4chan 8 gab

===

primary 7 24 to disting eg 8kun watkins... pioneer tag

SEE GAB CHAT 2

Trump promotes video in defense of economic and tariff policies that seems to echo 4chan claim that he is purposely crashing the market

The video, which contains claims and language seemingly from a 4chan post that gained traction on the far right, suggested that Trump “is purposely crashing the market” to bring down prices

Written by Alex Kaplan, Payton Armstrong & Craig Harrington

Published 04/04/25

On Truth Social, President Donald Trump attempted to defend his tariff policy — which economic experts agree will raise prices for consumers and increase the risk of a recession — by amplifying a TikTok video arguing that he “is purposely crashing the market.” The video echoes claims from a post on 4chan that gained traction on the far right.

On April 4, as international financial markets continued roiling in response to the launch of his global trade war on April 2, Trump amplified a video on his social media platform Truth Social from a right-wing account that contended that “Trump is crashing the stock market by 20% this month, but he’s doing it on purpose” as part of a grand strategy to lower interest rates, weaken the dollar, and bring down prices.

The TikTok video — which was uploaded on March 15, a few days after a post on 4chan’s far-right “/pol/” message board — claimed that Trump's current tariff and economic policies were part of a “secret game” to “make you rich” and “lower the cost of everything” by “trying to crash the stock market.” The 4chan post gained traction throughout the far right on multiple platforms, and the TikTok video has since earned at least 2.3 million views.

IFrame Content

The video amplified by Trump — the thumbnail of which shows language similar to the start of the 4chan post — echoes both claims and language of the 4chan post, including that Trump is trying to “push cash into Treasuries,” forcing the Federal Reserve to “slash interest rates” and “finance trillions of debt inexpensively.” Like the 4chan post, the video also claims tariffs would cause companies to “build here to dodge them” and farmers will “sell more of their products here in the U.S. to bring grocery prices way down.” It then invokes a claim that “94% of all stocks are owned only by 8% of Americans,” and that Trump is “taking from the rich short-term and handing it to the middle class through lower prices” — language very nearly matching that of the 4chan post.

The video also contains the false claim that billionaire investor Warren Buffet said that “Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over 50 years.”

In reality, economic experts are “ringing alarm bells as they digest the impact of the wide-ranging tariffs, which they forecast will accelerate inflation and dampen U.S. economic growth,” and raise the risk of launching the American economy into a recession.

Additionally, even if the claims in the video were to be taken at face value, not all of the things the video claims Trump is doing would necessarily indicate a healthy American economy, including a weaker U.S. dollar, lower Federal Reserve interest rates, and lower mortgage rates.

### Right-wing media tell Americans to embrace the tariff pain, wait for a “golden age”

04/04/25 3:56 PM EDT

### Fox embraces “the largest peacetime tax increase” in American history as Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs loom

04/01/25 4:43 PM EDT

### MSNBC's Steve Rattner: Trump has made America the “loser” in his global trade war

04/04/25

---

mma 10 24

4chan “/pol/” users have shared the site for Trump Force 47 hundreds of times

Far-right media figures have also been involved with Trump Force 47 — Trump’s “official army” of volunteers' training efforts

Written by Alex Kaplan

Published 10/03/24 2:14 PM EDT

Users of a far-right 4chan forum have shared the website for former President Donald Trump’s grassroots canvassing effort, Trump Force 47, hundreds of times, a Media Matters review has found.

4chan’s far-right “politically incorrect” message board, commonly known as “/pol/,” is a hotbed for white nationalist and racist content and harassment campaigns. The board played a major role in spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and it was the birthplace of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee launched Trump Force 47 in May to engage “tens of thousands of new volunteers across the country to participate in a neighbor-to-neighbor organizing program hyper-focused on mobilizing highly-targeted voters.” Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign describes it as the “official army of volunteer neighborhood organizers working together to defeat Kamala Harris and the far-left liberal democrats.” Volunteers, including in swing states, can seemingly be involved with neighborhood canvassing, poll watching, and other grassroots activities.

Users on 4chan’s /pol/ message board have been promoting the organizing effort. A Media Matters review found that since Trump Force 47 launched in May, the URL for the site of the effort has been shared on /pol/ more than 350 times.

These posts included messages pushing extremist rhetoric, which have been repeatedly shared. One included the lines “BAN THE TRANS,” “DEPORT THE HORDE!,” “AUDIT THE FRAUD,” “HANG THE RIGGERS,” and “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” (a reference to a white nationalist campaign popularized on the forum).

Another one that was repeatedly shared urges fellow users to “MAKE A BIG IMPACT WITH A SMALL TIME COMMITMENT” and “JOIN TRUMP FORCE 47 TODAY!, claiming that a “small time commitment will have a big impact on the outcome of November’s elections.”

And another repeatedly shared message tells users to go to Trump Force 47’s website and “start here if you want to help in a grassroots fashion, but are unsure of where to start.”

Other posts have seemingly connected the effort to “train[ing] the whole electorate” and getting “everyone you know down to the ballot boxes, get them cameras, get them clip boards.”

Some included text like, “I’ll be at mar a largo for the victory party. I’m racking up those trumpforce47.com points,” comments about working with Trump Force 47 to “do a quick dox” and call Pennsylvania voters, and demands to “stop sitting on your ass” and “become Trump’s strongest soldier” and to “take our country back.”

Trump Force 47’s URL has also been shared in other far-right online spaces, like among QAnon figures and users on the far-right forum TheDonald.

Far-right media figures, including Roseanne Barr, Jack Posobiec, and Rogan O’Handley — who have promoted QAnon, pushed various conspiracy theories, and spread misinformation, respectively — have taken part in Trump Force 47 training events. Posobiec’s trainings were reportedly “touted as a way to ‘receive insider insights from Jack Posobiec on the campaign’s efforts.’”

---

Right-wing media and social media users spread conspiracy theories about the Trump rally shooting

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN & PAYTON ARMSTRONG

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JASON CAMPBELL & NOAH DOWE

PUBLISHED 07/16/24

Following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, right-wing media figures and social media users have spread baseless conspiracy theories and claims about the shooting.

They have amplified a 4chan hoax that the Secret Service gave a stand-down order during the shooting; made baseless allegations that Alex Soros was connected to the shooting; falsely claimed a protester at a 2016 Trump rally was the shooter; suggested the shooting could be attributed to the intelligence community, the “deep state,” foreign actors, or an “RNC/Israeli hit job”; and connected the assassination attempt to biblical prophecy and “the hand of God.”

## A gunman attempted to shoot Trump at a July 13 rally

On July 13, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, injuring Trump, killing one rally attendee, and seriously wounding two others. The 20-year-old suspected gunman reportedly opened fire from a rooftop near the rally, and was fatally shot by the Secret Service. His motivation remains unclear. The New York Times, [7/14/24]

## Far-right figures spread a 4chan hoax that there was a stand-down order before the shooting

:{A :{4chan}: poster falsely claimed to be a law enforcement sniper who was at the Pennsylvania rally and said the Secret Service “refused to give the order to take out the perp.” A user on 4chan’s far-right “politically incorrect” message board (commonly known as “/pol/”) claimed to be “the officer in the famous photo of the two snipers on the roof at Trump's rally” and said that they “had the assassin in my sights for at least 3 minutes, but the head of the secret service refused to give the order to take out the perp.” The Associated Press reported that the claim was false, noting that “the Secret Service and the Butler Police Department say they have no agents, officers or employees with the name of the person claiming to be the sharpshooter.” :{4chan,:(style="background-color:#ff8000ff"):}:** [7/14/24; The Associated Press, 7/15/24]}:

Social media users earned tens of thousands of shares and likes promoting the 4chan post. Multiple users, including QAnon figure Nicholas Veniamin, shared the 4chan posts or its claims, raking up tens of thousands of shares and “likes” on X and Instagram. According to CrowdTangle, posts on Instagram sharing the 4chan hoax received more than 80,000 interactions. Twitter/X, [7/14/24, 7/14/24, 7/14/24, 7/15/24; Instagram, 7/14/24; CrowdTangle, accessed 7/16/24; Media Matters, 3/4/22]

A post amplifying the 4chan hoax was one of the top posts on Reddit’s conspiracy subreddit. On the prominent subreddit “r/conspiracy,” a user posted an image of the 4chan post — though they added, “BIG grain of salt recommended.” The post was one of the top posts in terms of “upvotes” in a 24-hour period between July 14 and July 15. Reddit, [7/14/24, 7/15/24; Media Matters, 9/18/23]

## QAnon figures revived a baseless conspiracy theory that Alex Soros had threatened Trump, apparently suggesting it was connected to the shooting

In January, Alex Soros was baselessly accused of threatening Trump after posting an article from The Atlantic on social media. Conspiracy theorists baselessly accused Alex Soros — the son of billionaire philanthropist George Soros and a frequent target of right-wing attacks and antisemitic conspiracy theories — of threatening Trump after he posted an Atlantic article that featured stock photos of a bullet hole and someone holding cash on X (formerly Twitter). Media Matters, [1/23/24]

QAnon figure Woke Societies after the shooting: “Don’t forgot Alex Soros posted this in January of this year. Demons.” Telegram, [7/13/24; Media Matters, 4/18/22]

QAnon figure Pepe Lives Matter: “Remember when Alex Soros tweeted a bullet shot with the number 47 in this ominous tweet that people thought was about Donald Trump and now he was just shot.” Telegram, [7/13/24, 1/7/21]

QAnon figure Ben Moore, known online as “Sun Tzu,” responded to a user claiming Alex Soros “hinted at what was coming in a X post” by asking if George and Alex Soros should “be designated as enemy combatants at this point.” Twitter/X, [7/15/24; Media Matters, 4/24/24]

Ann Vandersteel, who has promoted QAnon, posted an image of Alex Soros’ tweet with the text “Remember this?” Twitter/X, [7/13/24; Media Matters, 6/7/24]

A user on the online forum GreatAwakening, which is dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, shared a post saying “Y’all remember when Alex Soros posted $47 and a bullet hole?” GreatAwakening, [7/14/24; Media Matters, 6/30/20]

## Far-right figures falsely claimed a protester at a 2016 Trump rally was the shooter

QAnon figure QAnon John falsely claimed that “a guy affiliated with ANTIFA” was actually the shooter. John Sabal, known online as “QAnon John,” falsely posted that the shooter was actually “a guy affiliated with ANTIFA that was actually arrested back in 2016 for being involved in an Anti-Trump protest in Pittsburgh,” and that in response he was “calling on the FBI, DHS & DOJ to designate ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” Reuters reported that the claim is false, noting that the 2016 protester was “not the suspect identified by the FBI as the shooter” and that the photo shared online “does not resemble the suspect identified by authorities.” Gab, [7/14/24; Dallas Observer, 8/31/21; Reuters, 7/15/24; WTAE, 4/14/16]

Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone claimed that “a number of people have contacted me to say that the shooter is not the man they’ve identified.” During an appearance on conspiracy theory network Infowars, Stone said that “a number of people have contacted me to say that the shooter is not the man they’ve identified, but rather” someone else — the same person mentioned by QAnon John — “who appears to more closely resemble the picture we've been shown that is allegedly the corpse of the shooter.” [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 7/15/24]

Far-right figures baselessly suggested the shooting could be attributed to the “intelligence agencies,” the “deep state,” foreign actors, or “an RNC/Israeli hit job”

White nationalist Nick Fuentes floated the idea that “the intelligence agencies” could have been behind Trump‘s shooting. During an X Space discussion following the attempted shooting, Fuentes claimed that “it was either the intelligence agencies or it was these other guys who are gonna benefit with a more favorable advocate in the White House” — after listing people and entities including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ukraine — who “tried to knock him out” with the attempted shooting. Twitter/X, [7/13/24]

Alex Jones claimed that the Trump shooting was “clearly” done by the “deep state.” In the X Space with Fuentes, Jones claimed of the attempted shooting, “Clearly this was deep state.” He said it was evidence of “the deep state trying to kill him,” adding, “This was no accident, in my view.” Twitter/X, [7/13/24]

White nationalist Stew Peters baselessly claimed it was “an RNC/Israeli hit job.” According to Peters, “Everyone is blaming Biden and the Dems when this was clearly an RNC/Israeli hit job.” Twitter/X, [7/13/24; Media Matters, 3/13/23]

Right-wing personality Candace Owens said that if she were a conspiracy theorist, she might think the FBI was behind the Trump shooting. While discussing on her YouTube show the FBI’s efforts to access the alleged shooter’s phone (which it has since done), Owens said, “If I were a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not — I’m not a conspiracy theorist — some people might be thinking, though, those conspiracy theorists might be thinking, like, maybe it’s because the FBI did it. Maybe the FBI doesn’t want to get into the phone that connects the kid to the deep state.” YouTube, *Candace Owens*, [7/15/24; The New York Times, 7/15/24]

QAnon figure Clandestine claimed, “Whether this was a CIA-coordinated plot, or just a lone shooter, the Deep State are responsible regardless.” Jacob Creech, known online as “Clandestine,” added, “Either they planned the hit, or their years of violent rhetoric and endless MSM propaganda, created the vitriol that led to the attack.” Telegram, [7/14/24; Anti-Defamation League, 4/5/22]

## Far-right Christian media and right-wing social media influencers invoked biblical prophecy and “the hand of God” in discussing the shooting

