[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).

Gremlin wrote:

A shift in the discussion I've noticed after the recent synagogue attack: people who are familiar with the internet hate groups are pointing out that an awful lot of these "lone wolves" are posting their attacks to 8chan and getting egged on. And that law enforcement taking a closer look at the site would likely get them swiftly shuttered if the FBI was diligent about it.

Well thankfully, i'm sure there's some good news on that front....

America Under Attack by White Supremacists Acting Like ISIS

The alleged killer at a Southern California synagogue this weekend worked alone, according to law enforcement, but behind him is a sprawling, digital network of white supremacists spurring each other on to murder.

Moments before allegedly opening fire at worshippers in Chabad of Poway on Saturday, white supremacist John Earnest previewed his plans on 8chan, just as his supposed inspiration did. Last month, a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand used 8chan to share a link to a livestream of him killing 50 Muslims at a mosque. In between the attacks, the anonymous forum with a large fascist presence called for people to carry out more shootings. The calls for violence also spread across fringe platforms like Gab, and messaging apps like Telegram. It’s reminiscent of calls online for followers of ISIS and al Qaeda to strike out at the enemy, counter-terrorism experts said.

After the New Zealand shooting, 8chan users decorated the alleged killer as a “saint” and encouraged each other to commit shootings of their own, including against synagogues, to prepare for the “third world war” against Jews, or to kill a journalist critical of the forum.

“As a lot of people have noted over the past few days, 8chan is an awful cesspool of encouraging violence and hatred,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor focusing on online extremism at the University of Albany. “That hate and encouragement of violence might be a sort of baseline, background noise, but periodically someone moves from participating in this online awfulness to committing offline actions.”

Those real-life actions appear to have spiked over the past six months, with at least three white supremacists announcing attack plans on 8chan or Gab, before opening fire at Jewish or Muslim houses of worship. Three such attacks—at a Pittsburgh synagogue, a Christchurch mosque, and at the Poway synagogue—have killed a combined 62 people in the past six months.

That background noise can act as a war drum for violence. White supremacist communities often use memes to normalize extreme violence. Almost immediately after the San Diego shooter warned of his attack on 8chan, forum-goers treated the mass-shooting like a game.

The first response to his 8chan post urged him to “get the high score,” investigative outlet Bellingcat noted. (When only one person, 60-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye, was murdered, some 8chan users lamented the attack’s “low score.”)

The online-inspired terror, and its instant repackaging as propaganda, was pioneered by ISIS and al Qaeda. And unlike Islamic extremism, white supremacist terror appears to hold a place of middling concern in the Trump administration.

It's an immensely depressing thought, but I remember some interviews with journos who track the far-right in the immediate aftermath of Unite the Right and the "collapse"* of the Alt-Right pointing out, quite reasonably, that we are just in the foothills of how sh*tty this is likely to get.

* - "Collapse" is in quotes here, because quite a few formerly Alt-Right talking points and theories are increasingly mainstream.

From ruhk's story wrote:

There is likely to be another shooter, another manifesto, and more cheering anons.

*deep, deep, deep sigh*

Yup.

Facebook bid adieu to Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, InfoWars and Milo Yiannopoulos today. As someone I saw Tweeted today, the tech companies are realizing that they're basically ABC, CBS, NBC now, whether they like it or not.

EDIT: Important note, Facebook also means Instagram, where InfoWars specifically had quite successfully migrated after getting punted off of YouTube.

Oh, and FYI, the next 8channer who shoots up a synagogue/church/wherever, you can absolutely guarantee that the usual suspects will argue that he was radicalized/did it because "ordinary conservatives" have been deplatformed from social media.

Prederick wrote:

Facebook bid adieu to Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, InfoWars and Milo Yiannopoulos today. As someone I saw Tweeted today, the tech companies are realizing that they're basically ABC, CBS, NBC now, whether they like it or not.

EDIT: Important note, Facebook also means Instagram, where InfoWars specifically had quite successfully migrated after getting punted off of YouTube.

And nothing of value was lost.

BUT MUH FREEZE PEACH!

As a sidenote, as much of the online right appears to be congealing around a "they could do anyone" backlash, I am made to think of a great Buzzfeed article that's been doing the rounds about a former well-known figure in the Alt-Right.

In the spring of 2011, Katie McHugh was a student at Allegheny College. She grew up in western Pennsylvania and was attending the region’s oldest private college but wanted to make it to Washington and join the conservative movement. She was a quiet young woman who hadn’t ventured very far from where she’d grown up. Her reading had taken her to some unusual places, however, for a young person.

