an academic, I don't doubt he's attracted a certain audience looking for a new show of legitimacy.

I don't have time to dig super-deep into it right now, so this won't be much about Jordan Peterson per se. Though glancing at the web, it appears S--- of A---- cited him at least once.

And I've stopped taking people seriously when they see the ghost of postmodernism looming behind everything. But that's another discussion.

That said, I offer the following:

The pick-up-artist corner of the MRA/man-blogs/whatever overlaps with self-help. A lot. Young men are attracted to it because they feel inadequate because they aren't having sex with women. The PUA gurus tell them that the reason they don't have success with women is because they're weak and not real men. The offered fix is a combination of the "red pill" thinking and performing masculinity. According to whatever definition of masculinity appeals to the guru/blogger/YouTube yeller.

Some of this stuff is helpful, or at least not harmful: Working out, being more confident and assertive, taking action. Some of it is...less healthy, like practicing behaving like a sociopath so that no women will have a hold on you. On the pick-up-artist side, even the positive things are often entirely framed around becoming someone who has sex with women, of being alpha.1

For an older reference, Tyler Durden in Fight Club was popular. Of course, he was supposed to be a negative example, a self-undermining version of trying to perform masculinity that ate itself. But, then, those are also the people who borrowed their "red pill" terminology from the Matrix.2

So self-improvement has often been a part of the reactionary-masculinity-performance-whatever-we're-calling-it. Not always the most effective self-improvement: there's plenty of snake-oil peddlers who suddenly discovered a new market.

As for philosophy...again, I don't know where Peterson falls into this. But there are several strands of neoreactionary thought that have been taken up by the Internet Hate GroupsTM. Including the people who want to establish a feudalistic monarchy. And the people pushing racist pseudo-science.

Footnotes:

Spoiler:

1. Often, what this really means is becoming a man who is able to rape women: shaky notions of consent and insecurely aping a performance of masculinity lead to bad things.

Then there are a lot of men, particularly young men, who either haven't had sex or don't have sex,3 and who are afraid that there's something wrong with them.

2. There's a reading of the Matrix I came across recently, that frames it in terms of a transsexual self-discovery story. Which puts an interesting light on the film.

3. Possibly because of the somewhat misleading use of the mean value, young adults are having less sex than you might think. 53% of male teenagers have never experienced sexual intercourse. In 2002, of men 15-44 who never married and weren't cohabiting, only 69% of them had ever had intercourse. (And 10% of 44 year old never-married men hadn't. ) Which makes stats like Japan having, "43 per cent of people aged 18 to 34 from the island nation say they are virgins" less surprising...though I still want a better source than "a poll".

My point being that there is a sizeable number of young men who have the expectation that they're supposed to have had sex already, and are afraid that they're broken because they haven't. And the internet gives the bitter divorced men a forum to tell them that the real problem is the women.

Young women, of course, get similar messages, with the added mythology about virginity and femininity tacked on, so it's not like they have it any easier...

It's sophisticated bigotry. The best lies come with a grain of truth. Same here. They prop it up some because they're smart people, but the core of it that remains unexamined is profound sociopathy. It is okay to treat women as chattel. Because.

There's a lot of that I can get behind. I experienced that frustration as a young man. I had that desire burning in me for acceptance. For validation. For sex. It is overpowering and overwhelming. Like riding a bike downhill without brakes. You hold on and hope you don't crash too badly. But somewhere along that journey, I found purchase and direction, and now I can avoid causing other people to spill.

These PUAs/MRA/MGTOWs harness the worst parts of both feminist and patriarchy movements and hijack male victims of both ideologies to form their core. To some extent they do also rebel against the patriarchy, but only so they can establish their own version of it.

I like the self-help. I like the thrust for independence. I like exhortations to improve and the positive encouragement. I like men saying they shouldn't need the approval of women to feel good about themselves. I draw the line at using people. That's bad. I draw the line at seeing other people as objects. That's bad.

2. There's a reading of the Matrix I came across recently, that frames it in terms of a transsexual self-discovery story. Which puts an interesting light on the film.

MovieBob covered this pretty decently at a high level with his recent Really That Good about the Matrix, including some cited sources that go into a lot more depth.