Charisma News, which has been a sponsor of the ReAwaken America Tour led by Michael Flynn, published multiple articles linking the assassination attempt to biblical prophecy. An article titled “3 Prophecies Fulfilled with the Trump Assassination Attempt” claimed that “at least three different prophetic voices have had words about something massive that was coming to America.” Another article, titled “Prophecy Foretold Attempted Assassination Months in Advance” and focused on a March 2024 interview with guest Brandon Biggs, stated that “the events of Saturday, July 13, appear to have fulfilled the prophecy Biggs gave in startlingly accurate fashion.” Charisma News, [7/14/24, 7/14/24; Rolling Stone, 2/28/23]

Self-described prophet Amanda Grace said “prayer matters” because the assassination attempt was “meant to kill him and by the hand of God it grazed him” and claimed the “Lord warned” her that it would happen. Grace added: “Saul did this to David. This is that same spirit rising up. Saul attempted to kill David on multiple occasions and never was able to succeed.” She also suggested that God had warned her multiple times that Trump would be hurt, claiming that “the Lord warned [on] June 8” and “he warned it again two days ago.” YouTube, *Ark of Grace Ministries*,[; Media Matters, 5/30/24] VID]

While discussing the assassination attempt on FlashPoint, commentator and self-described prophet Lance Wallnau mentioned a prophetic “decree” and attributed Trump’s survival to “the impulse of God or an angel that enabled him to not be hit.”Wallnau said that “the brush with mortality is a moment also for President Trump to realize that God himself is preserving him. And let’s agree together in this decree that he will have an ear to hear in every key situation what the spirit of God is actually saying. And he’ll wisely and shrewdly navigate, turning to the left or to the right as the wisdom of God dictates, and that he will stay one step ahead of death.” Twitter/X, [7/13/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]

Far-right figures Dom Lucre and Jack Posobiec shared a video of supposed prophet Brandon Biggs predicting three months ago that Trump would be injured. Lucre wrote that “the prophet Brandon Bible’s prophecy about Donald Trump’s assassination attempt from 3 months ago has resurfaced” and said, “This has been biblical since day one.” Posobiec, who has a penchant for spreading conspiracy theories, amplified the video to his 2.5 million followers. Twitter/X, [7/14/24, 7/14/24; The Washington Post, 8/15/17; Forbes, 7/27/23]

Christian nationalist pastor Sean Feucht shared the video of Biggs and wrote, “Prophecy from March 14, 2024 about Trump being shot in the ear in an assassination attempt!” Twitter/X, [7/14/24; Media Matters, 9/14/23]

---

an 3 23

no lnx

vid

man who allegedly posted death threats online aimed at a Florida sheriff was arrested on March 6, The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.

Richard Golden, 38, was charged with second-degree felony written threats to kill or injure, Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said in a press conference this Tuesday.

Chitwood, who was the target of Golden's threats, said that Golden was unemployed and living in a back bedroom at his mother's house and harbored anti-police views.

Golden made the threats in a 4CHAN chatroom after Chitwood spoke out against the Goyim Defense League (GDL), a neo-Nazi group, for spreading fear and antisemitic hate literature about the Jewish community in Volusia County.

"Just shoot Chitwood in the head and he stops being a problem. They have to find a new guy to be the problem. But shooting Chitwood in the head solves an immediate problem permanently. Just shoot Chitwood in the head and murder him," Golden reportedly wrote.

The Volusia County Sheriff's Office along with other government agencies launched an investigation after they were notified of the threats.

"They discovered he is anti-government, he is anti-law enforcement and like every active shooter that we come across he is a marginalized member of society who spent hours and hours and hours in these extremist chat groups," Chitwood said.

"Here is this clown sitting in his bedroom who is indoctrinated by this bull (expletive) and thinks the best way to solve the problem is to put a bullet in my head," Chitwood said.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Man found at mother's house, arrested for threatening to murder Volusia County Sheriff

youtu.be

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Former neo-Nazi: Tucker Carlson sounds like me ›

New report reveals how neo-Nazis and other violent extremists have ‘taken refuge in digital currencies’ ›

Musk’s Twitter is 'welcoming with open arms' a 'full-fledged Nazi' — and recommending users follow him: reports ›

numerous links to white supremacist terror may finally push 8chan offline

What comes next depends on tech and social media companies

WRITTEN BY OLIVER MUSHTARE

PUBLISHED 08/08/19 12:46 PM EDT

Following last weekend’s massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, TX, in which a gunman killed 22 people and wounded 24 in a suspected hate crime, one of the internet’s foremost hate sites is struggling to survive.

The 21-year-old man who police say is responsible for the attack wrote a manifesto, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a federal official, in which he claimed to be fighting a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He posted the manifesto to 8chan, an imageboard website where users post messages anonymously.

Following the bloodshed in El Paso, the website security company Cloudflare dropped 8chan as a client. As 8chan had been relying on Cloudflare’s services to prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in which hackers crash servers by overwhelming them with traffic from multiple sources, the decision to sever ties with 8chan effectively knocked it offline.

In the past, Cloudflare has refused to drop clients over hateful speech. In a March 2017 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that among Cloudflare’s clientele were “at least 48 hate websites” across Europe “dedicated to recruiting, organizing and spreading extremist ideologies.”

The company had initially declined to drop The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, relenting only after the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing one and wounding scores of others.

In a statement posted to Cloudflare’s blog on August 5, two days after the El Paso attack, CEO Matthew Prince explained that 8chan is “lawless” and “has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.”

“Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community,” Prince wrote, “they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.”

From its very inception, 8chan has been a font of extremist content. Founded in 2013 by Frederick “Hotwheels” Brennan, the message board was designed to be a less restrictive version of its sister site, 4chan. (Brennan stopped running 8chan a few years ago and now says he regrets his creation.)

In 2014, when 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole banned threads about Gamergate, an online harassment campaign against female game developers, disaffected users flocked to 8chan, where they could feel free to post their targets’ personal information. Just last year, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg was “swatted” days after his address was posted to 8chan (it was also posted on 4chan, but the site seems to have deleted the posts).

In 2014, reports emerged that 8chan users were openly “shar[ing] graphic images of children, plus links to hardcore child pornography.” The following year, Google virtually blacklisted the site over “suspected child abuse content.”

Yet it wasn’t this history of “lawless” behavior that convinced Prince to drop 8chan as a client. Instead, it was the growing body count. In 2019 alone, 8chan has been linked to three separate acts of white supremacist terror, including the mass shooting in El Paso, which have left a total of 74 people dead.

In March, a white supremacist gunned down 51 worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prior to the attack, he posted a link to a 74-page manifesto on 8chan’s “politically incorrect” board, “/pol/,” along with a link to a livestream of the carnage.

The Christchurch shooter’s manifesto promoted the white supremacist “great replacement” theory -- the belief that white populations are being systematically replaced by way of low white birthrates coupled with non-white immigration -- and was replete with memes and inside jokes. It was a language the users of 8chan spoke fluently.

Over a month after the Christchurch shootings, another young white supremacist opened fire on a synagogue in Poway, CA, killing one and wounding three others. He too posted a link to a manifesto on 8chan, which accusedthe Jewish people of deicide, among a litany of other imagined crimes.

In response to these three shootings, Prince wrote that Cloudflare “draw[s] the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design” and that 8chan “will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.”

What happened next was akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

8chan sought the protection of BitMitigate, a Vancouver-based cybersecurity company that protects websites from DDoS attacks. The company was acquired in February by Epik, a domain registrar that routinely provides its services to white supremacist and far-right websites. Shortly after 8chan secured the services of BitMitigate, Stanford researcher Alex Stamos tweeted that Epik actually rents servers from a company called Voxility. Voxility responded by cutting ties with Epik, at once knocking both 8chan and The Daily Stormer, which also used BitMitigate, offline.

In a posted to his YouTube channel, Jim Watkins, whose company N.T. Technology currently owns 8chan, blasted the decisions from Cloudflare and Voxility as “cowardly” and “sinister behavior.” As taps played in the background, Watkins solemnly told viewers that it was now “time [for 8chan] to find a new home.”

One of the “new home[s]” is apparently ZeroNet, a “decentralized and open-source peer-to-peer version of the internet.” On ZeroNet, 8chan can be even more lawless, and “users leave themselves exposed to illegal content like child pornography.” As a user on the white supremacist online forum Stormfront crowed, “The Jews along with their C.I.A. spooks and government puppets can't touch it.”

In an August 6 tweet, however, 8chan moderator Ron Watkins -- Jim Watkins’ son -- stated that the version of 8chan hosted on ZeroNet “was not made by our team” and he had “no idea who set that up.”

In any case, 8chan’s struggle to stay online highlights the positives and pitfalls of deplatforming. On the one hand, cutting off a white supremacist website’s means of operating online, or choking off its finances, can effectively disrupt white supremacists’ ability to organize and spread their propaganda, especially in the short term.

On the other, white supremacists will search for alternatives to spread their hate. As Cloudflare’s Prince correctly predicted, 8chan quickly returned after his company banned it, using a competitor’s services to do so. “While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online,” he wrote.

At this very moment, white supremacists are using the messaging app Telegram to spread violent and racist rhetoric, including calls to murder law enforcement officials and attack places of worship. Twitter still allows scores of high-profile white supremacists to maintain accounts, some of them verified.

8chan currently operates a verified Twitter account, in spite of recent calls to #untwitter8chan. Even Amazon, the world’s largest and most profitable online retailer, provides assistance to white supremacists by allowing them to sell their products through its website. As The Daily Beast reported, this includes allowing Books.audio, another company that Watkins owns, to sell audiobooks on the platform.

Ultimately, it will take a concerted effort by tech and social media companies to keep hate and extremism offline. Otherwise, it will always find a way back.

Oliver Mushtare is a freelance writer and attorney who researches white supremacists and other extremist movements. He has a bachelor's degree in political science from SUNY Cortland and a law degree from Western New England University School of Law.

620

by Matthew Valasik, Louisiana State Universityand Shannon Reid, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

As protests about police violence among black people continue and become more widespread across the U.S., certain individuals and groups have begun to stand out – including anarchists, agitators and members of a variety of far-right groups.

With the country’s long history of racist killings, it may be confusing to think that racists and white supremacists are among those objecting to the killing of people of color.

But people affiliated with far-right groups aren’t trying to be part of the overall protest movement. Having researched these groups, we think it’s likely that they are attempting to hijack the event for their own purposes.

As researchers of street gangs and far-right groups, we see that in this case, they want to stoke a civil war between the races – one they think they can win. By antagonizing police, destroying property, or intimidating the public by adopting military gear – including weapons – these groups are attempting to instigate violence between the police, protesters and the public. Rousting law enforcement to violently retaliate against black people en masse is the first step.

Instigating civil war

The far-right is not unified by a strict ideology. It is a broad movement with various factions vying for greater amounts of attention and influence.

In spite of this tension, our research shows that many share the conspiracy belief that Western governments are corrupt and controlled by the New World Order, a cabal of wealthy Jewish elites. To them, wealthy Jewish investor and democracy advocate George Soros is the puppet master of the world economy.

William Luther Pierce’s 1978 novel “The Turner Diaries,” which has come to be known as “the bible of the racist right,” lays out a plan to instigate a race war and bring about the federal government’s collapse. The book has inspired violence from the far-right, most notably the 1995 bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

“Accelerationism” – the idea that inducing chaos, provoking law enforcement, and promoting political tension will hasten the collapse of Western government – has taken root among far-right groups. One such group, the “Boogaloo Bois,” identified by their penchant for wearing Hawaiian shirts, has been observed at protests in Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Oregon.As with any far-right movement, “Boogaloo Bois” groups are rather unstructured and have varied beliefs, lacking any hierarchical organization.

In Las Vegas, three “Boogaloo Bois” were arrested with firearms and a plan to incite violence during George Floyd protests. Social media posts and online chat groups have also shown them attempting to infiltrate other protests across the country.

Joining the crowds provides these groups an opportunity to discredit protesters by inciting looting, rioting, violence and vandalism – which they hope will spark like-minded white Americans to resist the civil disobedience of protesters. Already, there are roving bands of armed white counterprotesters at protests across America.

Other far-right extremists are talking on social media about the protests requiring a lot of police attention and see an opportunity to engage in targeted terror attacks. Their overall intention is the same: fanning flames to burn down the federal government, making room for them to establish a whites-only country.

Matthew Valasik, Associate Professor of Sociology, Louisiana State Universityand Shannon Reid, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

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

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-conspiracy-theory-post-about-coronavirus-spreading-social-media

no lnx many

QAnon conspiracy theory post about the coronavirus is spreading on social media

The QAnon conspiracy theory, alreadylabeled a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI, is now also a threat to public health

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/24/20 1:41 PM EDT

A conspiratorial post about the novel coronavirus by “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, is spreading throughout social media, harming efforts to convey that the virus is a legitimate danger to public health.

The QAnon conspiracy theory revolves around an anonymous account known as “Q,” and is premised around the claim that President Donald Trump was working with then-special counsel Robert Mueller to take down the president’s perceived enemies, the “deep state,” and pedophile rings. Multiple adherents to the conspiracy theory have been tied to acts of violence, including murders and an attempted kidnapping, and an FBI field office released a memo in May 2019 that listed QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The conspiracy theory started on far-right message board site 4chan and later moved to fellow far-right message board site 8chan, which has since relaunched as 8kun. The owner of 8chan/8kun, Jim Watkins, has shown support for QAnon and helped establish aQAnon super PAC. (Beyond the QAnon conspiracy theory, 8chan/8kun has been linked to multiple instances of white supremacist terrorism, including the August 2019 massacre in El Paso, Texas.)

On the evening of March 23, “Q” posted on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board about the coronavirus. The post used race-baiting language, referring to the illness as the “China virus,” and implied that the virus was a bioweapon created in order to harm Trump’s reelection chances. (This false conspiracy theory has spread elsewhere on social media.)