She’d become a devotee of Joe Sobran, the late Catholic columnist who was fired from National Review after falling out with William F. Buckley and whose writings deeply influenced the paleoconservative movement, which emphasizes nationalism and noninterventionism. Over the course of his career, Sobran’s writing on Israel and Jews became extreme, and he associated with Holocaust deniers and questioned Holocaust history. McHugh had liked Ron Paul, for whom she was slightly too young to vote in 2008, so a friend at church had told her to read Sobran’s “The Reluctant Anarchist.” In the piece, written in 2002, Sobran describes how he moved away from the ideology of mainstream conservatism and toward becoming a “philosophical anarchist.” Sobran opposed the concept of the state as a unifying force of government; he opposed the very idea of so-called constitutional government. The argument made sense to the budding young libertarian in Pennsylvania. “That was my step into the right,” she said. “I think I’ve read every single thing Sobran’s ever written.” Sobran’s death was also her introduction to even further-right media; when he died in 2010, her online search for obituaries led her to the VDare and American Renaissance websites, she said.

By the time she arrived at Allegheny, things were changing on the right. The victory of the first black president — an unapologetic liberal with roots in the community organizing so hated by conservatives — had catalyzed a shift on the right toward conspiracy theories, a penchant for victimhood, and an increasing emphasis on winning at all costs. On Allegheny’s small 2,000-student campus, McHugh said, “I made it more difficult on myself by being a raging conservative.”

She felt herself on the wrong side of a class divide. Allegheny’s students seemed wealthy; she wasn’t. She couldn’t join a sorority because she couldn’t afford the dues, she said. Her sense of outsiderness gave her a bold pen, and she was already going to extremes. She published reactionary opinion pieces for the campus newspaper, such as one arguing that the “homosexual movement, a liberal sub–faction, proliferates like melanoma.” “I could have tempered my message, things like that,” she told me. But she didn’t.

In 2011 she applied for an internship with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), a nonprofit connected to George Mason University that promotes “classical liberalism” and libertarianism on college campuses and grants fellowships to students.

“I reviewed your application,” wrote John Elliott, the IHS journalism internship program’s director at the time, in an email to her in February of that year. “You are the first applicant to ever list Joe Sobran as an influence. Joe was a friend. He had the same influence on me. I was delighted to find a young journalist who has profited from his work.”

Elliott wrote that he had moved her to the second round and that they would arrange a phone interview. He also offered some advice: “Reporting on student council meetings or power outages may not be as ‘fun’ as a column. But it will teach you the skills to find a job in journalism and eventually write the columns.” Elliott placed McHugh in an internship at the Daily Caller. It was under this aegis that McHugh went to Washington as a cub reporter for the first time.

“John essentially selected me to come to DC as part of the libertarian–alt-right pipeline,” McHugh said of Elliott.

“I chose Katie to mentor as a libertarian, not as a member of the ‘alt-right,’” Elliott said in an email. “The ‘alt-right’ didn’t exist in 2011, and I’ve had no connection with the ‘alt-right’ since it was invented. I tried to be a mentor and a friend to Katie for a decade, even as she went down some of the dark paths of those fringe groups. But her decision to go down those paths had nothing to do with me. I truly feel bad for her.”

Basically, among other things, the article and McHugh show how cozy much of the conservative establishment was or was willing to be at the time with some.... let's go with controversial figures with controversial views. And as I see the defenses of Laura Loomer and Alex Jones' protege Paul Joseph Watson as "normal conservatives" it seems... a little on the nose.

How the news took over reality: Is engagement with current affairs key to being a good citizen? Or could an endless torrent of notifications be harming democracy as well as our wellbeing?

The afternoon of Friday 13 November 2015 was a chilly one in Manhattan, but that only made the atmosphere inside the Old Town Bar, one of the city’s oldest drinking haunts, even cosier than usual. “It’s unpretentious, very warm, a nurturing environment – I regard it with a lot of fondness,” said Adam Greenfield, who was meeting a friend that day over beers and french fries in one of the bar’s wooden booths. “It’s the kind of place you lay down tracks of custom over time.” Greenfield is an expert in urban design, and liable to get more philosophical than most people on subjects such as the appeal of cosy bars. But anyone who has visited the Old Town Bar, or any friendly pub in a busy city, knows what he and his friend were experiencing: restoration, replenishment, repair. “And then our phones started to vibrate.”

In Paris, Islamist terrorists had launched a series of coordinated shootings and suicide bombings that would kill 130 people, including 90 attending a concert at the Bataclan theatre. As Greenfield reached for his phone in New York, he recalls, everyone else did the same, and “you could feel the temperature in the room immediately dropping”. Devices throughout the bar buzzed with news alerts from media organisations, as well as notifications from Facebook Safety Check, a new service that used geolocation to identify users in the general vicinity of the Paris attacks, inviting them to inform their friend networks that they were OK. Suddenly, it was as if the walls of the Old Town Bar had become porous – “like a colander, with this high-pressure medium of the outside world spurting through every aperture at once.”

