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      Are we ready for social media influencers shaping politics? | Joshua Citarella

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      Gen Z is the most online generation in history. They also have increasingly radical political views that aren’t always reflected in traditional media. It’s no surprise that online influencers – who run highly popular social media channels – are dominating political discourse in Gen Z’s online spaces.Young people’s politics are being shaped by popular YouTubers, livestreamers, podcasters and other influencer personalities, who debate political positions and educate viewers on what political engagement looks like. As audiences grow and watch times increase, the question inevitably arises: will the influencers of the burgeoning alt-media sphere become a new type of political organizer?At first glance, this might seem comically absurd. But in the past year, most universities, institutions and political organizations have transformed into Zoom meetings. Today, the gap between a college education and a Twitch stream has significantly narrowed. If you don’t speak during an online chapter meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, can you really be sure you’re not listening to a podcast?There have been a number of recent events which further blur these distinctions. In January of 2021, Riley Grace Roshong, a Baltimore-based law student and YouTuber, livestreamed her testimony before the Maryland congress in support of House Bill 231, which would eliminate the “panic defense” laws, a legal strategy that allows defendants who attack or murder LGBTQ people to claim that the gender identity or sexual orientation of their victim caused them to enter into a gay or trans “panic”. Roshong researched and drafted her testimony in collaboration with key contributors from her community of followers during a Twitch stream. Roshong’s testimony was one in a chorus of local activists and organizations including FreeState Justice and the ACLU.Another high-water mark for influencers flexing their political muscle was the Georgia Senate runoff – a key race which would determine the outcome of the 2020 election, in particular whether Democrats would enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress. In December and January, Destiny, a professional gamer turned political commentator on Twitch, led one of the larger door-knocking campaigns of the election. Using his enormous fanbase and platform, the gamer managed to mobilize his followers to knock on an estimated 17,500-20,000 doors in Columbus, Georgia, with approximately 140 volunteers. By comparison, local groups like the Mijente Pac had 200 paid canvassers and the New Georgia Project was seeking 200-300 volunteers.These recent events seem to indicate something larger on the horizon. In each of these instances, influencers took a tiny bit of time out of their usual entertainment programming to make a few political asks before switching back to their regular content (influencers are in the business of making videos, after all). However, as online media encroach further into real-world politics, there is a mounting competitive pressure for content producers to get more politically involved. If you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk. It’s not enough to sit home and criticize.It’s worth mentioning that the Proud Boys were founded by the Vice co-founder, comedian and former YouTuber Gavin McInnes in 2016. The broadcasters Cenk Uygur, of The Young Turks, and Kyle Kulinski, of Secular Talk, are among the co-founders of Justice Democrats in 2017. Just a few years before, it was difficult to imagine that online personalities could help to shape offline organizations.Most troublingly, the terrain of social media seems to definitively advantage rightwing politics. While conspiracy and disinformation circulates across the whole of the political spectrum, the far right is uniquely able to manifest offline in the form of gangs or stochastic violence. On the extreme end of this trajectory we find Tim Gionet (AKA Baked Alaska) livestreaming and taking selfies from inside the Capitol riot on 6 January 6. The attention economy incentivizes new and dangerous levels of violent spectacle.It’s worth theorizing how these forces could be harnessed for something other than conspicuous political stunts. What we know for sure, is that large online audiences, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, do not translate to the ballot box. In 2016, the civil rights activist and Twitter influencer DeRay Mckesson finished a Baltimore mayoral run with only 2.6% of the vote. In 2019, the rightwing YouTubers Carl Benjamin (AKA Sarkon of Akkad) and Mark Meechan (AKA Count Dankula), both ran for MEP, winning just 3.2% in England’s south-west and 1.9% in Scotland, respectively. In 2020, the Gen Z trucker turned TikTok star Joshua Collins earned less than 1% of the vote in Washington’s 10th district. If election outcomes were purely a product of follower counts then political parties would just recruit Kendall Jenner.The key difference between mainstream celebrities and niche influencers, is the potential for social media to form hyper-specific and hyper-dedicated communities. Viewers feel a strong connection to the content creators they follow and to the communities they participate in. These audiences yield higher than average conversion rates when called upon to take action. Today there are no casual fans – everything is a cult following. In most cases, these political influencer channels are unearthed over the course of months (or years) of exploring. Social media are forming accidental “pipelines” to political education and it’s time to start thinking about what these pipelines lead to.Fandoms are beginning to resemble political affiliations. Crowdfunding approximates membership dues. At their core, organizations are a list of names and addresses. Swap out newsletters for episodic content but the actionable items remain largely the same: voting endorsements and invitations to canvas. On an annual basis, it costs more to support a podcast than to join the DSA.Social atomization and economic precarity are sending increasing numbers of people out on to the web in search of answersClearly, magazines did not replace political parties and social media channels won’t either. But it does create room for something like an Upton Sinclair of the digital age. In an era defined by elite corruption and institutional failure, listener-funded counter-hegemonic narrators are thriving. Young viewers trust alt-media figures like Contrapoints because she doesn’t seem to work for the elites. Critical voices can only be trusted when they aren’t attached to big donors. Bloomberg couldn’t buy a successful meme while Bernie supporters made thousands for free.Social atomization and economic precarity are sending increasing numbers of people out on to the web in search of answers. But in the post-political era, most organizations have withered or dissolved. Perhaps members of generation Z are flocking to online fandoms because of the lack of real-world organizations. Further compounding this, is the repellent quality of activist culture which is largely out of touch with the needs of most people. Meanwhile, online communities are fun and cool. Until organization becomes a normal aspect of everyday life, we should expect for online communities to grow at comparatively faster rates.So what might these new influencer communities be good for? One indication could be novelty fundraising. In November of 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, along with a team of other players, including the Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh, political streamers the Serfs and video game streamers including xQcOw, DisguisedToast and others, raised a combined $200,000 for eviction defense and food pantries while playing the popular online multiplayer game Among Us. But this particular model seems reminiscent of celebrity fundraisers in the cable TV era and could easily be repeated by the political establishment.On the nationalist right, political influencers have taken to forming their own parallel events to compete with establishment parties. Inaugurated in 2020, and now in its second year, Afpac, America First Political Action Conference, is an annual event, intended as an off-site alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a Republican stronghold. Throughout 2019, this same group of young American nationalists coordinated to heckle and undermine public events including those which featured Donald Trump Jr and congressman Dan Crenshaw. Small hyper-dedicated groups are ideally suited for specific and targeted interventions.Influencers are not organizers. But they might be soon. Perhaps they require their own distinct category. Online communities might become a new type of crowdfunded special interest group or thinktank with a built-in spokesperson (like People’s Policy Project, founded by Matt Breunig in 2017). At the least, these overlapping fields are becoming more structurally similar. The key difference seems to be what the community members are asked to do. Soon, content producers might ask for much more.If fierce online competition is driving these channels to become politically active, this can be harnessed as effective advertising and recruitment into organized political life. It’s worth thinking about these emergent pipelines now, so that in 2028, we find ourselves surrounded by a new rank and file rather than sensationalist livestreaming from the barricades. More