Q post coronavirus pix]

Since then, the post has spread throughout Facebook groups and Twitter among QAnon supporters, where it has received thousands of engagements combined, being cited for proof that “the virus is a Cabal weapon” and a “false flag” that “democrats look suspiciously responsible for.”The “Q” post was also able to spread thanks to QAnon apps that are offered on the Google Play Store (which Google profits from).

Q post coronavirus Twitter2

Q post coronavirus Facebook1

Q post coronavirus Twitter3

The “Q” post’s spread comes as supporters of the conspiracy theory have been using social media platforms to spread falsehoods about the virus being some kind of false flag by the “deep state” for population control or a “military operation” to target supposed elites. They have also promoted dangerous false cures for the disease such as drinking bleach.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/pro-trump-media-claim-cdc-overhyping-coronavirus-because-nancy-messonnier

Dr. Nancy Messonnier is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her impressive bio lists a number of top positions that she has held in the CDC, and it also notes that she has received multiple awards.

In recent days, Messonnier has taken a leading role in warning the public about the threat that the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19 poses to the United States. The Wall Street Journal noted that Messonnier said it was just a question of when coronavirus will circulate in the U.S. The Daily Beast quoted her as saying, “We expect to see more cases of person-to-person spread among close contacts. ... The goal here is to slow entry of this virus into the United States.” CNBC quoted her calling for schools to divide students into smaller groups or to close entirely and conduct courses online. Many other outlets have quoted her as well.

But right-wing media have begun to coalesce around a conspiracy theory that Messonnier’s warning should be disregarded because she is the sister of former Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein was a frequent target of pro-Trump propagandists for appointing Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the Russia investigation.

From a QAnon Twitter account to Rush Limbaugh's show

The conspiracy theory about Messonnier and Rosenstein goes back at least to a QAnon Twitter account noting their connection in early January.

It really started to pick up speed this week.

On February 25, Rush Limbaugh ranted about Messonnier, suggesting an anti-Trump conspiracy after he learned she’s related to Rosenstein. It was also picked up by a poster on white nationalist message board 8kun. Soon thereafter, it jumped to 4chan's “/pol/,” a slightly less extreme white nationalist message board. The Conservative Treehouse, a right-wing blog featured on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show before, also posted about the conspiracy theory.

Others followed suit:

On the morning of the February 26, Joe Hoft (the brother of Jim Hoft, proprietor of the Gateway Pundit) posted about it. Hoft wrote that Messonnier’s remarks while President Donald Trump was in India were “a startling rebuke” and that it was “eerily similar to past Presidential trips when former and corrupt DAG Rod Rosenstein and the corrupt and criminal Mueller gang would drop shocking news as the President was overseas.”

Later on the 26th, Rush Limbaugh returned to the conspiracy theory, with the transcript of his show hyperlinking to Hoft’s post. After suggesting that Messonnier was not to be trusted, Limbaugh quickly changed the subject to suggest that the virus may just disappear once the weather warms up. Scientists have cast doubt on that theory as well.

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly furious at Messonnier:

see something awful https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-12516

11/19

all points bks ny 2019

Dale Beran's new book, It Came from Something Awful,

Beran's a writer and cartoonist who got a lot of attention for a 2017 piece he published on Medium titled "4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump."

https://www.c-span.org/video/?463096-1/it-awful

july 30, 2019

It Came From Something Awful

Dale Beran talked about his book, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, in which he profiled the counterculture online hub 4chan.

——

DALE BERAN is a writer and artist whose work has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, The Huffington Post, The Daily Dot, The Nib, and The Baltimore City Paper. His recent article on Medium, 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump, became a sensation that was shared and recommended by JK Rowling and Marc Maron, among many others. He has a BA in classics from Bard and a JD from Fordham. He lives in Baltimore.

"An insider's history of the website at the end of the world, which burst into politics and memed Donald Trump into the White House. The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called http://4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture. Dale Beran has observed the website's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. 4chan is a microcosm of the internet itself--simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. It was the original meme machine, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together. During the recession of the late 2000's, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site's ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider's knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan's strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to--according to some--memeing Donald Trump into the White House"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction : the garbage fire eternal

-- Countering counterculture

-- The two sprouls

-- It came from something awful

-- Moot in raspberry heaven

-- Memes, trolls, and Chan girls

-- 2008 : anonymous accidentally starts a worldwide revolution

-- 2008-2011 : from hope to despair to change

-- Anon peeks into the Palantir

-- From gentlemen to robots

-- From robots to Nazis

-- Gamergate : 4chan's depression quest

-- Trump the frog

-- Steve Bannon : nerd out of time

-- #War on the sea owl

-- Tumblr and the mosaic of identity

-- Politics steps through the looking glass

-- Tumblr goes to college

-- 2016 : ejecta assemble

-- 2017 : the alt-right implodes

-- 2018 : what a time to be alive.

Bibliography, etc. note

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Publisher

New York : All Points Books

https://www.wired.com/story/dale-beran-it-came-from-something-awful-review/

Further Reading

• ‘The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online’ by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Miltner If you’re still looking for more web weirdness, Phillips and Miltner explore strange internet artifacts—from #YesAllWomen to Boaty McBoatface to Donald Trump’s Twitter account—to understand the ways internet culture can both create community or destroy order. 

• ‘The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives’ by Jen Schradie Maybe hashtag activism, for all its flashiness and vaunted successes (the Arab Spring, #MeToo), doesn’t actually work. Schradie considers how conservative digital activism has achieved greater success IRL. 

• ‘Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and Its Human Fallout’ by Ginger Gorman If you’re still not sure about the difference between lols and lulz or online harassment and Russian meddling, Gorman will enlighten you in this deeply sourced, deeply personal account of digital aggression. 

• ‘Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age’ by Alice Marwick In the time between the dot–com boom and the App Store, Silicon Valley was coding the bones of the social media platforms that now shape our lives. Marwick explores why the democratic revolution many techno-utopians expected has yet to arrive. 

• ‘(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work’ by Brooke Erin Duffy You know you’re a woman in the gig economy when you’re expected to cheerfully work for free. Duffy’s research into the world of fashion designers, bloggers, and designers illuminates the gendered stakes of the collapsing creative economy.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/white-extremists-are-on-the-rise-around-the-world-emboldened-by-heroes-and-hate-music/

(AFP) – They may lack centralised organisation or even a common goal, but white supremacists encouraged by the exploits of extremist “heroes” canonised on social media pose an ever-growing security threat, analysts say. After nine people in Germany were killed by a gunman with “a very deeply racist attitude,” the country’s interior minister on Friday warned that the far right still posed a “very high” security threat.The shootings on Wednesday at a shisha bar and a cafe in the city of Hanau were the latest in a growing list of attacks in the West attributed to self-appointed defenders

...

Emboldened by 'heroes' and hate music, white extremists on the rise

AFP

Didier LAURAS

,AFP•February 21, 2020

[A day after nine people were killed by a gunman with "a very deeply racist attitude," Germany's interior minister warned that the far right still posed a "very high" security threat (AFP Photo/Odd ANDERSEN)

Paris (AFP) - They may lack centralised organisation or even a common goal, but white supremacists encouraged by the exploits of extremist "heroes" canonised on social media pose an ever-growing security threat, analysts say.

After nine people in Germany were killed by a gunman with "a very deeply racist attitude," the country's interior minister on Friday warned that the far right still posed a "very high" security threat.

The shootings on Wednesday at a shisha bar and a cafe in the city of Hanau were the latest in a growing list of attacks in the West attributed to self-appointed defenders of a "white race" perceived to be under threat from migration, globalisation and Islam.

From Christchurch to Pittsburg, Halle to El Paso, militants have been emboldened by a narrative of hatred spread on the internet with an ease that observers find worrying.

"This digital ecosystem is fuelling a cumulative momentum, which serves to lower 'thresholds' to violence for those engaged in this space, both in the United States and elsewhere," Graham Macklin, assistant professor at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, said in a recent article.

One attack "encourages and inspires another, creating a growing 'canon' of 'saints' and 'martyrs' for others to emulate," he wrote -- noting that Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in 2011, had become "an aspirational figure" for many.

Internet a 'facilitator' -

According to the Soufan Center, a global security think-tank, white supremacism has entered a phase of globalisation driven by niche websites popular among neo-Nazis, such as Gab and 8chan, and even the so-called "white power" music scene.

"White supremacy extremists rely on a diverse set of techniques to radicalise potential recruits," it said in a recent report, with attackers "lionised" on such platforms "as heroes, martyrs, 'saints,' 'commanders' and other honorifics."

White extremists do not share a single, common goal -- some seek self rule, others the expulsion of minorities -- but all believe their "race" to be under threat.

Many adherents to transnational white supremacy extremism hold millenarian and apocalyptic beliefs about an imminent race war, with some ardent believers in the end of time and influenced by elements of Christian identity," Soufan said.

Some believe their governments are conspiring with minority populations to bring about their demise -- the so-called Great Replacement theory, based on the title of a 2011 book by French writer Renaud Camus.

Anais Voy-Gillis, an extreme right specialist at the French Institute of Geopolitics, said: "The current context, with notably the migrant crisis of 2015, has surely contributed to the radicalisation of many people who are now ready to cross over to action."

Not only fringe sites are used to spread messages of fear, hate, and racial superiority.

The gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last March, killing 51 Muslim worshippers, live-streamed his attack live on Facebook.

A few months later, an anti-Semitic attack in the east German city of Halle, which claimed two lives, was posted on the streaming platform Twitch.

"There are many radical groups in the world and the internet is a facilitator for them to get together nationally and even internationally," Voy-Gillis told AFP.

- 'Exporter' of white supremacism -

In Europe, a well-organised coordination of far-right efforts seems unlikely, for now.

Last June, a French parliamentary committee conducted an analysis of far-right groups in the country, including attempts to make contact with like-minded organisations elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and Austria.

At the time, the boss of France's DGSI domestic intelligence service Nicolas Lerner told investigators the chances were "extremely limited" that these movements would have the ability to work together at a European level.

But within a country's borders, the threat is real.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday that right-wing extremism was the "biggest security threat" facing his country, as he announced a more visible police presence and bolstered surveillance at mosques, train stations, airports and borders.

In the United States, an FBI report last November showed that 65 percent of "lone wolf" perpetrators of terror attacks where white.

Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of 52 such attacks committed in the United States between 1972 and 2015 were motivated by ideologies "advocating for the superiority of the white race," it found.

It was the same percentage as attackers motivated by radical Islamist doctrine.

"For almost two decades, the United States has pointed abroad at countries who are exporters of extreme Islamist ideology," Russell Travers, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in November.

"We are now being seen as the exporters of white supremacist ideology; that's a reality with which we are going to have to deal," he said. yahoo

https://www.mediamatters.org/maga-trolls/fake-news-and-alt-right-are-pushing-forged-documents-aid-marine-le-pen-frances-election

Forged documents originating on 4chan alleging that French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was evading taxes spread online thanks to an ecosystem that includes social media, “alt-right” outlets, and fake news purveyors. The campaign was seemingly aided by Russian-linked entities, and it subsequently reached Macron’s opponent, who aired the claim in a public debate.

Macron is competing in a May 7 runoff against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. On May 3, hours before a scheduled debate between Macron and Le Pen, an anonymous user on 4chan posted documents purporting to show that Macron used a shell company to dodge taxes. Users on the forum responded that the documents should be sent to “independent journalists” and “the alternative media” like “Cernovic (sic), Breitbart, and so on,” and encouraged each other to “spam” the documents “on social media” such as Twitter to get “it trending.” They also said to “send it to Le Pen.” The documents soon spread on Twitter, with many of the Twitter accounts promoting them appearing to have connections to Russia, according to a Belgian researcher. The claim was promoted by “alt-right” media figures such as Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.

That these figures would attempt to smear Le Pen’s opponent is not surprising given that Le Pen is widely admired by much of the “alt-right” and closely tied with Russia.

Along with Twitter, 4chan’s campaign was picked up by forums on 8chan and Reddit; “alt-right” fringe outlets The Gateway Pundit, Got News, Zero Hedge, and Daily Stormer; and fake news purveyor Before It’s News.

The 4chan-based documents eventually reached Le Pen herself. During her debate with Macron, she said, “I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas.”Le Pen later backed down on her claim, and Macron filed a legal complaint against her for the statement.Multiple outlets have reported that the documents were fake, with The Telegraph noting that they were “widely denounced ascrudeforgeries.” Additionally, following Le Pen's accusation, the French prosecutor's office has opened an investigation regarding “suspicions of fake news being spread to influence Sunday's presidential vote.”

The case is yet another example of the way the misinformation ecosystem involving the “alt-right” and fake news purveyor:{s:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: amplifiesfringe falsities and lies (and even Kremlin-connected conspiracy theories). The network has often succeeded in pushing those false claims into more traditional conservative and mainstream outlets and, thus, the public realm.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/police-probing-alleged-white-supremacist-views-of-el-paso-gunman-who-left-20-dead

no lnx

Police probing alleged white supremacist views of El Paso gunman who left 20 dead

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 4, 2019

Within 13 hours in two U.S. cities—El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio—at least 29 people were killed in mass shootings on Saturday and Sunday.

Police in Dayton, Ohio were gathering information on Sunday morning about a shooting that took place in the city’s downtown Oregon neighborhood at about 1:00am. Nine people were killed by a gunman who used what one eyewitness described as anassault rifle and wore body armor, and at least 16 were injured.