It wasn’t the first time that Greenfield, a former designer for Nokia, had guiltily worried that mobile phones might be making our lives more miserable. But the jarring contrast between the intimacy of the bar and the news from Paris highlighted how vulnerable such spaces, and the nourishment they provided, had become. Suddenly, the news was sucking up virtually the whole supply of attention in the room. It didn’t discriminate based on whether people had friends and family in Paris, or whether they might be in a position to do anything to help. It just forced its way in, displacing the immediate reality of the bar, asserting itself as the part of reality that really mattered.

If we rarely notice how strange such interruptions are, it is because for many of us these days, this situation is normal. We marinate in the news. We may be familiar with the headlines before we have exchanged a word with another human in the morning; we kill time on the bus or in queues by checking Twitter, only to find ourselves plunged into the dramas of presidential politics or humanitarian emergencies. By one estimate, 70% of us take our news-delivery devices to bed with us at night.

In recent years, there has been enormous concern about the time we spend on our web-connected devices and what that might be doing to our brains. But a related psychological shift has gone largely unremarked: the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces. It’s not simply that we spend too many hours glued to screens. It’s that for some of us, at least, they have altered our way of being in the world such that the news is no longer one aspect of the backdrop to our lives, but the main drama. The way that journalists and television producers have always experienced the news is now the way millions of others experience it, too.

From a British or American standpoint, the overwhelmingly dominant features of this changed mental landscape are Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump. But the sheer outrageousness of them both risks blinding us to how strange and recent a phenomenon it is for the news – any news – to assume such a central position in people’s daily lives. In a now familiar refrain, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof bemoans his social circle’s “addiction to Trump” – “at cocktail parties, on cable television, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, all we talk about these days is Trump.” But Trump’s eclipse of all other news is not the only precondition for this addiction. The other is the eclipse of the rest of life by the dramas of the news.

It’s easy to assume that the reason you spend so much time thinking about the news is simply that the news is so crazy right now. Yet the news has often been crazy. What it hasn’t been is ubiquitous: from its earliest beginnings, until a few decades ago, almost by definition, the news was a dispatch from elsewhere, a world you visited briefly before returning to your own. For centuries, it was accessible only to a small elite; even in the era of mass media, news rarely occupied more than an hour a day of an educated citizen’s attention.

As someone without a smartphone who has to sit down at a desktop computer or turn on a tv to get news, I don't think that's the problem.

The problem is, well, we're in the endgame now.

It's not just that the news is crazy, it's that there was no bounce back from the Great Recession to give us a sense of hope that better days are going to come around again to offer something new. Pop Culture Died in 2009. Throughout human history progress has meant bigger and more varied marketplaces in the physical world, until now: there's not even a reason to go out and explore your local region.

Sure, there's an 'artisinal' thing happening, but, how many people can really afford that? Either money or time, or both?

I think we're obsessed with the news because it's the only thing that matters anymore, the only thing that meaningfully changes anymore. If the future holds something good, it's probably going to be a long, hard slog that'll involve the government. No wonder we can't look away from the news.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

As someone without a smartphone who has to sit down at a desktop computer or turn on a tv to get news, I don't think that's the problem.

The problem is, well, we're in the endgame now.

It's not just that the news is crazy, it's that there was no bounce back from the Great Recession to give us a sense of hope that better days are going to come around again to offer something new. Pop Culture Died in 2009. Throughout human history progress has meant bigger and more varied marketplaces in the physical world, until now: there's not even a reason to go out and explore your local region.

Sure, there's an 'artisinal' thing happening, but, how many people can really afford that? Either money or time, or both?

I think we're obsessed with the news because it's the only thing that matters anymore, the only thing that meaningfully changes anymore. If the future holds something good, it's probably going to be a long, hard slog that'll involve the government. No wonder we can't look away from the news.

But there is still this:

IMAGE(https://howdogiraffeseattheirfood.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/what-do-giraffes-eat-2.png)

And this:

IMAGE(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sZwu_IIsWEc/XBbQ1yTL4iI/AAAAAAAAuBU/UCQVilhhuCwMj-OmckD81ERz87IB2DuagCLcBGAs/s1600/Photographer%2BCaptured%2BSquirrels%2BEvery%2BDay%2BFor%2BSix%2BYears%2BAnd%2BHere%2BAre%2BThe%2BIncredible%2BResults%2B2.jpg)

edit: AHHHH I don't want to make the association between those pictures and something sad for anyone else so hopefully no one read this comment yet!

I read it and it made me happy!

Yeah I already liked it. Mitt Romney killed Toys R Us.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

edit: AHHHH I don't want to make the association between those pictures and something sad for anyone else so hopefully no one read this comment yet!

I was going to ask what you said originally and then I saw your profile picture and settled back into my usual routine of "laughing with a mixture of pleasure and terror".