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      Apple and Parler agreement could restore rightwing platform to App Store

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      Apple said it had reached an agreement with Parler, the rightwing social media app, that could lead to its reinstatement in the company’s app store. Apple kicked out Parler in January over ties to the deadly 6 January siege on the US Capitol.In a letter to two Republican lawmakers in Congress, Apple said it has been in “substantial conversations” with Parler over how the company plans to moderate content on its network. Before its removal from the App Store, Parler was a hotbed of hate speech, Nazi imagery, calls for violence (including violence against specific people) and conspiracy theories.Apple declined to comment beyond the letter, which didn’t provide details on how Parler plans to moderate such content. In the letter, Apple said Parler’s proposed changes would lead to approval of the app.Parler did not immediately respond to a message for comment. As of midday Monday, Parler was not yet available in the App Store and Apple did not give a timeline for when it would be reinstated. According to Apple’s letter, Parler proposed changes to its app and how it moderates content. Apple said the updated app incorporating those changes should be available as soon as Parler releases it.Google also banned Parler from its Google Play store in January, but Parler remains available for Android phones through third-party app stores. Apple’s closed app system means apps are only available through Apple’s own App Store. On Monday, Google reiterated its January statement that “Parler is welcome back in the Play store once it submits an app that complies with our policies”.So far, this has not happened.Parler remains banned from Amazon Web Services. Amazon said in January that Parler was unable to moderate a rise in violent content before, during and after the insurrection. Parler asked a federal judge in Seattle to force Amazon to reinstate it on the web. That effort failed, and the companies are still fighting in court.The Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer has confirmed she helped bankroll Parler and has emerged in recent months as the network’s shadow executive after its founder John Matze was ousted as CEO in February. More

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      Facebook, Preparing for Chauvin Verdict, Will Limit Posts That Might Incite Violence

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      Facebook on Monday said it planned to limit posts that contain misinformation and hate speech related to the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, to keep them from spilling over into real-world harm.As closing arguments began in the trial and Minneapolis braced for a verdict, Facebook said it would identify and remove posts on the social network that urged people to bring arms to the city. It also said it would protect members of Mr. Floyd’s family from harassment and take down content that praised, celebrated or mocked his death.“We know this trial has been painful for many people,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, wrote in a blog post. “We want to strike the right balance between allowing people to speak about the trial and what the verdict means, while still doing our part to protect everyone’s safety.”Facebook, which has long positioned itself as a site for free speech, has become increasingly proactive in policing content that might lead to real-world violence. The Silicon Valley company has been under fire for years over the way it has handled sensitive news events. That includes last year’s presidential election, when online misinformation about voter fraud galvanized supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Believing the election to have been stolen from Mr. Trump, some supporters stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6.Leading up to the election, Facebook took steps to fight misinformation, foreign interference and voter suppression. The company displayed warnings on more than 150 million posts with election misinformation, removed more than 120,000 posts for violating its voter interference policies and took down 30 networks that posted false messages about the election.But critics said Facebook and other social media platforms did not do enough. After the storming of the Capitol, the social network stopped Mr. Trump from being able to post on the site. The company’s independent oversight board is now debating whether the former president will be allowed back on Facebook and has said it plans to issue its decision “in the coming weeks,” without giving a definite date.The death of Mr. Floyd, who was Black, led to a wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the nation last year. Mr. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who is white, faces charges of manslaughter, second-degree murder and third-degree murder for Mr. Floyd’s death. The trial began in late March. Mr. Chauvin did not testify.Facebook said on Monday that it had determined that Minneapolis was, at least temporarily, “a high-risk location.” It said it would remove pages, groups, events and Instagram accounts that violated its violence and incitement policy; take down attacks against Mr. Chauvin and Mr. Floyd; and label misinformation and graphic content as sensitive.The company did not have any further comment.“As the trial comes to a close, we will continue doing our part to help people safely connect and share what they are experiencing,” Ms. Bickert said in the blog post. More