Just a few hours before the shooting in Washington, D.C., the hundreds of protesters representing the national gun control group Moms Demand Action marched from the White House to the Capitol to demand legislative action following Saturday morning’s shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

@nicksuplina

Hundreds of @momsdemand and #StudentsDemandAction volunteers and survivors of gun violence spontaneously making their voices heard in DC. #NotOneMore #GSU19

A number of observers on social media expressed grief over the two shootings taking place within a day of one another.

G.E. Anderson

We live in a country where the mass shooting that took place yesterday in El Paso, Texas is not the top story because there was another mass shooting overnight in Dayton, Ohio. #MakeAmericaSaneAgain

@Will_Bunch

How many others did what I did? -- fell asleep with the latest news out of El Paso on the TV, slept fitfully for about 6 hours and woke up at 5 a.m. startled to see carnage in Dayton on the screen. In America, the nightmares come when you wake up

@tedlieu

Still grieving over the mass shooting in El Paso. My heart breaks again for the victims of another mass shooting in Dayton.

The policies of @realDonaldTrump & his enablers have not made us safer. Time to give others a chance. Vote out those who do nothing about gun violence. https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1157903408201949185 …

BNO News

@BNONews

UPDATE: Multiple fatalities, others seriously injured after gunman opens fire in Dayton, Ohio https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/08/active-shooter-in-dayton-ohio/ …

Investigators on Sunday were examining an anti-immigration “manifesto” posted online by a 21-year-old gunman who opened fire in El Paso late Saturday morning, killing at least 20 people and injuring26.

“If reports are true, this senseless attack cannot be separated from the escalating politics of hate and fear,” said Ernest Coverson, head of Amnesty International USA’s gun control campaign. “This is simply unacceptable. Everyone has the human right to live in safety, whether they are going to the mall or walking down the street in their neighborhood.”

The shooter fired multiple rounds with an AK-47-style rifle, walking through the store and shooting shoppers aisle-by-aisle.

The manifesto was posted on the online forum 8chan less than 20 minutes before the first 911 callwas made about the shooting, according to the New York Times. The forum was the same one on which the gunman in the March mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand posted his own statement about his intent to kill Muslims and immigrants, shortly before he killed 51 people at two mosques.

The El Paso shooter expressed support for the Christchurch gunman and reportedly said his own goal was to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas”with the shooting in the largely Latino border city.

The man lived outside Dallas and made the nine-hour trip because he believed “the heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold,” according to the statement. He expressed support for the white supremacist theory of “the great replacement” which argues that so-called “elites” are attempting to replace white Europeans with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.

“This is about hate,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso, said in a statement. “The manifesto narrative is fueled by hate, and it is fueled by racism and bigotry and division.”

On social media, just as many have vehemently rejected the “thoughts and prayers” of politicians who accept thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the NRA and refuse to fight for broadly-popular gun control reforms, some critics directed ire at another perennial post-shooting sentiment, expressed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hours after the El Paso shooting—that better mental healthcare is the answer to the United States’ epidemic of gun violence.

The causes of the shooting in El Paso, many said, were the shooter’s easy access to guns and the growth of the white supremacist viewpoints he allegedly subscribed to—as well as support for such views by President Donald Trump and other elected officials.

@shannonrwatts

BULLSHIT: The El Paso gunman drove NINE HOURS to the Texas border to kill brown people.

White supremacy is not a mental illness. It’s an ideology encouraged by the President and too many of our leaders, and it’s made deadly in the US via easy access to arsenals and ammunition. https://twitter.com/texastribune/status/1157801199225188352 …

Texas Tribune

@TexasTribune

.@GregAbbott_TX says in #ElPaso: "Bottom line is mental health is a large contributor" to any type of violence. #ElPasoShooting https://bit.ly/2LYlfmk

Eugene Gu, MD

@eugenegu

Massive income inequality creates this whole generation of disgruntled white men who scapegoat immigrants and minorities for all their problems and then go on these brutal killing sprees with easy access to assault weapons. All of this predates Trump but he makes it much worse.

Eugene Gu, MD

That’s why this second mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio just hours after the one in El Paso, Texas is so extremely scary right now. White supremacy is an ideology not a mental illness. And unlike a mental illness, an ideology can be highly contagious

new 719

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/4chan-users-incels-extol-reports-of-teenage-girls-death

Police are investigating a death in Utica, New York, of a teenage girl who was killed by a young man who posted graphic violent images of her body on social media sites. Users in far-right corners of the internet are hailing the killing, further demonstrating the proclivity for violent extremist acts among the participants in those digital enclaves.

The Observer-Dispatch, a Utica newspaper, reported yesterday that Utica police were investigating a death with some details that matched unverified claims that had been shared online about the killing of the teenager identified as Bianca Devins, an aspiring social-media influencer and model. WKTV confirmed today that the victim in question was Devins. NBC New York reports that the death is still being investigated, “appears to have involved an image posted to Instagram” and that police plan to meet with Devins’ family today. Soon after the story broke, the hashtag “#ripbianca” trended on Twitter.

The alleged killer posted graphic images to Instagram showing the teenage girl with her neck slashed, and one of himself with a wound suggesting that he had slit his own throat. (Right Wing Watch reviewed these images and the Instagram account from which they came, but will not be publishing the graphic images in question.) Despite early reports that Devins connected with her killer online, Heavy reports that Devin’s sister “says the suspect was a family friend” and BuzzFeed News reports that Utica police said that “the couple had just attended a concert together and were in a relationship.”

On 4chan and 8chan, users shared graphic images of the homicide and lauded the killer for his actions. On 4chan’s “r9k” board, where discontented young men gather to deride women for their appearances and share their loathing for society, some users argued that the killing was justified; others went as far as to celebrate it. On incel forums online, similar sentiments were shared. Incel communities online exist as places where young men convince each other that they have a right to expect sex from women and encourage each other to adopt extreme and violent misogyny as a response to their failures.

A post allegedly appeared on a now-defunct Facebook page called “Darkcel Gaming” with an image of the suspected killer before reports circulated of the young woman’s death. Users in incel communities have committed multiple murders and acts of mass violence in recent years, including an attack that killed 10 people in Toronto last year.

Social media platforms such as 4chan have repeatedly failed to moderate their sites in order to curb the extremist elements brewed and propagandized on their platforms, and law enforcement has struggled to grapple with the threats of violence these digital spaces help foster.

nb calculated large scale sorta long term meme spread strategy on clown world?

Actor and ardent Trump supporter James Woods, who is not banned from Twitter, but rather has refused to delete a post on his Twitter profile with the hashtag “#HangThemAll” that would result in his account being unlocked, was also featured as a “prominent” censored conservative voice. Before being locked out of Twitter, Woods also shared a meme of the Christchurch shooter depicted as a clown, part of a push by white supremacists to find a new way to launder their voices into relevance.

ref

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-nationalists-adopt-clowns-as-their-next-racist-symbol-yes-seriously/

White Nationalists Adopt Clowns as Their Next Racist Symbol (Yes, Seriously)

By Jared Holt | April 4, 2019 2:54 pm

(Screenshot / 4chan)

Online personalities in far-right and white nationalist online circles are attempting to attribute racism and anti-Semitism to an image of cartoon character Pepe the Frog depicted poorly drawn and as a clown, and that effort has gained notable traction in recent months. Far-right proponents want the broader internet to believe the character directly represents their worldview, but the situation in whole represents an attitude shift in far-right circles online and a slow inching toward even more radical elements of the movement.

The clown render of Pepe the Frog, which KnowYourMeme researchers have identified as being known as “Honk Honk” or “Honkler,” began spreading across the internet last year. In recent months, the meme has gained a foothold in the far-right and is bleeding into racist propaganda. Pepe the Frog, originally from the comic series “Boy’s Club,” was co-opted by an iteration of the white nationalist movement that emerged in 2015 and dubbed itself the “alt-right”—a term created as part of a strategy to obscure the inherent racism and antisemitism of the movement in hopes of making its agenda more palatable among conservatives.

On 4chan, there is an abundance of memes depicting the character lynching black people (depicted in stereotypically racist ways), operating gas chambers, and deploying racial slurs. On February 11, users on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” forum board launched “operation honk,” a campaign with the mission of spreading the character across the internet and boosting its popularity, and then returning the character back to 4chan where it could be associated with racism.The “Operation Honkler” post cited by KnowYourMeme reads: “They will adopt our child, and post Honkler on social media under mainstream memes already in circulation. There will come a time when we must take him back. … Whether of the HONK or not, we must perpetuate this meme to show the world our ideas.”

The sentiment of the “Honkler” meme has also appeared in written format on venues where images won’t fit. A clown emoji and a globe emoji together has been used to convey the phrase “clown world” where the phrase isn’t written out fully. Such references can be found in numerous Twitter profiles, including that of Rebel Media personality Martina Markota,who Salon reported in 2017 as having ties to the far-right. “Honk Honk” memes were also used by “Microchip”—a pseudonym used by a far-right troll who made waves propagandizing in favor of Donald Trump during the 2016 election— to replace slurs and curse words in his posts on Gab.

The phrase “clown world” and accompanying emojis unify far-right social media users in their exasperation over an imagined state of collapse in the Western hemispherethat they largely blame on immigrants and minority groups. The force driving “Honkler” across the far-right is the same bleak worldview that led white nationalists to embrace Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. In their minds, if there is nothing that they can do to stop the supposed “great replacement” of white people in their “homelands” and no politicians who care enough about their cause to implement real policies that favor their agenda, they may as well accept the outcome and wrench whatever they can out of the system, like Yang’s promise of $1,000 per month universal basic income. This mentality is often referred to as “black pilling."

[twt]

"Honkler” and “clown world” memes were recently incorporated into “Goy Talk,” a new but growing web-based white nationalist podcast. The show’s hosts advocate white nationalism in a detached way, and embody the same increasingly nihilistic attitude among the white nationalist and white supremacist movements in the United States conveyed in the repetition of the phrase “clown world.”

“Goy Talk” hosts express racist and anti-Semitic views as a staple of their programming, with guests that include David Duke, Christopher Cantwell, and Patrick Little. Nevertheless, they are ultimately nihilistic about the state of the world and their ability to change it without mass-organized action reminiscent of the violent writings of James Mason in his book, “Siege.”

A March 28 episode of “Goy Talk” opens with a heavily edited video featuring the Honkler character, and one of the display images used for a show host is edited in “Honkler” style. Additionally, the hosts of “Goy Talk” have modified their profiles on Twitter to include clown imagery.

Online personalities in far-right and white nationalist online circles are attempting to attribute racism and anti-Semitism to an image of cartoon character Pepe the Frog depicted poorly drawn and as a clown, and that effort has gained notable traction in recent months. Far-right proponents want the broader internet to believe the character directly represents their worldview, but the situation in whole represents an attitude shift in far-right circles online and a slow inching toward even more radical elements of the movement.

On 4chan, there is an abundance of memes depicting the character lynching black people (depicted in stereotypically racist ways), operating gas chambers, and deploying racial slurs. On February 11, users on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” forum board launched “operation honk,” a campaign with the mission of spreading the character across the internet and boosting its popularity, and then returning the character back to 4chan where it could be associated with racism. The “Operation Honkler” post cited by KnowYourMeme reads: “They will adopt our child, and post Honkler on social media under mainstream memes already in circulation. There will come a time when we must take him back. … Whether of the HONK or not, we must perpetuate this meme to show the world our ideas.”

The sentiment of the “Honkler” meme has also appeared in written format on venues where images won’t fit. A clown emoji and a globe emoji together has been used to convey the phrase “clown world” where the phrase isn’t written out fully. Such references can be found in numerous Twitter profiles, including that of Rebel Media personality Martina Markota, who Salon reported in 2017 as having ties to the far-right. “Honk Honk” memes were also used by “Microchip”—a pseudonym used by a far-right troll who made waves propagandizing in favor of Donald Trump during the 2016 election— to replace slurs and curse words in his posts on Gab.

(Screenshot / Twitter)

The phrase “clown world” and accompanying emojis unify far-right social media users in their exasperation over an imagined state of collapse in the Western hemisphere that they largely blame on immigrants and minority groups. The force driving “Honkler” across the far-right is the same bleak worldview that led white nationalists to embrace Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. In their minds, if there is nothing that they can do to stop the supposed “great replacement” of white people in their “homelands” and no politicians who care enough about their cause to implement real policies that favor their agenda, they may as well accept the outcome and wrench whatever they can out of the system, like Yang’s promise of $1,000 per month universal basic income. This mentality is often referred to as “black pilling.”

Nicholas J. Fuentes

@NickJFuentes

Understanding Yang Gang:

The country is doomed

The rules don’t matter

We might as well get $1,000 a month

2,743

6:55 PM - Mar 12, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

609 people are talking about this

“Honkler” and “clown world” memes were recently incorporated into “Goy Talk,” a new but growing web-based white nationalist podcast. The show’s hosts advocate white nationalism in a detached way, and embody the same increasingly nihilistic attitude among the white nationalist and white supremacist movements in the United States conveyed in the repetition of the phrase “clown world.”

(Screenshot / Twitter)

The Twitter account for “Goy Talk” posted an image yesterday of an anti-Semitic meme modified to depict a racist caricature as a clown.

https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1115346306300616709?lang=en nz shooter

mma

Saturday, there was another mass shooting at a synagogue. A man opened fire inside the Chabad synagogue in Powoy, CA, just outside of San Diego. NBC's Ben Collins and Andrew Blankstein reported that an open letter was posted on far-right forum 8chan in the shooters name, which also took credit for an unsolved arson of a nearby mosque. According to the San Diego County Sheriff, the alleged shooter is now being investigated for that arson as well.

