Message Boards

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AN 12 25

Far-right extremists have been organizing online since before the internet – and AI is their next frontier

How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.

Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.

I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.

This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.

Going digital

Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.

The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”

Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.

In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.

Arrival of the web

By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.

By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.

In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.

Up next: AI

The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.

AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.

Countering extremism

Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.

Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.

Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-online-comment-sections-must-die

Besides inventing clickbait and downgrading many journalists into curators, Silicon Valley has changed our collective relationship to the news itself. This is because online journalism has presided over a peculiar breakdown in the relationship between writer and reader, and especially between editor and reader – exemplified by the concept of thepublic “comments section,” common to online news sites and social media pages.

Excerpted with permission from “A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy,” by Keith A. Spencer, available now from major booksellers. © 2018 Eyewear Publishing.]

In the old days of print media, the only way for readers to talk back was to mail (and later email) comments to editors who would then pick and choose the most relevant or interesting ones (and weed out the racist, sexist, or just plain mean ones). Online comment sections usually remove editors entirely. Now, anyone is free to go on any news site that allows comments and post whatever inflammatory thing they wish – or reply angrily to other comments pseudonymously. One can engage in the same exercise on most social media sites, such as microblogging platforms like Twitter, video-sharing site YouTube, or link aggregator Reddit. British think-tank Demos conducted a study of Twitter in 2014 in which they found “approximately 10,000 uses per day of racist and ethnic slur terms in English.” These online spaces are frequently used to cyber-bully, shame and humiliate others – in netspeak, what we call “trolling.”

Though the concept of comments sections likely began as a naïve experiment in online media, such sections quickly became omnipresent. Many people, myself included, are horrified at online comments on news articles, and particularly at how out-of-tune they can seem with regional cultural values and ideology.

Why do media empires tolerate, even promotesuch comments sections? The unsurprising answer is money. “For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it,” wrote Buzzfeed reporter Charlie Warzel:

Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority.

In effect, abuse is easy on most online platforms – you just sit down and type. Yet, moderating abuse is the hard — and expensive — part. Talk is cheap, commenting is so effortless, abuse so simple because it’s also profitable. The more that people feel they are engaged with a media outlet, the more likely they will return, their precious eyeballs lingering on an ad or pop-up that nets a few more pennies of revenue to the host.

Many of the largest forums, news sites, and social media platforms ignore the deleterious effects that an unmoderated, pseudonymous commentariat has upon its users’ emotions. As a result, those who are most frequently victimized – even scared off of these spaces entirely – tend to be women, people of color, and gender minorities. In short, victims of online trolling are also those most likely to be oppressed in everyday society.

If you spend a fair bit of time online, you have probably been harassed online in ways that no one has ever harassed you in the real world. In my previous day job as editor-in-chief of an online Bay Area culture magazine, I dealt constantly with moderating and deleting harassing and abusive comments directed at our writers. (My general rule as an editor is that, if you would not say it to the writer’s face, it doesn’t deserve to be online.) For years, I was shocked at the negative and cruel behavior of the online masses, but over time, I came to understand that, through the written veil of online pseudo-anonymity, people are apt to be much more spiteful, hateful, and cruel than they would be if they were communicating face-to-face. Over an Internet connection, you generally cannot see your interlocutor, and they can’t see you; there is a corresponding dehumanization. It’s hard to empathize with someone invisible: rather than a feeling person with a family and loved ones, online, a faceless individual becomes an inanimate punching bag of ideologies. While most people would never spout racist slander in the workplace, online, away from prying eyes and with no other people around to stop it, many commenters feel empowered to say whatever they want.

Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority.

http://www.politisink.com/2010/08/the-not-so-secret-history-of-freerepublic-com/

The (not so) Secret History of FreeRepublic.com

Author: Tars Tarkas
Filed under: #freerepublic

Sunday

Aug 22,2010

If you have spent any time on the internet in the world of politics, you have heard of FreeRepublic.com. A right wing message board that boasts one of the largest memberships and pageviews of any right wing website. It is its own self-contained community that has a long history of ups and downs. Many times members of FreeRepublic.com have influenced real world events, and their notoriety have made them a powerful block in right wing circles. Even if the right wing circles don’t want to acknowledge exactly what is being said by the various Freepers.