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      100 Days Without Trump on Twitter: A Nation Scrolls More Calmly

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      Democrats are breathing easier. Republicans are crying censorship. For all of the country’s news consumers, a strange quiet has descended after a four-year bombardment of presidential verbiage.That soothing sound that Gary Cavalli hears emanating from Twitter these days? It is the sound of silence — specifically, the silence of former President Donald J. Trump.“My blood pressure has gone down 20 points,” said Mr. Cavalli, 71, whose obsessive hate-following of Mr. Trump ended for good when Twitter permanently barred the former president in January. “Not having to read his latest dishonest tweets has made my life so much happier.”It seems like just yesterday, or perhaps a lifetime ago, that Mr. Trump swaggered through the corridors of Twitter as if he owned the place, praising himself and denigrating his enemies in an endless stream of poorly punctuated, creatively spelled, factually challenged ALL-CAPS DIATRIBES that inflamed, delighted and terrified the nation to varying degrees. That all ended on Jan. 8, two days after a mob egged on by his incendiary remarks had stormed the United States Capitol in an ill-conceived effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.One hundred days have now elapsed since the start of the ban — a move that raised questions of free speech and censorship in the social media age, upset pro-Trump Republicans and further enraged a now-former president who still refuses to accept the fact that he lost the election.To many of the former president’s detractors, the absence of a daily barrage of anxiety-provoking presidential verbiage feels closer to a return to normalcy than anything else (so far) in 2021.“I legitimately slept better with him off Twitter,” said Mario Marval, 35, a program manager and Air Force veteran in the Cincinnati area. “It allowed me to reflect on how much of a vacuum of my attention he became.”For Matt Leece, 29, a music professor in Bloomsburg, Pa., the Twitter suspension was akin to a clearing of the air: “It’s like living in a city perpetually choked with smog, and suddenly one day you wake up and the sky is blue, the birds are singing, and you can finally take a full, nontoxic breath.”Yet for millions of Trump loyalists, his silence has meant the loss of their favorite champion and the greatest weapon in their fight against the left.“I miss having his strong, conservative, opinionated voice on Twitter,” said Kelly Clobes, 39, a business manager from southern Wisconsin. “Other people have been allowed to have free speech and speak their minds, and they haven’t been banned. Unless you’re going to do it across the board, you shouldn’t do it to him.”Even in a forum known for turning small differences into all-out hostility, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was unique. There was its sheer volume. From 2009, when he posted his first tweet (“Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”), to Jan. 8 of this year, when he posted his last (“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20”), Mr. Trump tweeted more than 56,000 times, according to an online archive of his posts. He tweeted so often on some mornings in office that it was hard to believe he was doing much else.Then there were the presidential tweets themselves.The one where he predicted that if he were to fight Joe Biden, Mr. Biden would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” The one where he called Meryl Streep “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood.” The one where he accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. The one where he boasted that his “Nuclear Button” was “much bigger & more powerful” than that of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. (“And my Button works!” he added.)Love it or hate it, it was impossible to ignore Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, which flowed from the platform directly into the nation’s psyche. His tweets were quoted, analyzed, dissected, praised and ridiculed across the news media and the internet, featuring often in people’s “I can’t believe he said that” conversations. For his opponents, there was a rubbernecking quality to the exercise, a kind of masochistic need to read the tweets in order to feel the outrage.Seth Norrholm, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and an expert on post-traumatic stress, said that Twitter had offered Mr. Trump a round-the-clock forum to express his contempt and anger, a direct channel from his id to the internet. Every time he used all-caps, Professor Norrholm said, it was as if “an abuser was shouting demeaning statements” at the American people.Although “out of sight, out of mind really works well for a lot of people in helping them to move forward,” he continued, Mr. Trump has refused to go away quietly. Indeed, he has set up a sort of presidential office in exile at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, emerging intermittently to issue statements on quasi-presidential letterhead and to heap derision on Republicans he deems insufficiently loyal.“It’s as if you’re in a new relationship with the current administration, but every now and then the ex-partner pops up to remind you that ‘I’m still here’ — that he hasn’t disappeared entirely and is living in the basement,” Professor Norrholm said. “What’s going to happen over the next couple of years is that you will hear rumbles from the basement. We don’t know whether he’ll emerge or not, or whether it’s just some guy in the basement making some noise.”But how significant is the noise? Many Republicans still seem to be hanging on Mr. Trump’s every word. But others say that without Twitter or indeed the presidency, his voice has been rendered nearly impotent, much the way Alpha, the terrifying Doberman pinscher in the movie “Up,” becomes ridiculous when his electronic voice malfunctions, forcing him to speak with the Mickey Mouse-like voice of someone who has inhaled too much helium.“He’s not conducting himself in a logical, disciplined fashion in order to carry out a plan,” the anti-Trump Republican lawyer George Conway said of the former president. “Instead, he’s trying to yell as loudly as he can, but the problem is that he’s in the basement, and so it’s just like a mouse squeaking.”Not everyone agrees, of course. Even some people who are no fans of Mr. Trump’s language say that the Twitter ban was plain censorship, depriving the country of an important political voice.Ronald Johnson, a 63-year-old retailer from Wisconsin who voted for Mr. Trump in November, said that Twitter had, foolishly, turned itself into the villain in the fight.“What it’s doing is making people be more sympathetic to the idea that here is somebody who is who is being abused by Big Tech,” Mr. Johnson said. Although he doesn’t miss the former president’s outrageous language, he said, it was a mistake to deprive his supporters of the chance to hear what he has to say.And many Trump fans miss him desperately, in part because their identity is so closely tied to his.Last month, a plaintive tweet by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, that bemoaned Mr. Trump’s absence from the platform was “liked” more than 66,000 times. It also inspired a return to the sort of brawl that Mr. Trump used to provoke on Twitter, as outraged anti-Trumpers waded in to inform Mr. Giuliani exactly what he could do with his opinion.It is exactly that sort of thing — the punch-counterpunch between the right and left, the quick escalation (or devolution) into name-calling and outrage so often touched off by Mr. Trump — that caused Mr. Cavalli, a former sportswriter and associate athletic director at Stanford University, to leave Twitter right before the election. He had been spending an hour or two a day on the platform, often working himself up into a frenzy of posting sarcastic responses to the president’s tweets.When he called Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, a “bimbo,” Twitter briefly suspended him.“I thought, maybe God’s sending me a message here, and this is something I shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “So I quit.” His wife was happy; he has tried to channel his pent-up outrage by writing letters to the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle.Joe Walsh, a former Trump-supporting Republican congressman who is now an anti-Trump talk-radio host, said that even some people who hate the former president are suffering from a kind of withdrawal, their lives emptier now that Mr. Trump is no longer around to serve as a villainous foil for their grievances.“I completely get that it’s cool and hip to say, ‘I’m going to ignore the former guy’ — there’s a lot of performance art around that — but a lot of people miss being able to go after him or talk about him every day,” he said. “We’re all so tribal and we want to pick our tribes, and Trump made that dividing line really easy. Where do you stand on Biden’s infrastructure plan? That’s a little more nuanced.” More