Over at Bellingcat, Robert Evans took a deep dive into 8chan, which was also the place where the Christchurch mosque shooter posted his manifesto. Media Matters' Cristina López has previously written about how board users launch harassment campaigns using 8chan. 8chan is also the hub of the QAnon conspiracy theory which has swept pro-Trump media; a number of prominent right-wing figures have amplified that conspiracy theory. And board users absolutely love Sean Hannity.

Over at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel wrote about how these mass shootings have become a meme in the far-right internet: "The pattern is eerie: it starts with a crude genealogy of the shooter’s ethnic roots, then a self-aggrandizing Q. and A. with himself, followed by a litany of toxic in-jokes meant to confuse the media and those less savvy in far-right online culture. ... Like the Christchurch massacre, the Poway shooting is not only tailored for the internet but also sickeningly standardized. The digital footprint and manifestoes of these white nationalist terrorists follow a familiar template — one that each shooter fills in with their own hideous details. Indeed, it seems real-world murderous hate crimes have become a message board meme of sorts. And like any online meme, the creation cycle only seems to be accelerating, refining itself and, horrifyingly, increasing in frequency."

On Fox News, a guest was linking the rise of anti-Semitism to Trump's permissive rhetoric about the far right, specifically Trump's defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville who chanted "Jews will not replace us." (Trump even doubled down on that characterization on Friday in an interview with Mark Levin.) But as the guest described this, the show suddenly cut to commercial. The guest was invited back on later in the day, but the discussion moved quickly beyond Trump's rhetoric to an assertion that Trump could not possibly be personally anti-Semitic.

Fox News never stopped pushing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the Tree of Life shooter. Glenn Beck was on Fox News earlier this month pushing it. And earlier this week, a Fox Nation guest fearmongered about George Soros infiltrating the census, harkening back to when a guest was banned from the network for complaining about the "Soros-occupied State Department."

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/10/28/analyzing-terrorists-social-media-manifesto-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooters-posts-gab

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shooters-manifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/

nl lnxtwit

In the hours after the horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, people desperately searched the internet for any sign of a motive or meaning behind the attack. Early Friday, a number of unverified social-media posts surfaced, along with a bizarre manifesto posted to 8chan, rich with irony and references to memes.

Together, the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.

Read: YouTube extremism and the long tail]

Kjellberg, who has previously found himself embroiled in controversy over alleged anti-Semitism, disavowed the shooting on Twitter Friday morning. “Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy,” he wrote. By forcing Kjellberg to acknowledge the attack, the shooter succeeded in further spreading the word about the crime to Kjellberg’s tens of millions of followers.

@loudmouthjulia

"Subscribe to PewDiePie" is a meme that encompasses a misled belief that it's a fight for the disenfranchised; those constantly being pushed down. It's David vs Goliath. It's used on boards like 8chan as a rallying cry. It doesn't belong to PDP anymore — but we need to examine it...

Significant portions of the manifesto appear to be an elaborate troll, written to prey on the mainstream media’s worst tendencies. As the journalist Robert Evans noted, “This manifesto is a trap … laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, ‘shitposting.’”

[The Tech White Power Used to Go Viral

OLGA KHAZAN]

Shitposting is a slang term used to describe the act of posting trollish and usually ironic content designed to derail a conversation or elicit a strong reaction from people who aren’t in on the joke. Certain aspects of the shooter’s manifesto fall into this category. He includes Navy Seal Copypasta, a meme that originated on 4chan. He claims that Spyro: Year of the Dragon, a video game, taught him ethno-nationalism and that Fortnite taught him to “floss on the corpses,” referring to a viral dance move from the game. These absurd references are meant to troll readers

Jasmin Mujanovic

@JasminMuj

Replying to @JasminMuj

One more thought: the shooter makes repeated references to the “remove Kebab” meme, which is based on a propaganda video produced by Serb nationalist forces during the Bosnian War & Bosnian Genocide in 90s. Meshes w/ Obilic references & clear Breivik influence.

...

The shooter also credits the far-right personality Candace Owens with helping to “push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.” Though the shooter could be a genuine fan of Owens, who has been known to espouse right-leaning views on immigration and gun control, this reference might be meant to incite Owens’s critics to blame her.

That doesn’t mean the racism expressed throughout the 74-page manifesto isn’t genuine. But the complexities of the crime are still unfolding, and as the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose cautioned, “The NZ shooter’s apparent manifesto is thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret.” Unfortunately, when journalists report on these horrific acts, the shooter’s hateful messages are sometimes amplified in the process. But the origins of that hate and the shooter’s public postings do need to be examined, even when taking them at face value is difficult.

Mass killers have long exploited the media environments they operate within. The Zodiac killer gained notoriety by persuading newspapers to publish his cryptic messages. In 2015, a shooter in Virginia killed people during a live television broadcast.

As the internet and social media have democratized access to information, much of it spreads without necessary context. As the Verge writer Elizabeth Lopatto noted in 2015, “Our interactions with these killers were mediated by huge media gatekeepers—their manifestos were left at their homes, or sent to newspapers and TV stations. If the manifestos appeared at all, they were quoted from, rather than released in full. This is no longer the case.”

Read: The dangerous spread of extremist manifestos]

While this system of gatekeeping itself was undoubtedly problematic, since many of the gatekeepers upheld norms and power structures built on privilege, technology has upended our media environment so quickly that many people are ill-equipped to handle the new information environment. We’ve seen the consequences of this play out in the rise of fake news, thriving misinformation campaigns, and bizarre viral hoaxes warped by trolls to capitalize on people’s worst fears.

Before people can even begin to grasp the nuances of today’s internet, they can be radicalized by it. Platforms such as YouTube and Facebook can send users barreling into fringe communities where extremist views are normalized and advanced. Because these communities have so successfully adopted irony as a cloaking device for promoting extremism, outsiders are left confused as to what is a real threat and what’s just trolling. The darker corners of the internet are so fragmented that even when they spawn a mass shooting, as in New Zealand, the shooter’s words can be nearly impossible to parse, even for those who are Extremely Online.i

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/03/15/New-Zealand-mass-shooting-illustrates-failure-of-tech-companies-to-prevent-radicalization-/223153

Discussing the shooting at two New Zealand mosques that left at least 49 dead at the hands of an anti-Muslim extremist, NBC reporter Ben Collins noted that the alleged shooter showed signs of “getting radicalized by these same algorithms” on tech platforms such as YouTube that previously influenced other mass shooters.

YouTube has a serious radicalization problem because its algorithm sometimes pushes far-right content via recommendations, which Collins noted can cause people to “go down rabbit holes” and “maybe they start as racists and they end up as extremists,” leading to harassment, racist violence, and terrorism. Collins also compared the alleged Christchurch shooter’s reported announcement of the attack on far-right message board 8chan to the alleged Pittsburgh, PA, shooter’sannouncement of his attack on Gab, a social media platform that is a hotbed for white nationalists.

The alleged New Zealand mosque shooter livestreamed the attack on Facebook, and it was also shared on YouTube and Twitter, but the social media platforms have struggled to remove the video. Tech companies have been ill-equipped to proactively deal with this kind of content, in some ways leaving the task of combating it to the most affected communities.

...

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.

When I asked Townsend about his e-mails to Guilfoyle, he said, “Mind your own business. I’m just a Fox fan. I’m a keyboard warrior. I’m a nobody.” He said, “I’ve sent stuff to various people at Fox for years, and I don’t get a penny for it,” and added, “I don’t know what tree you’re barking up but you better be careful.”

nyer mayer

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/

Wednesday, POLITICO reported that several politicians floated as challengers to President Donald Trump are being targeted by a “sustained and ongoing” propaganda campaign on social media designed to divide the Democratic Party — possibly of foreign origin.

The most aggressively targeted figures are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), all of whom are running for president in 2020, as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is currently deciding between running for president and a second campaign for Senate. All of them are being targeted on Twitter and other platforms, with the apparent goal of damaging their reputations before the primary can begin:

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

According to information analyzed by Guardians.ai on behalf of POLITICO,much of the activity around these candidates on Twitter is being driven by 200 accounts, both organic and likely automated — during a recent 30 day period, these accounts were responsible for 2 to 15 percent of all mentions of these four politicians on the site.

The most targeted politician seems to have been Harris, who is currently the tentative frontrunner in polls of declared candidates. She has been subject to a barrage of sexist attacks on her youthful relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. If this activity is part of a disinformation campaign by foreign state actors, it would not be the first time. There is strong evidence that Russia created several of the accounts in 2016 that were responsible for spreading rhetoric meant to divide supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who had very similar platforms but ended up in a toxic primary battle that left Clinton wounded ahead of the general election. Moreover, there is a consensus that the stolen Democratic emails distributed through WikiLeaks and propagandized out of context in the 2016 cycle originated with Russian hackers.

But that is not the whole story, becauseat least some of the energy to poison the primaries appears to be coming from fringe troll sites like 4chan and 8chan, where users have taken up explicit calls to attack Democratic candidates from the left (one user explicitly told fellow posters to spread information about how Warren was a Republican until 1996). It is unclear how many of these users are foreign state actors from places like Russia or Iran, versus organic right-wing activists in the United States, but data experts believe it is a mixture of the two.

It is clear that social media is still a place where toxic attacks and partisan propaganda can spread rapidly — and those who make it a part of their media diet should be on guard.

https://www.thewrap.com/far-right-social-network-gab-back-online-after-finding-new-host/

cute frog logo no accident?]

Gab.com returned over the weekend after spending roughly a week offline. A visit to the site Monday revealed things were up and running normally under a new hosting provider, the Seattle-based Epik.com.

“Here is our press release the media. You failed,” the website announced triumphantly on Twitter. “We are back online. We grow stronger by the hour. Free speech lives at Gab.com. This is only the beginning. May God have mercy on you for what you people have done this past week. Peace, love, and prayers.”

is our press release to the media:

You failed. We are back online. We grow stronger by the hour. Free speech lives at :{http://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:Gab.com:{ :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:. This is only the beginning. May God have mercy on you for what you people have done this past week. Peace, love, and prayers.

2,253

6:13 PM - Nov 4, 2018

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

1,071 people are talking about this

:{Also Read::(style="box-sizing:inherit;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;font-weight:bolder;display:block"):}:Far-Right Social Network Gab Goes Offline After Domain Host Pulls the Plug

Gab chief Andrew Torba did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap but did provide a “world exclusive” to InfoWars chief Alex Jones.

“We have the most traffic that we’ve ever seen in our existence and we are proud to be back online defending free speech and individual liberty,” he told Jones. “The media tries to smear us. They tried to smear myself and my business and our community of over 800,000 people from around the world.”

Gab, which bills itself as a free speech alternative to Twitter, is known for its extremely permissive rules on acceptable content, making it a favorite of white nationalists and other internet rogues banned from more mainstream social networks.

Also Read:Donald Trump Again Attacks 'Fake News Media' as 'True Enemy of the People'

Gab went broadly unnoticed by most of the general public until a deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last month left 11 dead. Media reports later found that the suspected gunman, Robert Bowers, had been a regular Gab user where he routinely posted anti-semitic memes and content.

The site was abruptly dropped by its hosting provider GoDaddy last week after the domain host said Gab violated their terms of service. The decision came after an intense internet pressure campaign.

Also Read:Anti-Defamation League Calls Pittsburgh Shooting 'Deadliest Attack' on Jewish Community in U.S. History

The decision by Epik.com to host the site led to an immediate reaction from many of the same activists Monday. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap, but the website’s chief Rob Monster did speak to the Seattle Times, saying in brief remarks that he viewed his company as more of a utility and that he believed Torba and his team would be “vigilant” in policing content which violates their terms of service.

4x but annotation here

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) [time lag, as well as filter]

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: APPROPRIATE/PVTIZE/MONETIZE THE COMMONS, DENY/SHIFT THE COST: WE ARE JUST A PLATFORM; THESE PPL AR CONTRACTORS NOT EMPLOYEES THAT WE HAVE CONTROL OVER OR RESPONSIBILTY TO]

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.[AN paste fail rep]

...

ref

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s

rww

Two neo-Nazis who filmed One America News Network personality Jack Posobiec while he roamed the streets of a Washington, D.C., to create propaganda for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory on behalf of Rebel Media are suspected to have schemed violence in relation to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 murdered, court documents show.

Jeffrey Clark, who police arrested on November 9, was active on Gab, where he used his profile honoring white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof to connect with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Prior to his arrest, he had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was photographed alongside the young man who killed counter-protester Heather Heyer. Clark’s relatives told the FBI that he sought to “expedite” a race war.

Clark’s brother, a fellow neo-Nazi named Edward, committed suicide after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting when it was revealed that Gab, a Twitter spin-off overrun with violent extremists, had provided the shooter’s profile information to law enforcement. Apparently concerned that he’d soon be receiving a visit from the FBI, he shot himself in a park.

The tie-ins don’t stop at Gab. The neo-Nazi Clark brothers were connected to a web of white nationalists who ushered in the “alt-right,” including Posobiec.

The brothers were photographed filming Posobiec while he worked on footage about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, which served as rich fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists online in 2016. Posobiec also notably traveled to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant and bar that was at the center of wild internet conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile rings, to “infiltrate” the scene. When a believer in the conspiracy theory took matters into his own hands and entered the restaurant with a firearm, Posobiec deleted evidence of his visit and began lying about his role in spreading the hoax.