When it becomes too much for me, I just unplug from national and international current affairs. I switch to only paying attention to things the internet feeds me that will lift my spirits.

Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember when news wasn't something that demanded your attention 24/7.

Smartphones are like any other technological tool in that we can use them for good or ill. Notifications can be disabled. There is no requirement to subject yourself to Facebook or Twitter or any 24 hour news service that wants to shove every headline in your face. They are not motivated by your interests. They only care about engagement, which they can sell to their real customers.

When it comes to consuming news, the old warning is more applicable than ever: caveat emptor.

Prederick wrote:

Facebook bid adieu to Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, InfoWars and Milo Yiannopoulos today. As someone I saw Tweeted today, the tech companies are realizing that they're basically ABC, CBS, NBC now, whether they like it or not.

EDIT: Important note, Facebook also means Instagram, where InfoWars specifically had quite successfully migrated after getting punted off of YouTube.

Welp, this made it to the President's desk. I think Alex Jones may still be a step too far, but you can bet PJW and James Woods will be getting the fawning carwash treatment on FOX News within a week. (Possibly Laura Loomer as well, but she and Jones might be a step too far.)

I should note, in the President's tweets, he refers to PJW as a "conservative thinker" and a lot of people are going "is this what you want to call a conservative thinker?", which is dumb, because yes, PJW and the InfoWars crew are absolutely influential conservative thinkers these days. (That and, obviously, the President will vocally back basically anyone who backs him.)

EDIT: "Platform Access is a Civil Right" is the title of an article PJW just RT'd.

Regulation is coming for the tech companies, this much is clear. Who is doing the regulation is will be all that matters.

"Platform Access is a Civil Right"

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/6p38bC5.jpg)

Also, he could have reasonably covered his ass a little bit if he (and other conservatives) had made sure to always positively mention Louis Farrakhan, who also caught the banhammer. It'd have complicated the discussion a little, at least (although considering they spent half of yesterday insisting that he's not Right-wing, I can understand why they're not mentioning him).

Anyway, Tucker Carlson is treating InfoWars like it's no different than any other media company tonight and everything remains dumb.

There is a genuine conversation to be had here, but obviously, we're not getting it.

EDIT: There is a non-zero chance that Trump tweets "I AM Q!" before the 2020 election. Just prepare yourselves now.

Facebook should just announce they actually banned those people because of their haircuts - which they are also well within their rights to do.

Prederick wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

edit: AHHHH I don't want to make the association between those pictures and something sad for anyone else so hopefully no one read this comment yet!

I was going to ask what you said originally and then I saw your profile picture and settled back into my usual routine of "laughing with a mixture of pleasure and terror".

#BigDemocratEnergy

Prederick wrote:

Regulation is coming for the tech companies, this much is clear. Who is doing the regulation is will be all that matters.

Facebook made $22 billion in *profit* last year. They will flood DC with lobbyists and campaign donations to make absolutely sure that any regulation lawmakers might cook up won't impact their operations or their bottom line in the least.

They could literally foot the campaign bill for the President, every member of Congress, and all their challengers in 2020 and still turn a $16 billion profit.

And thanks to Citizens United, combined with zero restrictions on dark money, they can do just that, and we'll never know!

I mean, for all we know they already did that and that's why their profit wasn't $28 billion.

Prederick wrote:

EDIT: There is a non-zero chance that Trump tweets "I AM Q!" before the 2020 election. Just prepare yourselves now.

He retweeeted a QAnon account today already, so we're getting closer!

Jesus, that was a roller coaster that I was not prepared for.
It does give me a lot of hope for handling my own kids

Yeah a bit terrifying as a parent.

Powerful. Thanks for linking.

I wonder how many kids fall into the same trap that snared "Sam," and who don't get out until years later, if ever. Pretty much every teenager has some kind of negative event happen to them, beyond their control to solve, that might be exploited to get them to join some online cult of alienation.

It's kind of a through-line for reactionary groups across the globe though, they all target disaffected young men.

BadKen wrote:

I wonder how many kids fall into the same trap that snared "Sam," and who don't get out until years later, if ever. Pretty much every teenager has some kind of negative event happen to them, beyond their control to solve, that might be exploited to get them to join some online cult of alienation.

I'm old enough to predate YouTube but young enough that when I fell into deep depression as a teenager that there were online cults of alienation there to pick up the pieces. Thankfully, I didn't fall into the orbit of neo-Nazis and white supremacists (I found other awful groups), but some of my peers and even family members did, and I don't know that all of them made it back out again. That was a couple decades ago, and the sales pitch is even more potent and more pervasive. We had pro-Hitler Doom mods, pro-fascist Warhammer 40K groups, manifestos, and white pride chat rooms; we didn't have YouTube videos ostensibly about depression and self-actualization with a poison pill of bigotry inside.