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      Mike Lindell’s new free speech network won’t let you use the Lord’s name in vain

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      Mike Lindell, the man best known for his internet pillow company My Pillow, as well as for his fierce allegiance to Donald Trump, is set to launch a new free speech platform this week that he thinks will put YouTube and Twitter out of business. But it turns out it will limit what users can say – by stopping them from, among other things, taking the Lord’s name in vain.“Everyone is going to be able to talk freely,” said Mike Lindell about the platform, called Frank, which is set to roll out on 19 April, in an interview with the conservative host Graham Ledger on the Ledger Report podcast. “When you come over now you are going to be able to speak out and have opinions.”“You don’t get to use the four swear words: the c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain,” Lindell explained in a video on the Frank landing page.In an attempt to differentiate itself from other “anything goes” conservative-leaning social networking platforms, Lindell, a Christian, has laid out the type of speech his users will not be able to freely use, including profanity, sexual content, and blasphemous language.Lindell, the, let us say, creatively minded political theorist, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for his persistent lies about how Trump actually won the 2020 election, met with the former president in January apparently urging him to consider martial law to defend that claim, and has recently said he’s hired private investigators to look into why Fox News won’t book him any more, has framed the social media venture as a mix between Twitter and YouTube.“You’re going to have your own like YouTube channel, only that’s your Twitter handle,” he’s said.Oh and, by the way, it will also put both companies out of business he said.Mike Lindell announces that he’ll be unveiling a new social media platform within two weeks that will put both Twitter and YouTube out of business. pic.twitter.com/PsDuBOWd5H— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 11, 2021
      He has also, without necessarily explaining how the concept will work, promised users more followers, certainly a unique pitch.“People are going to have more followers,” Lindell told Steve Bannon recently. “Ten times more followers.”In a shocking move, Lindell has admitted that criticism of Trump will be permitted on the site.“Free speech is not pornography. Free speech is not ‘I’m going to kill you’,” said Lindell, who is currently being sued by voting machine manufacturer Dominion for $1.3bn over his own personal free speech about the election. More

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      in World Politics

      The Spread of Global Hate

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      One insidious way to torture the detainees at Guantanamo Bay was to blast music at them at all hours. The mixtape, which included everything from Metallica to the Meow Mix jingle, was intended to disorient the captives and impress upon them the futility of resistance. It worked: This soundtrack from hell did indeed break several inmates.