In the images and reporting published by HuffPost, the Clark brothers are seen filming Posobiec. Jeffrey Clark reportedly told Laura Sennett of One People’s Project that “Posobiec absolutely was” aware of their neo-Nazi beliefs and had told his brother “that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.” HuffPost reports:

In May 2017, the Clark brothers teamed up with far-right “Pizzagate” propagandist Jack Posobiec, who was then the D.C. bureau chief for the far-right website Rebel Media, to shoot footage for a film Posobiec was working on about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose murder near the Clarks’ home in Bloomingdale has spawned numerous far-right conspiracy theories.

Laura Sennett, an anti-fascist researcher who works with One People’s Project, spoke with Jeffrey Clark a few weeks after he and his brother were spotted in Bloomingdale with Posobiec, who by then had been fired from Rebel under mysterious circumstances after plagiarizing Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right rally.

“[Clark] told me that Jack Posobiec hired him and his brother to follow him with a camera to take video of his investigation of Seth Rich,” Sennett told HuffPost. “Not sure if it was a documentary or a news story, but [Posobiec] was doing some kind of reporting for Rebel Media. I asked him if Posobiec was aware of his Nazi beliefs. He told me that Posobiec absolutely was and had told Jeff that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.”

TheClark brothers would stand Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer,of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.

...

april glaser (salon?) kpfa 10/31/18

discord // slack for logistics?

gab fdr y combinator

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-internet-gets-hip-to-npc-memes

Right-wing circles online have become increasingly obsessed with “NPC” memes, which they’ve utilized to compare their critics to non-playable characters in video games. The comparison, they hope, serves to ascribe a degree of intellectual apathy to, and dehumanize, those who do not hold their own far-right beliefs.

According to the meme-tracking website “Know Your Meme,” the NPC meme originated on 4chan in a 2016 thread posted to the portion of the site dedicated to video games. The post projects a hybrid of simulation theory philosophy and belief structures held by many conspiracy theorists, who become convinced that they have discovered a “truth” that has broken them from a previously autonomous lifestyle in normal society.

In early September, the meme experienced a brief renaissance on 4Chan’s “politically incorrect” anonymous image board (known online simply as “/pol/”) but appeared to wander out of the spotlight nearly as quickly as it had entered. But since the publication of a Kotaku article explaining the meme last week, users have made a play to replace the term “SJW”—referring to the caricature of a “social justice warrior”—and has given birth to a new tangle of spin-offs. As Cecilia D’Anastasio at Kotaku explains:

In some corners of the internet, NPC is beginning to replace the term “SJW.” According to ex-World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern, NPCs have the following qualities: “Incapable of independent thought. Wants everything done for them. (Quests) Constantly needing coddling (escort quests).” He published his checklist after another developer accused him of being a “right wing hack.” The tweet evidently was meant to compare so-called SJWs to these NPCs.

It’s a now-common refrain on Reddit, with posts on /r/The_Donald saying, “The Left is just a meme of lunacy come to life. They’re just NPCs in the game of life” or, in reference to economic experts widely condemning tariffs, “here we are with one of the best economies in US history. Only brainwashed NPCs believe what ‘experts’ say when those claims are contradicted by reality!.”

Now that the NPC meme has been re-framed as a way to “own the libs,” it’s inspired a new wave of enthusiasm among Trump supporters online. Google Trends shows a massive spike in interest in the meme....[graph]

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/a-year-after-charlottesville-melee-silicon-valley-still-profits-off-extremism

A year ago, Americans watched on in horror as the extremism and hate of the so-called “alt-right”, which had long been festering online, materialized in a very real and terrifying form on the streets of Charlottesville.

In response to the violence, which :{left :(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}::{counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer dead:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and dozens of others injured, tech companies belatedly woke up to the fact that they were effectively providing safe spaces for far-right hate. These companies made promises to the public that they would take action, and soon cracked down on some of the far-right’s most prominent figures and organizations.

Far-right figures were booted off Twitter, domain-hosting companies shut downneo-Nazi forums like Stormfront, and Richard B. Spencer, one of the most immediately recognizable figures in the latest rebirth of the racist white identitarian movement that branded itself an alternative to the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Confederate groups, has been repeatedly kicked from fundraising platforms.

But one year later, many of the most well-documented hate groups and conveners of extremism online are still operating on the backs of some of the largest tech industry giants. The tech companies are aware of this problem, but they seem to have chosen indifference.

One of the most flagrant offenders is Stripe,an online payment processing company that works with some of the biggest names in tech, including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Salesforce. But such while major content providers Apple, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube have taken half-measures to give the appearance that they’re cracking down on hate, payment processing systems, and especially Stripe, haven’t even done that much, continuing to allow its purveyors to collect profits via their services.

What makes the inaction of the payment processing companies so infuriating is that they are still readily working with such groups and websites — even those who can’t be bothered to hide their racism and anti-Semitism behind layers of “irony” and “humor,” as do many :{in :(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}::{the ranks of the 2.0 form of white identitarianism:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: — despite repeated promises that they would do just that.

Stripe, for instance, is servicing payments for the League of the South, Occidental Quarterly, and Counter–Currents Publishing. The League of the South:{is an openly white supremacist, neo-Confederate group:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that advocates Secession and the creation of a southern theocracy. Its leaders say that immigration “will eventually weaken and destroy our civilization.” (Intriguingly, a whole section of the group’s website is devoted to “Russian Outreach.”)

Counter–Currents Publishing and Occidental Quarterly, meanwhile, have been part of the “intellectual vanguard” of the far-right for decades, flogging books such as “Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country.” One of the most important figures in this white nationalist “intellectual” sphere is Jared Taylor, who:{sits on the board for Occidental Quarterly:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. Taylor has been a prominent figure on the:{white supremacist scene for more than 25 years:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, and frequently appears:{at far-right conferences:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, including those convened by Spencer.

Former Counter–Currents contributor :{Jason Jorjani:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear;font-weight:400"):}: was:{filmed:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear;font-weight:400"):}: last September by the:{anti-racism group Hope not Hate:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear;font-weight:400"):}: saying that the far-right’s plans will end “with concentration camps and expulsions and war — at the cost of a few hundred million people.”[pix]

The site Gab.ai, a “free speech” social media platform that quickly became a haven for white supremacists banned from more conventional sites like Twitter, also runs its premium account payments through Stripe. Members of Gab Pro can use Stripe processing to profit via the website by offering subscriptions to paywalled content. As indicated by the blue checkmarks next to their handles on the site, Gab Pro members include neo-Nazis:{Andrew Anglin:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of The Daily Stormer, failed Senate candidate:{Patrick Little:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and “Crying Nazi”:{Christopher Cantwell:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, just to name a few. Last week, Gab was forced to remove two posts from Little that contained violent anti-Semitic threats.

As a payment processor, there are two ways for Stripe to facilitate financial transactions between its clients and the banking system: via plug-ins and payment gateways. In the case of payment gateways, Stripe is an active part of allowing the money to move from the client to the banks. For example, when a person decides to donate to League of the South, Stripe will take his credit card information and check it against the banking system. If the information matches, Stripe allows the user’s donation to pass through its “gateway” and into the banking system.

Plug-ins are a bit more complicated. They can be described as a tool that Stripe gives away so that a website can better control its own financing. When Stripe gives away the plugin, however, someone has to sign over bank account details to the website owner or administrator. That, plus the information on the site, gives Stripe a record of who it is working with and on what site the plug-in will appear. [2 pix]

To its credit, Stripe has already removed its service from some sites popular with extremists, including BitChute, FreeStartr, and GoMakerSupport. But the problem appears to be systemic, and when we asked the company about its servicing for other extreme hate groups, we didn’t receive an answer.

In Stripe’s user agreement, under “Prohibited Businesses,” it says it will not service “any business or organization that a. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property, or engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”

A tech employee familiar with financial processing, who asked us to keep their identity anonymous for fear they may lose their job for speaking with us, told us that Stripe “almost certainly” knows it provides its services to extremists.

“A company like Stripe is going to have employees dedicated to monitoring their brand,” the tech worker told us. “They’re not dumb. They read Twitter. They read the news. If a racist website is breaking their terms of service, it’ll get flagged eventually. The system works slowly … but it’s up to major tech companies like Stripe to enforce their own terms of service.”

Sources close to Stripe say that company has had major internal discussions over how best to handle sites like League of the South, a debate echoed on a wider scale throughout Silicon Valley — seen most recently with the drawn-out drama of Alex Jones getting deplatformed.

On one hand, the sources noted, Stripe is aware that it can no longer advocate complete neutrality. But the company also can’t arbitrarily decide who it refuses to work with, especially considering that on the other side of the coin, Stripe would like to work with some websites — such as websites that publish erotic art and operate in the marijuana business — but can’t because of its current terms and conditions. The sources added that, in their opinions, Stripe had done a good job of booting the organizers of the original Unite the Right from their system, and making sure that they didn’t sneak back in.

As a Business to Business (B2B) company, Stripe prefers to operate quietly, and is more responsive to its more immediately image conscious financial partners. This is where banking regulations come in.

A crucial part of Stripe’s terms and conditions isits Financial Service Terms section, which notes that Stripe partners with Wells Fargo for access to the financial system. Under the 2001 Patriot Act, Wells Fargo signed on to a Know Your Customer regulation, which requires banks and the payment processors they work with to collect information on their users to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

But according to Dennis Lormel, a former head of financial crimes at the FBI, although banks may be obligated to note who they do business with, it is still up to them to decide on an individual basis if the reputational risk of kicking groups or individuals off their platforms is worth it. Because groups like League of the South operate in a legal gray area — endorsing violence but not explicitly spreading it — banks often determine that kicking them off is not worth their time. This is particularly true, Lormel said, as these type of groups have been known to readily sue banks.

...Ive been axed from Patreon, without explanation, warning or notice -- no doubt as part of the ongoing efforts of the Left to deny all platforms to those who reject its agenda. To those who supported me there, thank you, and I'm sorry we couldn't follow through on plans.

...

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

Other financial processing companies have declared anti-hate policies on their transaction systems, including Patreon, which unrolled:{policies:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that forbid those who engage in hate speech, doxing, illegal activities, and bullying and harassment from using its crowdfunding site to enrich themselves. As a result, some far-right extremists, such as Faith Goldy, have been:{denied access:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to their platforms.

However, Patreon continues to:{allow extremist:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform;transition-timing-function:linear;font-weight:400"):}: James Allsup, an advocate of white identitarianism, to continue to use Patreon to enrich himself. Allsup this year joined the white extremist group, Identity Evropa, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in 2017 marched with extremist groups at the Unite the Right convergence in Charlottesville. He also spoke that year at a rally in Washington, D.C., convened by Spencer.

Read: [Richard Spencer Is Begging For Money To Fight Lawsuit Against Him]

For his own part, Richard Spencer told us he’s been unable to reach a human contact at Stripe to talk about the status of his account. He called it “ridiculous” that he has been, as he believes, “singled out as a bad actor” to serve as a public martyr for display to signal that companies like Stripe are combating hate on their platforms.

Spencer says he was cut off from the platform shortly after the Unite the Right converging of far-right groups in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. The night before the streets of Charlottesville turned deadly, Spencer led a torchlit march to the campus of University of Virginia, steering a column of far-right activists who chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Some of the marchers attacked a small band of UVA students who mounted a counter-protest.

Spencer told us that he had used Stripe for about five years prior to the ban imposed on him and the National Policy Institute, the innocuously named far-right extremist organization he helms. He said he used the platform to process hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of financial tractions — which he said he conservatively estimates to total at least a $250,000, but speculated it could have been as much a $1 million — for conference registrations, donations and book sales, all without a hitch.

“There are groups that seem quite similar to my operation, and indeed places I’ve written for in my career, that are apparently able to use these payment systems,” Spencer told us, saying he felt it was “unfair” he was “singled out.” He later added, “I have become the poster boy for this,” and compared himself to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been given the boot from many online services. It should be noted that those extremists who still have access to big-tech payment systems could be viewed as Spencer’s competitors.

Kicking white nationalists like Spencer from platforms can have serious implications for their ability to recruit and organize. Spencer said that his operation has experienced large setbacks since he lost access to simple payment processing online.

“I, in a way, have not recovered from the deplatforming since Charlottesville, and everything it entails,” Spencer said. “The payment processing — that is more devastating than the social media. I mean, I would give up my Twitter account if we could maintain something like payment processing that is made so easy through Stripe.”

Spencer told us he had “made some headway in cracking the nut” of payment processing for his group, but when we asked for more details he laughed and said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

***

This article was co-authored by Luke Barnes, a reporter at the progressive online news site, ThinkProgress. His work focuses on Big Tech, far-right extremism and organized crime.

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/09/seeking-revenge-alex-jones-far-right-trolls-unleash-harassment-verified-twitter-users/220953

no lnx gfx many

Seeking revenge for Alex Jones, far-right trolls unleash harassment on verified Twitter users

A harassment campaign organized on far-right sites targeted journalists and activists with malicious abuse

Blog ››› August 9, 2018 5:12 PM EDT ››› TALIA LAVIN

Sarah Wasko/Media Matters

On Wednesday, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey reiterated the importance of journalists’ presence on the platform when he tweeted, “We can’t be a useful service without the integrity journalists bring.” Some journalists, many of whom have faced relentless harassment on the platform, met Dorsey’s proclamation with jaded skepticism, and for good reason. Following President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks against the press, journalists have become a target for online harassment by the far-right favorites, egged on by prominent figures like Fox’s Sean Hannity, whom Dorsey gave a rare interview to this week. And when the consequences of the anti-press sentiment on the right have turned deadly, far-right message boards users have reacted in celebration.