But, again, Red Pill... in a movie series where it turns out taking the red pill makes you just as much a part of the system as anyone else with a controlled rebellion that is expected and accounted for just like all the blue pill folks.

Like, I get that not everyone likes the other two movies, I'd definitely argue they're not nearly as good as the first, but... yeaaaaaaaaah, as boring as the Architect scene can be for some, it kind of flips the whole human rebellion thing flat on its ass and destroys the metaphor within the narrative...

Gremlin wrote:

And I've stopped taking people seriously when they see the ghost of postmodernism looming behind everything. But that's another discussion.

One that is worth having. As a student of philosophy of science and related topics - thinking that relates directly to how we understand the world in a very real way - it's my opinion that Postmodernism has diverted far too much brainpower into actively working to tear down the way we know the world and share it with each other. And social movements that look to turn people away from egalitarianism and opportunity to exclusion and servitude make use of it to disrupt, disturb and ultimately work to destroy the underpinnings of a cooperative world, by removing the idea that we can know anything at all about the world and the way it works. They replace that with their own internally derived worldviews which are crucially disconnected from the consensual understanding in ways that benefit them where they wish it to.

It's hard to underestimate the damage of this ultimately anti-intellectual breed of intellectualism over the last 60 years or so. And I firmly believe that the "skepticism" and nihilism and self-centeredness of the modern PUA or Men's Rights Activist or "Climate skeptic" or "State's Rights" advocate or modern "screw you, I got mine" fake libertarian (and many other movements) owe a great deal to the justification of subjectivity over objectivity that comes with Postmodernism as a cultural influence.

Robear wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

And I've stopped taking people seriously when they see the ghost of postmodernism looming behind everything. But that's another discussion.

One that is worth having. As a student of philosophy of science and related topics - thinking that relates directly to how we understand the world in a very real way - it's my opinion that Postmodernism has diverted far too much brainpower into actively working to tear down the way we know the world and share it with each other. And social movements that look to turn people away from egalitarianism and opportunity to exclusion and servitude make use of it to disrupt, disturb and ultimately work to destroy the underpinnings of a cooperative world, by removing the idea that we can know anything at all about the world and the way it works. They replace that with their own internally derived worldviews which are crucially disconnected from the consensual understanding in ways that benefit them where they wish it to.

It's hard to underestimate the damage of this ultimately anti-intellectual breed of intellectualism over the last 60 years or so. And I firmly believe that the "skepticism" and nihilism and self-centeredness of the modern PUA or Men's Rights Activist or "Climate skeptic" or "State's Rights" advocate or modern "screw you, I got mine" fake libertarian (and many other movements) owe a great deal to the justification of subjectivity over objectivity that comes with Postmodernism as a cultural influence.

I actually don't think it did any damage. People just live in their own Goldilocks zone, and handwave away any inconvenient truths as either subjective when not intellectual enough, or semantics when too intellectual. Libertarianism was always fake. Every -ism was always fake.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the argument and used to make it myself, but the more I look at how people really deal with having their beliefs challenged, the less work I think "objectivity" and "intellectualism" ever did to influence anyone. The reason we see anti-intellectualism is because it's clear that one side in the culture wars is right, and the other side is wrong. One side sees that there's no way they can defend their ideas while being intellectually honest so they've given up on it, and the other side sees further beating of their opponent's intellectual dead horse as a waste of precious resources that could be put to better use.

Robear wrote:

It's hard to underestimate the damage of this ultimately anti-intellectual breed of intellectualism over the last 60 years or so. And I firmly believe that the "skepticism" and nihilism and self-centeredness of the modern PUA or Men's Rights Activist or "Climate skeptic" or "State's Rights" advocate or modern "screw you, I got mine" fake libertarian (and many other movements) owe a great deal to the justification of subjectivity over objectivity that comes with Postmodernism as a cultural influence.

See, the funny thing is that they believe that you're the postmodernist and they're the hard-headed, objective intellectuals.

Part of this is not really knowing what postmodernism is. Part of this is various (mostly right-wing) fringe thinkers using postmodernism as a shorthand for "people no longer unquestioningly believe the thing I think they should," without actually grappling with either modernism or postmodernism. There's a Cold War fear of Marxism. Religious fears about loss of objective truth figure into it, too. Actual postmodernism is only sometimes involved.

I will try to stand up a thread today.