      For four years, Americans had to deal with a similar sonic blast, namely the “music” of President Donald Trump. His voice was everywhere: on TV and radio, screaming from the headlines of newspapers, pumped out nonstop on social media. MAGAmen and women danced to the repetitive beat of his lies and distortions. Everyone else experienced the nonstop assault of Trump’s instantly recognizable accent and intonations as nails on a blackboard. After the 2016 presidential election, psychologists observed a significant uptick in the fears Americans had about the future. One clinician even dubbed the phenomenon “Trump anxiety disorder.”

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      The volume of Trump’s assault on the senses has decreased considerably since January. Obviously, he no longer has the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to broadcast his views. The mainstream media no longer covers his every utterance. Most importantly, the major social media platforms have banned him. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, Twitter suspended Trump permanently under its glorification of violence policy. Facebook made the same decision, though its oversight board is now revisiting the former president’s deplatforming.

      It’s not only Trump. The Proud Boys, QAnon, the militia movements: The social media footprint of the far right has decreased a great deal in 2021, with a parallel decline in the amount of misinformation available on the Web.

      And it’s not just a problem of misinformation and hate speech. According to a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on domestic terrorism, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots and 91 fatalities since 2015, with the number of incidents rising in 2020 to a height unseen in a quarter of a century. A large number of the perpetrators are loners who have formed their beliefs from social media. As one counterterrorism official put it, “Social media has afforded absolutely everything that’s bad out there in the world the ability to come inside your home.”

      So, why did the tech giants provide Trump, his extremist followers and their global counterparts unlimited access to a growing audience over those four long years?

      Facebook Helps Trump

      In a new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), Heidi Beirich and Wendy Via write: “For years, Trump violated the community standards of several platforms with relative impunity. Tech leaders had made the affirmative decision to allow exceptions for the politically powerful, usually with the excuse of ‘newsworthiness’ or under the guise of ‘political commentary’ that the public supposedly needed to see.”

      Even before Trump became president, Facebook was cutting him a break. In 2015, he was using the social media platform to promote a Muslim travel ban, which generated considerable controversy, particularly within Facebook itself. The Washington Post reports:

      “Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said.”

      But the company’s most prominent Republican, Vice-President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, persuaded Zuckerberg to change his position. In spring 2016, when Zuckerberg wanted to condemn Trump’s plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico, he was again persuaded to step back for fear of seeming too partisan.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Facebook went on to play a critical role in getting Trump elected. It wasn’t simply the Russian campaign to create fake accounts, fake messaging and even fake events using Facebook, or the theft of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica. More important was the role played by Facebook staff in helping Trump’s digital outreach team maximize its use of social media. The Trump campaign spent $70 million on Facebook ads and raised much of its $250 million in online fundraising through Facebook as well.

      Trump established a new paradigm through brute force and money. As he turned himself into clickbait, the social media giants applied the same “exceptionalism” to other rancid politicians. More ominously, the protection accorded politicians extended to extremists. According to an account of a discussion at a Twitter staff meeting, one employee explained that “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda.”

      Of course, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, social media organizations decided that society could indeed accept the banning of politicians, at least when it came to some politicians in the United States.

      The Real Fake News

      In the Philippines, an extraordinary 97% of internet users had accounts with Facebookas of 2019, up from 40% in 2018 (by comparison, about 67% of Americans have Facebook accounts). Increasingly, Filipinos get their news from social media. That’s bad news for the mainstream media in the Philippines. And that’s particularly bad news for journalists like Maria Ressa, who runs an online news site called Rappler.

      At a press conference for the GPAHE report, Ressa described how the government of Rodrigo Duterte, with an assist from Facebook, has made her life a living hell. Like Trump, President Duterte came to power on a populist platform spread through Facebook. Because of her critical reporting on government affairs, Ressa felt the ire of the Duterte fan club, which generated half a million hate posts that, according to one study, consisted of 60% attacks on her credibility and 40% sexist and misogynist slurs. This onslaught created a bandwagon effect that equated journalists like her with criminals.

      This noxious equation on social media turned into a real case when the Philippine authorities arrested Ressa in 2019 and convicted her of the dubious charge of “cyberlibel.” She faces a sentence of as much as 100 years in prison.

      “Our dystopian present is your dystopian future,” she observed. What happened in the Philippines in that first year of Duterte became the reality in the United States under Trump. It was the same life cycle of hate in which misinformation is introduced in social media, then imported into the mainstream media and supported from the top down by opportunistic politicians.

      The Philippines faces another presidential election next year, and Duterte is barred from running again by term limits. Duterte’s daughter, who is currently the mayor of Davao City just like her father had been, tops the early polls, though she hasn’t thrown her hat in the ring and her father has declared that women shouldn’t run for president. This time around, however, Facebook disrupted the misinformation campaign tied to the Dutertes when it took down fake accounts coming from China that supported the daughter’s potential bid for the presidency.

      President Duterte was furious. “Facebook, listen to me,” he said. “We allow you to operate here hoping that you could help us. Now, if government cannot espouse or advocate something which is for the good of the people, then what is your purpose here in my country? What would be the point of allowing you to continue if you can’t help us?”