In fact, at the time Dorsey was underscoring the vital role of the press on Twitter, a coordinated harassment campaign -- seemingly originating from the anonymous message board 4chan and the white supremacist-friendly Twitter alternative Gab.ai -- was targeting users, including dozens ofjournalists, who have been verified by Twitter.

The campaign, organized under the hashtag #VerifiedHate, can be traced back to multiple internet spats that have unfolded in recent days. The first was a determined, bad-faith campaign to force The New York Times to fire newly hired editorial board member Sarah Jeong who had written a number of tweets appearing to denigrate white people. The manufactured outrage over Jeong was dominated by right-wing figures and championed by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who insisted on taking her flippant tweets as deadly earnest “reverse racism.” However, the campaign culminated in frustration as the Times retained Jeong, despite issuing a somewhat equivocal statement. The second episode was Alex Jones getting banned from several tech platforms including Apple, YouTube, Facebook, Stitcher, and MailChimp, which was viewed by right-wing media as evidence of double standards and anti-conservative bias among tech companies.

Faced with the combination of their failure to get a woman of color fired and their ire at tech companies, anonymous social-media users started a campaign to harass verified Twitter users who have in the past sent tweets containing jokes about white people.

The campaign -- targeting particularly those of Jewish descent -- can be traced back to Gab, which harbors infamous white supremacist trolls like Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin. Four days ago, a Gab user posted a collage of verified Twitter users who the person claimed were showing their “white hatred”:

The #VerifiedHate hashtag was also promoted by Gab founder and CEO Andrew Torba, a defender of white supremacist rhetoric who has appeared on Infowars to attack tech platforms:

The idea spread to 4chan, where users called the push to harass journalists and activists “Twittercaust” or the “Night of the Blue Checkmarks,” saying it was an effort “to prove … once and for all that the Journalists, media personalities and celebrities are all a part of a massive anti white (sic) conspiracy!!!”

The trolls also revealed it was a coordinated action, with some 4chan members claiming they were using multiple accounts to push the hashtag:

4chan users posted examples of their coordinated Twitter harassment on the message board, demonstrating ways in which individual tweets could circumvent the platform’s hateful conduct policy that prohibits the usage of slurs:

The trolls particularly singled out individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who had referenced their own whiteness and Jewishness on Twitter:

One locus of the #VerifiedHate campaign was BuzzFeed journalist Joe Bernstein, who received significant volumes of harassment, including one user who sent him an image of a gun:

On Twitter, the account @meme_america began to promote lists of users whom trolls could harass in the #VerifiedHate campaign and focused on specific journalists like VICE’s Justin Ling, who was subjected to vile comments:

Multiple 4chan users expressed affinity for Alex Jones, and one claimed that, though Twitter hasn't banned Jones yet, the platform has removed other conservative voices and “probably will remove more”:

#VerifiedHate is an example of an open campaign cooked up by right-wing trolls to harass and intimidate verified Twitter users, specifically journalists. If Dorsey really needs journalists to maintain the integrity of his platform, perhaps he should work to suppress campaigns that subject them to threats, intimidation, and harassment and make the social media platform safer to use for everyone.

troll shite

https://www.alternet.org/hoax-swat-call-sends-police-home-parkland-survivor-david-hogg

Parkland survivor David Hogg was targeted in a dangerous "swatting" incident. If you're not familiar, "swatting" is when a fake call to the police sends armed police officers (a SWAT team usually) to someone's residence. In December, a "swatting" incident related to a feud regarding the Call of Duty game led to an unarmed man who had nothing to do with the feud being shot dead.

Media Matters found that the day before this incident the personal information about Hogg's family was posted on internet forums notorious for organizing harassment. A Huffington Post reporter and numerous colleagues were recently attacked by members of this forum after the reporter published a profile of a notorious anti-Muslim crusader. These forums are driving revanchist sentiment, and it is something that Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and others have picked up on. It's important to realize that these forums are not just doing that through rhetoric; they are hubs for harassment campaigns aimed at threatening people they disagree with.

ref 4 chan

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/06/05/day-parkland-survivor-david-hogg-got-swatted-trolls-shared-his-address-4chan-and-8chan/220382

a "graduation present" for Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, trolls on 4chan and 8chan shared his contact information -- including his home address and multiple phone numbers connected to his family -- and called for his harassment. A day later, a prank call claiming there was a hostage situation in his house led to an armed police team being deployed there. The practice, known as “swatting,” is a harassment tool online trolls use to attack their victims, and it has proved fatal on at least one occasion.

The now-archived 4chan thread is a response to Hogg teasing the announcement of the activism “Road to Change” bus tour, a gun violence prevention tour he and some of his fellow Parkland shooting survivors just kicked off. In a June 3 post, a troll references Hogg having a “surprise for us” adding a link to the announcement of the bus tour, and posts contact information that includes home address and phone numbers linked to the Hogg family, saying it’s a “graduation present.”

[screen grab]

After the post and subsequent replies were apparently deleted from 4chan, trolls took to 8chan (a message board launched in response to perceived censorship on 4chan that has since became more anarchic) to continue the “doxxing,” or the publication of a victim’s contact information with malicious intent. In the 8chan thread, trolls complained that 4chan (which they refer to as “cuckchan”) had deleted the original post, plotted to send “large usps boxes” to the Hoggs’ home address, and schemed about “looking into” a patent under Hogg’s father’s name. After the news broke that Hogg had been swatted, at least one troll on the thread also complained that “unfortunately he survived.”

The doxxing and subsequent targeted harassment of Hogg follow months of right-wing media attacking and floating absurd conspiracy theories about him in reaction to his gun violence prevention activism. Online, trolls are mirroring the attacks that right-wing media figures and the gun lobby are waging on Parkland shooting survivors, or vice versa.

And in taking to message boards like 4chan and 8chan to plot hits on their victims, they’re continuing what is becoming a terrifying pattern: During the 2016 presidential campaign, 8chan launched a harassment campaign against journalist David Cay Johnston after he published an excerpt from President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax documents. After a judge upheld existing regulations to assault weapons, trolls shared his contact information on 8chan in clear efforts to target him for harassment. After he profiled an anti-Muslim Twitter crusader, a HuffPost reporter got doxxed on 4chan, followed by numerous colleagues. In 2014, 4chan trolls organized“Operation Lollipop,” an effort to infiltrate feminist Twitter and sow dissent. These message boards have proven to be ideal hubs for far-right trolls to organize harassment campaigns aimed at silencing, threatening, and hurting those they oppose politically, with little to no consequences.

Emma Gonzalez's words have already become iconic, adorning countless placards at this weekend's March for Our Lives rally across the country: ." Now the right is attempting to weaponize the Parkland survivor's newfound fame in the form of a photoshopped image of her tearing up a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

The fake image, which first appeared on the website 4chan in a “‘politically incorrect’ board,” according to CNN, received a "signal boost" from actor Adam Baldwin on Saturday and has been making the rounds on social media ever since. Gab, the preferred network of the alt-right, tweeted out the gif with the caption, “Not gonna happen.” The account later sent out a follow-up tweet:

24 Mar

[:{:{Gab: Free Speech Social Network}::{

✔

}:}:@getongab](https://twitter.com/getongab)

Not gonna happen. pic.twitter.com/4kKBcSqdCl

:{:(style="position:relative;top:1px;display:inline-block"):}:

[:{:{Gab: Free Speech Social Network}::{

✔

}:}:@getongab](https://twitter.com/getongab)

This is obviously a parody/satire. You’re all mad because it’s believable, isn’t it? That’s the best type of satire. It’s a comedic reflection of reality.

5:31 PM - Mar 24, 2018

:{961:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

:{298 people are talking about this:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

This is hardly the first attack on the Parkland shooting survivors, or even Gonzalez herself. Over the weekend, right-wing commenters disaparaged the activist for sporting a Cuban flag patch on her jacket during her rally speech. Prior to that, pundits and even a handful of politicians accused David Hogg of being a so-called crisis actor.

“The attacks being lobbied against Emma follow the all-too-familiar patterns: she’s an opinionated woman, she’s Latinx, she is queer," notes Teen Vogue's Phillip Picardi. "Some say those are strikes already against her when confronting the establishment.”

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-7-2017/

Angela Nagle to talk about the roots and the rise of the far-fetched subcultures dominating the internet culture wars.

Angela Nagle is an expert on the online culture wars, anti-feminist online, and the alt-right. Her latest book is Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.

taboo breaking is main goal, so PC race and gender obvious targets

lord of the flies vigilantism, bond over hatred of (single thus simpler) enemy, strip target of humanity, squish

http://www.alternet.org/media/6-examples-fake-news-about-antifa

twitterbots

Watch Part 3 || Joshua Green on How Bannon’s Experience with Video Gamers Gave Rise to the Alt-Right

GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joshua Green. His new book is Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. You also talk about how Breitbart News went after Fox News to make it more extreme, and the gaming background of Steve Bannon, recognizing that Fox News was for old folks. There was this huge young conservative set that he could bring in.

JOSHUA GREEN: You know, another story in the book—another thing I got asked about a lot as a political reporter was: Where did this idea of the alt-right come from? Who are these people? How did they infect our politics in the way that they had? And Bannon, oddly enough, is a critical figure in the rise of the alt-right, many of whose members, I should just add as a side note, read and admire Julius Evola and his thinking.

But back in 2007, after Bannon had done Hollywood and filmmaking, he wound up, for about a year and a half, as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong, which did not actually make video games that you play. It pioneered something called gold farming, which I had never heard of. But what gold farming is, is the process of going into these massive multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, and winning armor and prizes and gold, which allow you to advance in the game, but then turning around and selling them to people in the real world. So Bannon’s company would hire teams of low-wage Chinese workers to play these games in 24-hour rotating cycles, win all this stuff, and then sell it to wealthier gamers offline, which was considered a serious enough business that Goldman Sachs actually invested money in Bannon’s company.

But what happened was, the gamers—most of the people who played the games considered this cheating, and they got very angry. You know, kids would spend hours and weeks and months absorbed in these games, and didn’t like the fact that there was this shortcut. And so, the gamers themselves organized on message boards. There are special message boards devoted to these multiplayer games. And they organized themselves and said, "Hey, we’re going to put pressure on these video games and make them shut down the practice of gold farming." And they did. And it destroyed—itbankrupted Bannon’s business.

But the lesson he took away from this was that there are millions and millions of young, white—mostly white—men who spend their entire lives in these online alternate realities, and that—

AMY GOODMAN: 4chan.

JOSHUA GREEN: 4chan, exactly, Reddit—and that if they are motived to do so, they could be a very powerful political force: "They bankrupted my company. I want to see if I can channel them into politics." And when Bannon got to Breitbart News, he hired a notorious internet troll named Milo Yiannopoulos to be Breitbart’s tech editor and to essentially entice these legions of angry online gamers into the world of populist right-wing politics. And eventually Bannon was able to turn them on to Trump.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/05/05/fake-news-and-alt-right-are-pushing-forged-documents-aid-marine-le-pen-frances-election/216305

Forged documents originating on 4chan alleging that French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was evading taxes spread online thanks to an ecosystem that includes social media, “alt-right” outlets, and fake news purveyors. The campaign was seemingly aided by Russian-linked entities, and it subsequently reached Macron’s opponent, who aired the claim in a public debate.

Macron is competing in a May 7 runoff against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. On May 3, hours before a scheduled debate between Macron and Le Pen, an anonymous user on 4chan posted documents purporting to show that Macron used a shell company to dodge taxes. Users on the forum responded that the documents should be sent to “independent journalists” and “the alternative media” like “Cernovic (sic), Breitbart, and so on,” and encouraged each other to “spam” the documents “on social media” such as Twitter to get “it trending.” They also said to “send it to Le Pen.” The documents soon spread on Twitter, with many of the Twitter accounts promoting them appearing to have connections to Russia, according to a Belgian researcher. The claim was promoted by “alt-right” media figures such as Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.

That these figures would attempt to smear Le Pen’s opponent is not surprising given that Le Pen is widely admired by much of the “alt-right” and closely tied with Russia.

The 4chan-based documents eventually reached Le Pen herself. During her debate with Macron, she said, “I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas.” Le Pen later backed down on her claim, and Macron filed a legal complaint against her for the statement. Multiple outlets have reported that the documents were fake, with The Telegraph noting that they were “widely denounced as crude forgeries.” Additionally, following Le Pen's accusation, the French prosecutor's office has opened an investigationr egarding “suspicions of fake news being spread to influence Sunday's presidential vote.”

The case is yet another example of the way the misinformation ecosystem involving the “alt-right” and fake news purveyors amplifiesfringe falsities and lies (and even Kremlin-connected conspiracy theories). The network has often succeeded in pushing those false claims into more traditional conservative and mainstream outlets and, thus, the public realm.

kekistan

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/far-right-white-supremacists-berkeley-protests-antifa-trump

https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/4chan-trolls-diy-spaces-oakland-fire

4chan Users Launch Campaign to Shut Down DIY Venues in Aftermath of Oakland Fire

GABRIELLE CANON

DEC 15 2016, 12:46PM

The online forum’s right-wing internet activists are calling for warehouse spaces to be shut down for being “open hotbeds of liberal radicalism.”

The smell of ash hadn't yet cleared from the air in Oakland's Fruitvale district as fire-crews and inspectors continued sifting through the debris where The Ghost Ship warehouse once stood. It had been five days since a fire tore through the building and killed 36 people who were there for a music event, sparking debates about safety concerns and the importance of less-than-legal live/work spaces for underground artists. That's when one 4chan poster saw an opportunity—namely, to use the tragedy to "crush the radical left."