So what exactly is FreeRepublic.com? How did it get started? What have they done? this article attempts to answer those questions by giving a timeline overview of the history of FreeRepublic.com. We use publicly available messages, both from FreeRepublic.com and external sources (members, ex-members, bitter ex-members, news reports, and enemies) FR has done A LOT of stuff. This is in no ways a complete list of everything they have accomplished or a complete history. Most major events are mentioned, as well as many minor events, some listed just as examples of the state of the FR forums at the time. Some of the sources are more dodgy than others, even history on the FR boards themselves are whitewashed and purged at times. But it is a good rough draft, and revisions are welcome in the comments section.

Overview

FreeRepublic.com was launched in February 1997 as a public message board, but existed in late 1996 as a private forum. It was started by founder Jim (James C.) Robinson. Jim Robinson (aka JimRob) was a computer programmer (among other things) who was kind enough to leave his resume online – JimRob resume

Jim enlisted in the Navy in 1965 and served until 1969. He later married his wife Sheila and had two sons, John and Chris. John helps run FreeRepublic.com so you will see his name from time to time in official capacity. We’ve collected some photos of JimRob that were posted on FRso you can see him as an actual human being, instead of a faceless guy who writes rants on the internet. This is the JimRob Tribute Thread where many photos of JimRob over the years were posted.

The Pre-FR Days:

JimRob’s pre-FR days on the internet are mentioned in an article on Sweetness & Light:

He used to post quite regularly on the Whitewater bulletin board at Prodigy, where he butted heads quite regularly with the moderators. They claimed they were only objecting to his posting of articles that were copyright protected. Robinson claimed they had a political agenda.

Eventually Robinson was banned from Prodigy. He next turned up at another place I and many other conservatives regularly visited at the time (circa 1995), the now legendary usenet group alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater. This site had tremendous influence for a news group and was regularly featured in mainstream media stories in this period.

Mr. Robinson continued to post at a.c-e.c.w the same kind of articles he had posted at Prodigy. Then he began to post links to promote his own fledgling site, Free Republic.

….

I was later told by Jim and/or by his son John he really had no interest in politics until the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan hit. So the Lippo Group/Riady business and the supposed drug-dealing through Mena, Arkansas were of major interest to him, as was of course Whitewater.

A lot of this is standard conservative conspiracy theories from the mid to late 1990s. For those of you old enough to be tooling around the internet in those days, you will probably remember all the chatter about the Clinton Crimes and various theories that linked them to the New World Order, Factions 1 and 2, and fun things like that (and if you go really deep down the rabbit hole, we bring up the Greys, Reptilians, Hollow Earth, Area 51, and alien-controlled Sasquatches.) Much of this evolved from pre-internet conspiracies that constantly morphed based on who was in charge at the time. The drug running through Arkansas is just an evolution of the old charged that the Bush family ran drugs through their offshore oil platforms, funded through the CIA which George H.W. Bush was head of at one time. These conspiracies would evolve yet again upon the election of Bush 2.0, go nuts after 9-11, and then Obama’s election turns the crazy into overdrive. It even made it into the comic book The Losers. But that’s another article. There are still plenty of sites around cataloging stuff like this (unfortunately, we lost a lot of them when GeoCities was shut down) for the curious.

FR has begun to wane as a conservative force to be reckoned with. It is still massive and JimRob pulls a lot of weight, but the increasing number of blogs, thinktank funded conservative online communities, astroturf ning sites, and JimRob’s own instability have caused FR to not have the leadership role it once did. Their ability to reclaim the undisputed top of the heap title grows farther and farther each day. Only time will tell the future of FreeRepublic.com, and this is an article solely about its past…