      Duterte had been led to believe, based on his previous experience, that Facebook was his lapdog. Other authoritarian regimes had come to expect the same treatment. In India, according to the GPAHE report, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party:

      “… was Facebook India’s biggest advertising spender in 2020. Ties between the company and the Indian government run even deeper, as the company has multiple commercial ties, including partnerships with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the Ministry of Women and the Board of Education. Both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have met personally with Modi, who is the most popular world leader on Facebook. Before Modi became prime minister, Zuckerberg even introduced his parents to him.”

      Facebook has also cozied up to the right-wing government in Poland, misinformation helped get Jair Bolsonaro elected in Brazil, and the platform served as a vehicle for the Islamophobic content that contributed to the rise of the far right in the Netherlands. But the decision to ban Trump has set in motion a backlash. In Poland, for instance, the Law and Justice Party has proposed a law to fine Facebook and others for removing content if it doesn’t break Polish law, and a journalist has attempted to establish a pro-government alternative to Facebook called Albicla.

      Back in the USA

      Similarly, in the United States, the far right have suddenly become a big booster of free speech now that social media platforms have begun to deplatform high-profile users like Trump and take down posts for their questionable veracity and hate content. In the second quarter of 2020 alone, Facebook removed 22.5 million posts.

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      Facebook has tried to get ahead of this story by establishing an oversight board that includes members like Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University; Julie Owono, executive director at Internet Sans Frontiere; and Nighat Dad, founder of the Digital Rights Foundation. Now, Facebook users can also petition the board to remove content.

      With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others now removing a lot of extremist content, the far right have migrated to other platforms, such as Gab, Telegram, and MeWe. They continue to spread conspiracy theories, anti-COVID vaccine misinformation and pro-Trump propaganda on these alternative platforms. Meanwhile, the MAGA crowd awaits the second coming of Trump in the form of a new social media platform that he plans to launch in a couple of months to remobilize his followers.

      Even without such an alternative alt-right platform — Trumpbook? TrumpSpace? Trumper? — the life cycle of hate is still alive and well in the United States. Consider the “great replacement theory,” according to which immigrants and denizens of the non-white world are determined to “replace” white populations in Europe, America and elsewhere. Since its inception in France in 2010, this extremist conspiracy theory has spread far and wide on social media. It has been picked up by white nationalists and mass shooters. Now, in the second stage of the life cycle, it has landed in the mainstream media thanks to right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson, who recently opined, “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

      Pressure is mounting on Fox to fire Carlson, though the network is resisting. Carlson and his supporters decry the campaign as yet another example of “cancel culture.” They insist on their First Amendment right to express unpopular opinions. But a privately-owned media company is under no obligation to air all views, and the definition of acceptability is constantly evolving.

      Also, a deplatformed Carlson would still be able to air his crank views on the street corner or in emails to his followers. No doubt when Trumpbook debuts at some point in the future, Carlson’s biggest fan will also give him a digital megaphone to spread lies and hate all around the world. These talking heads will continue talking no matter what. The challenge is to progressively shrink the size of their global platform.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre

      by

      In 1999 I sat in a Vancouver café with a group of anti-capitalist activists. They’d just returned from protesting the WTO in Seattle to find a new, far stranger foe in town – David Icke. He was there to lecture about how the ruling elite are actually child-sacrificing, blood-drinking paedophile lizards in human disguise.Nobody had ever suggested such a thing before, and the activists were working to get his books seized and destroyed. They were alarmed not just by the echoes of antisemitism but because something startling was happening. Icke was beginning to win over people who should have been on their side. I wrote back then that they were “seeing an omen of the blackest kind, the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land”. But this wasn’t prophecy on my part. I thought they were probably being overdramatic.I spent much of the late 1990s chronicling the embryonic world of Satanic Hollywood lizard paedophile conspiracy theories for my book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, which turns 20 this week. Lately, of course, the theories have proliferated wildly – radicalising unparalleled swathes of YouTubers, inspiring an insurrection and reportedly in the past two years at least one murder and a suicide bombing. I feel lucky to have been there at its inception, but annoyed with myself for not anticipating quite how vast and malevolent things would get. Looking back, were there clues?It was a tip-off from a militant Islamist that alerted me to that fledgling world. In 1995 the director Saul Dibb and I began filming Omar Bakri Mohammed, who had just announced that he wouldn’t rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.“Maybe,” our editor at Channel 4 said, “it’ll be the Islamic fundamentalist version of following around Hitler the watercolourist.”Omar Bakri’s jihad campaign was indeed so nascent we had to drive him to Office World to get his “Islam the Future for Britain” pamphlets photocopied. His sweet 13-year-old son Mohammed flapped around anxiously, watching the Malcolm X biopic and worrying that his father might one day be assassinated, too.Fifteen years later, Omar Bakri was imprisoned in Lebanon for supporting terrorism. His anxious teenage son Mohammed grew up, joined Isis, and was murdered by them, reportedly for cursing the Prophet Muhammad. It was heartbreaking. But these days when I recall the “Hitler the watercolourist” comment, I mostly remember a remark made by one of Omar’s circle during our first day’s reporting.The man was recounting his daydream of releasing a swarm of mice into United Nations headquarters when he suddenly asked if I was aware that the world was being secretly controlled by a network of shadowy cabals from secret rooms. A year later I met a Ku Klux Klansman in Arkansas who was consumed by the same shadowy cabal conspiracy theories, and that’s when it hit me: there was an under-chronicled relationship between 1990s political and religious extremism and conspiratorial thinking. So I started hanging around the conspiracy world.And, in hindsight, it was all clues. The most popular tables at the gun shows were frequently the ones selling the conspiracy VHS tapes – recordings of very long conversations between unengaging men in public access TV studios. They’d discuss how the Illuminati were the puppet masters behind the deaths at David Koresh’s church in Waco, or how the all-seeing eye on the dollar bill was evidence of the Illuminati’s takeover of the Federal Reserve. They were as dull as anything, but due to their scarcity the VHSs were passed around militia circles like rare jewels, gun-show Rosetta stones.Then there was Art Bell’s popular paranormal radio show, Coast to Coast AM, broadcast from Bell’s desert home in Pahrump, Nevada. Ten million Americans routinely tuned in to hear spellbinding night-time tales of ghosts and UFOs and conspiracies – like how the streaks of condensation you see coming from aeroplanes are actually chemicals designed to keep the masses docile. It was the perfect theory for the extremely lazy. No travelling was necessary, no trips to ancient rune sites or whatever. You only had to look out of your window and up into the sky to see the smoking gun. It was Miss Marple for those who wanted to expend as little physical exertion as possible.These days nothing much has changed, except instead of streaks of vapour and the dollar bill they’re deciphering clues in Beyoncé videos and Chrissy Teigen’s tweets. For QAnon to work, adherents have to allow themselves to believe that the secret paedophile elite, despite their Machiavellian genius, can’t resist leaving little visible pointers to their malevolent power, like a thief placing a monogrammed glove at the scene of the crime. It’s lucky for the armchair detective that that’s their achilles heel.Looking back then, it’s obvious that all the movement needed was a much better distribution system and some charismatic leaders, Art Bell being reclusive and not a tub-thumper.It turned out I had a knack for star-spotting future conspiracy luminaries – although, to be honest, it wasn’t hard. In the 1990s two men towered over the others in terms of oratory skills and engrossing theories – David Icke and Alex Jones.In 1991 Icke, then a popular BBC sports presenter, unexpectedly announced on Wogan that he was the son of God. The screams of laughter from the studio audience felt like a firing squad. When I met him soon afterwards he said of that interview: “One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. As a television presenter people come up to you and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into ‘Icke’s a nutter.’ I couldn’t walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. That was so important for me in understanding how it was possible for a relatively few people in key positions to run the world. They do it by manipulating the way people think and feel.”I felt quite sure then, and still do, that he was right about that last part. The mainstream media loves to form a consensus about who the new most ridiculed person ought to be. The same is true of social media, of course. Sometimes these warring factions disagree, and a person monsterised by one clique is deemed a magnificent hero by another, but with each wild generalisation our grey areas become unfashionable and there’s a narrowing of what constitutes an acceptable person.All the conspiracy movement needed was charismatic leadersBut there was something that the mainstream media, in its hubris, failed to notice about David Icke: a growing number of people were feeling more aligned to him than to his tormentors. These were people who also, for their own reasons, felt ridiculed and shut out of the culture. And so when Icke re-emerged with his paedophile lizard theory he immediately began selling out concert halls across the world. It was an incredibly surprising and, I suspect, spiteful story born from injury: conspiracy theory as grievance storytelling. And it was a dangerous theory, with its appeals to paranoia and delusion.When sceptics are asked to explain why people succumb to conspiracy theories, they tend to say they offer a strange comfort – they allow people to make sense of a chaotic world. But I think there’s another, more often ignored reason. You get renaissances of conspiracy theories when the powerful behave in conspiratorial ways. The mystery is why the theorists are never happy with the actual evidence, and instead behave like amateur sleuths inside some magical parallel world where metaphors are facts. In that world, the deaths at David Koresh’s church in Waco were caused not by government overreach but by the Illuminati’s Satanic desire for blood sacrifice. Why they invariably slap a layer of fiction on top of an already fascinating truth had long been a puzzle to me, and to many others, too: a question I’ve been asked over and over is whether I think Alex Jones knows he’s lying when he tells his millions of listeners that, for instance, the Sandy Hook school shootings were “a giant hoax”.Finally, after 20 years, I think I’ve figured the answer out.I first met Alex Jones at the site of David Koresh’s church, five years after 76 Branch Davidians died there. I’d been told that an Austin conspiracy radio host was organising its rebuilding with listener donations. As I drove in I saw a bunch of militia people – bikers and separatists – hammering away, but when Jones wandered towards them they turned tongue-tied and star-struck. Jones was 26, unknown outside militia and Austin hipster circles, but clearly, as his future wife Kelly put it to me that week, “a new sensation”.I visited his home and watched him broadcast down an ISDN line in a child’s bedroom decorated with choo-choo train wallpaper. He was mesmerising. “We see decadent empires in their final stages of corruption as they become insane!” he yelled of the Waco siege. “Engaging in mass murder, just to do it! Are you going to be that Aztec villager who hands his child over to be lunchmeat for the priesthood?” Between his incredible eloquence and his disregard for the truth, he was unstoppable.But unlike David Icke, it turns out that Jones’s conspiratorial thinking has nothing to do with being ridiculed or cast out of society. Two years ago I visited some of his classmates for a story about his teenage years. He was raised by loving parents in a gated community in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall. According to everyone we spoke to, he wasn’t bullied at school. He was the bully – the most violent bully at Rockwall High. He beat one boy, Jared, almost to death. Jared says he has never fully recovered. (Jones claims he was defending himself.) And from the beginning, Jones was a conspiracy theorist. “He always had something to say about the teachers and the principal and the school cop,” Jared told me. “If we were at the pool hall, it was ‘the guy that owns the pool hall has called the DEA and they’re setting a deal up.’ It was weird, man. Everybody was like, what?”In 2017, I spent a few days in a courtroom watching Jones and his now ex-wife Kelly go through what divorce lawyers were calling Austin’s most acrimonious child custody hearing in living memory. At one point as I sat in the gallery a court psychologist, Alissa Sherry, was called to give evidence about Jones’s mental state. She testified that he had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.At first, I felt sad for him, wondering if he was embarrassed that a thing like that had come out in court. But I kept thinking about it and, honestly, it answers a lot of questions. High-scoring narcissists are prone to paranoia and black-and-white thinking. Through their eyes everyone is either wonderful or else they’re the enemy. (Often the wonderful person commits some minor transgression and instantly becomes the enemy; if you’ve been close to a narcissist you’ll probably recognise that “love-bomb, devalue, discard” relationship arc.) And narcissists need to feel like they’re the smartest person in the room – hence, I suspect, their reaching for conspiracy theories with their obnoxiously counterintuitive, superficially complex worldviews.With David Icke and Alex Jones the movement had found its stars. So now all it needed was a better distribution system. Unfortunately the one it got turned out to massively exacerbate our proclivity for paranoia and black-and-white thinking – social media algorithms.In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives had realised four years earlier that its algorithms were “exploiting the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness” – like the startling fact that 64% of users who joined extremist groups were enticed to do so by clicking on the “Groups you should join” and “Discover” buttons. Inside the company there was alarm. What might these rabbit holes be doing to users’ mental health and to society? Internal teams suggested numerous fixes – algorithmic tweaks to make the site more civil. But the executives nicknamed the proposals “Eat Your Veggies” and ignored them. (They argued that it was for reasons of fairness: there are more far-right pages on Facebook, so any changes would have disproportionately affected conservatives.) Facebook claimed in 2020 that it had changed in the years since these deliberations.Were I a conspiracy theorist, I could easily concoct a theory about the man instrumental in killing the recommendations. He was Facebook’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan. In 2000, when Kaplan was an adviser to George W Bush’s election campaign, he was present at the Brooks Brothers riot, where dozens of paid Republican operatives masquerading as concerned citizens stormed Miami-Dade polling headquarters with the goal of shutting down the recount. They pounded on windows and chanted “Stop the fraud!” In the ensuing chaos, the recount was abandoned and Bush was elected president.Between 2001 and 2009 Kaplan worked for the Bush administration’s policy and budget management offices. During that time the administration launched Operation Shock and Awe in Iraq. Shock and Awe was described by Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine as economic strategy: “the brutal tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures”.And so Kaplan was right there at three pivotal moments in recent history when his employers’ goals were furthered by creating disorienting chaos. The tech utopians and their devotion to algorithms was the one clue I could never have anticipated. I could describe Kaplan as a player in a conspiracy. But what it really was, I suppose, is business. More

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      in US Politics

      Who needs Twitter? Trump wishes happy Easter to 'radical left crazies'

      by

      Donald Trump is reportedly working on a social media platform of his own, after being banned from Twitter and Facebook for inciting the Capitol riot.He has also launched a new website, which presents a highly selective history of his single term in power and offers the chance to book appearances or personal greetings.But Trump has also said he may not need his new platform, because the short, often tweet-length statements he now propels into journalists’ inboxes from Mar-a-Lago in Florida communicate his views as effectively as any tweet ever could.On Sunday the former president seemed to test the theory, mimicking world leaders including Pope Francis, if not echoing their sense of dignity and appeals for peace on a major religious holiday, by releasing a statement to mark Easter Sunday.“Happy Easter to ALL,” Trump said, “including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country!”The presidential election was not rigged, however often Trump repeats a lie repeatedly thrown out of court. Joe Biden beat him by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college.But for Trump supporters, the statement may have carried a raucous echo of what were for them happier times, when he regularly tweeted diplomatic communiqués such as: “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”Tellingly, Trump’s Easter statement did not set off the kind of explosions in the news media his tweets once did. Instead of prompting deadline scrambles and front-page headlines, it seemed to engender a sort of mild ennui.“Jesus couldn’t have said it any better,” wrote Ken Vogel of the New York Times.The writer Robert Schlesinger asked: “What is the phrase my religious friends use when in doubt? What would Jesus whine?”David Frum, once a speechwriter for George W Bush, now a prominent Trump critic on the American right, called it “an Easter Sunday message of resentment and rage”. “It’s an enduring good joke,” he added, “that Donald Trump has zero understanding of Christian faith – and that if he ever did understand it, he would 100% oppose and reject it.”A few hours later, Trump tried again. This time, his statement simply said: “Happy Easter!” More