Posting on an anonymous online message board for political discussions and debates—4chan's "Politically Incorrect" (/pol/)—the contributor used all caps to call for others using their site to report art spaces and illegal venues to the authorities.

"These places are open hotbeds of liberal radicalism and degeneracy and now YOU [sic] can stop them by reporting all such places you may be or may become aware of to the authorities, specifically the local fire marshel [sic]," the poster explained. "Watch them and follow them to their hives. Infiltrate social circles, go to parties/events, record evidence and report it. We've got them on the run but now we must crush their nests before they can regroup!"

The post ended with MAGA—an acronym used on the site for Donald Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again," as the poster wished everyone "happy hunting."

The thread filled with responses.

Laced with racial slurs and memes championing the cause, commenters offered advice for how to find and target the underground spaces. "Look on college communities, facebook groups, and music forums. Try searching for keywords like queer and safespace" [sic]," a poster advised, while another instructed readers to gain the trust of those who organize events.

Others just reiterated the message of the original poster, emphasizing that these spaces are home to progressive organizing efforts, and delightedly spurred others to take on the budding campaign in their hometowns across the United States.

"These places hold Black Lives Matter meetings. These places plan protests that disrupt our cities. These places illegally house our enemies," one person wrote. "Stop them."

"Fate has presented us this opportunity to strike the left at its core and destabilise [sic] them," added another. "Don't waste it!"

Photo of interior of Ghost Ship via their website

Unlike most message boards or online community sites, discussions exist only ephemerally on 4chan, as the site limits boards to ten pages of comments. A short time after they expire, threads are automatically removed from the site. The original post about Oakland's fire existed for only a day, but nearly a week later, another emerged with broader directives.

"MAGA," the "Make America Great Again" tagline, had been reframed with MASA—Make America Safe Again—and the newly dubbed "Right Wing Safety Squad" or the "SS" (named with a nod at Hitler's "SS" paramilitary), were congratulating themselves on their progress in shutting down warehouse spaces around the country.

Paired with jeering and seemingly sarcastic calls for greater safety, commenters directed people's attention to places where organizers could be planning protests in Washington DC for Trump's inauguration:

"These are the places where a lot of the protests over the last couple months have recruited from, originated from, and that have housed people from out of town to participate in," one poster commented. "it is anticipated that on inauguration day there will be protests, these will be the places sowing drug fueled chaos. This must be quelled. To that end here is a list of addresses of DC "spaces" they need to be sorted through and shitholes discovered. DO NOT REPORT ON RESPONSIBLE BUSINESSES, research the list. report shitholes. MASA [sic]."

This type of post isn't unusual in 4chan, a site that has become the infamous online home for racist and misogynist rhetoric. But while most of what happens on the site stays there, this type of call to arms has the potential to do real damage—especially after the site's white-supremacy-supporting users have been empowered by President-elect Donald Trump.

Started in 2003 by a 15-year-old named Chris Poole, 4chan has morphed over the past decade into an influential internet subculture with 27 million monthly page-views and an increasing ability to produce IRL actions. While there are threads on just about anything, 4chan has developed a reputation for their effectively organized pranks and for conducting so-called "raids," using collective online actions to take down a specific target.

"A lot of [4chan] users realized if they pull their resources together they can wreak havoc," says Cole Stryker, author of two books on 4chan and online anonymous activism. He explains that originally the main objective was a subversive kind of fun—trolling aimed at the establishment. Over the past few years, however, there has been a shift in ideology, and an increase in support of far-right politics.

"I am old enough to remember when 4chan was actually funny," says Brianna Wu, a computer programmer who heads development at a gaming company called Giant Spacekat. "They were more of a site based on irreverent chaos. They would do things like sabotage online polls to name a scientific boat and it was ridiculous and childish but no one got hurt."

Wu knows firsthand what it's like to be targeted by the 4chan community. As an outspoken feminist involved in gaming, she was one of the many victims of GamerGate, an attack launched in 2014 through online sites like 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter against women in the gaming industry or those who reported on or reviewed it. After Wu's personal information was posted online (via a hacker tactic known as "doxing"), she received death threats and rape threats that caused her to flee her home. She has had to change her phone number numerous times and now, even years later, she is still harassed by people trying to get and post her personal information.

"One of the really sad things is these communities have taken a really terrifyingly hardcore right-wing anti-feminist, anti-inclusion turn," she adds.

Stryker says GamerGate was the turning point for 4chan, which has now become a breeding ground for the burgeoning "alt-right" movement that paved the way for neo-Nazis and white supremacists to emerge into the mainstream in support of President-elect Donald Trump.

Photo of Ghost Ship fire by Seung Y Lee

Describing what those in the community saw as a "nerd uprising," Stryker says that after GamerGate, the anger and the raiding was increasingly directed at left-wing groups they call SJWs—an acronym for Social Justice Warriors. "That is when this consciousness began to develop," he explains, "the idea that if 'we don't stand up against this wave of SJW ideology, we are going to get overrun by it.'"

While there hasn't been a documented increase in the number of 4chan raids in recent months, the actions of this group of 4chan users may have the potential for greater impact, especially if they continue to find unique strategies of attacking the left, like calling upon authorities to shut down sub-legal warehouses.

Wednesday's call to target art spaces where diverse communities feel safe—at perhaps their most vulnerable moment—could be said to be an easy task compared to previous raids, as it doesn't require anyone to do anything illegal, or any actual hacking. Instead, all people have to do is place a call to the authorities.

It is still unclear whether or not the group's efforts have been or will be successful, but that hasn't stopped them from congratulating themselves on seven shutdown spaces across the country, including Baltimore's Bell Foundry, Denver's Rhinoceropolis, and Nashville's Glass Menage, all of which were closed down after the Oakland fire.

Wu, the female programmer targeted in GamerGate, says that, based on her experience, there's little that can be done to stop raids once they are underway. She says authorities and online social sites should do more to crack down on doxers and associated internet activists, especially when their targets are already at-risk groups.

"The people who were killed in the fire in Oakland were some of the most vulnerable, and 4chan has nothing better to do with their time but destroy these communities?" she said."It's unconscionable."

Stryker says that, while many raid campaigns fail, he thinks this one might do some damage unless government officials decide to step in. "If they are calling attention to building code violations, and if those violations are actually there, I can see them causing a lot of anguish," he says. After all, these spaces are underfunded and complying with building codes isn't exactly easy.

"If authorities actually respond to these calls—and I don't know why they wouldn't in the wake of something like this Oakland situation," he says with a pause before adding, "I think this is kind of an ingenious plan that has a high potential for success."

no links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

4chan is an English-language imageboard website. Users generally post anonymously, with the most recent posts appearing above the rest. 4chan is split into various boards with their own specific content and guidelines. Registration is not required, nor is it possible (except for staff).

Launched on October 1, 2003, the site was modeled on Japanese imageboards, particularly 2chan. 4chans first boards were originally primarily used for posting pictures and discussing manga and anime. The site quickly became popular and expanded, and now features boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime (and other otaku topics), to videogames, music, literature, fitness, politics and sports.

The site has been linked to Internet subcultures and activism, most notably Anonymous, the alt-right and Project Chanology.^[3][4][5] 4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats, Rickrolling, "Chocolate Rain", Pedobear and many others. The site's "Random" board, also known as "/b/", was the first board to be created, and is the one that receives the most traffic.^[6][7] As its name suggests, the Random board has minimal rules on posted content. Gawker once jokingly claimed that "reading /b/ will melt your brain".^[8] The site's anonymous community and culture have often provoked media attention. For media planners, this enterprise is "further proof that creativity is everywhere and new media is less accessible" to advertisement agencies.^[9]

4chan users have been instrumental in pranks such as hijacking Internet destinations to cause images of Rick Astley to appear in place of their content, coordinating attacks against other websites and Internet users, and posting threats of violence in order to elicit individual and public reactions. The Guardian once summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile [...] brilliant, ridiculous and alarming."^[10]

[hide]

Background

4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times.^[14] 4chan's Alexa rank is generally around 700,^[15] though it has been as high as number 56 at times.^[16] It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. Poole acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site online, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet.^[17] However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content.^[18] In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; in February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money.^[19] The 4chan servers were moved from Texas to California in August 2008, which upgraded the maximum bandwidth throughput of 4chan from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s.^[20]The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards.^[8][11] The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, physical fitness, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain.^[12] The site has had at least one employee, a programmer whom 4chan's founder Christopher Poole met via online Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers.^[13] As of 2011, the /b/ (Random), /v/ (Video games), /a/ (Anime and Manga), and /s/ (explicit images) boards were respectively the site's first, second, third, and fourth most popular boards.^[note ^1]

Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously.^[21][22] Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot".^[23] In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity.^[24] As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users.^[25] Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode.^[26] In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan.^[note ^1] 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.^[27]

4chan has been the target of occasional denial of service attacks. For instance, on December 28, 2010, 4chan and other websites went down due to such an attack, following which Poole said on his blog, "We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!"^[28]

History

4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of Christopher Poole, a then-15-year-old student from New York City whose 4chan handle is "moot".^[13] Prior to starting 4chan, Poole had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums.^[21] He intended 4chan to be an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard and a place to discuss manga and anime.^[11][29] Upon the creation of 4chan, Poole encouraged users from the Something Awful subforum titled "Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse", who also happened to be dissatisfied with the forum, to discuss anime on his website.^[30] Poole originally used the Futaba Channel to obtain anime-related images, and liked the concept of a message board where people anonymously shared images, which eventually led to his idea of creating a similar English-based website. During the creation of 4chan, he obtained the source code for the Futaba Channel website, and translated the Japanese text into English using Altavista's Babelfish online translator.^[note ^1][31] During 4chans earliest days, it had only two boards: "/a/ – Anime/General" and "/b/ – Anime/Random" (the very first board to be created); more boards were created over time, and /b/ was eventually renamed to simply "/b/ – Random".^[note ^1][31]

During the early days of 4chan, the boards that originally existed were the anime, random, cute, hentai, and yaoi boards; a lolicon board also existed at /l/,^[32] but after being disabled for a week around the turn of the year 2004 it was removed in October 2004.^[33] The /g/ board also was initially dedicated to guro, before it was deleted and later remade as the "technology" board.^[34] During 2004, 4chan briefly went offline,^[35] then returned fully online a few months later.^[36] Following 4chan's return, some non-anime related boards, such as the weapons, automobile, and video games boards, were introduced.^[37]

In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd's ROBOT9000 script.^[38] During the same year, the /soc/ board was created in an effort to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/. /r9k/ was restored on October 23, 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/) and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica, and realized that he had done the same.^[39]

...

skeleton key to Trump youth

Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right.

2. Anon Steps Out to Fight Lord Xenu

In the beginning I didn’t pay all that much attention 4chan. I knew they were a group of teen anime fans like so many other teens at nerd-themed conventions. But around 2008 I realized I wanted to do a story on them. Their user base had grown exponentially and it was obvious they were about to explode into the mainstream. (Much to the dismay of its millions of users, who tried in vain desperation to keep it a secret.)

The key to 4chan’s popularity (and what distinguished it from its progenitor Something Awful) was the Japanese bulletin board Poole had adapted for English use. People had so much fun using it, threads became ephemeral, growing wildly within seconds, then disappearing minutes later, pushed out of the way and into oblivion by new threads and so forth ad infinitum 24/7. Perhaps the most appealing part for users was that you didn’t have to make an account. The software displayed a default name for posters who didn’t sign up — which was everyone. On all those millions upon millions of posts the author’s name was simply, “Anonymous”. Users began referring to each other by that name. “Hi Anon here,” posts would begin. And so Anonymous was born.

Now 4chan is often explained as being responsible for some early popular memes like “rickrolling”. But this is an understatement. 4chan invented the meme as we use it today. At the time, one of the few places you saw memes was there. The white Impact font with the black outlines, that was them (via S.A.). Terms like “win” and “epic” and “fail” were all created or popularized on 4chan, used there for years before they became a ubiquitous part of the culture. The very method of how gifs and images are interspersed with dialogue in Slack or now iMessage or wherever is deeply 4chanian. In other words, the site left a profound impression on how we as a culture behave and interact.

In 2008, I wrote the site’s teenage founder, Poole, whose contact was at the top of the site, asking for an interview. He never wrote back. Then I saw 4chan was meeting, not in Baltimore, but a few blocks from my apartment in New York, in fact, in many cities around the world. They had planned to protest the church of Scientology.

Why this group of nerdy boys had pivoted from }: to protesting Scientology is an interesting question.

To answer it, we must look a little closer at 4chan’s system of values. To those with a passing knowledge of 4chan it’s strange to think of it having a value system. And indeed it did try its mightiest to be nihilistic, to hate, to deny, to shrug, to laugh off everything as a joke like all teenage boys do (the board was mostly young men). This effort was of course impossible. The attempts to be “random”, like a Rorschach test, painted a portrait of exactly who they were, the voids filled in with their identity, their interests, their tastes. The result was that 4chan had a culture as complex as any other society of millions of people, anonymous or no. There were things it loved, things it hated, ways of being and acting that met with approval and disapproval in the group.

In fact, it codified its value system in a series of “rules”. Like everything it did, these were constructed piecemeal from pop culture. Rule #1 was taken from Fight Club’s Rule # 1, “Don’t talk about 4chan”. All the rules had a Lord of the Flies vibe to them,that is to say, they were very obviously created by a bullying and anarchic society of adolescent boys — or at least, men with the mindset of boys — particularly lonely, sex starved man-boys, who according to their own frequent jokes about the subject, lived in their parents’ basement. (Poole himself lived in his parents’ basement well after the initial success of the site.) They were obsessed with Japanese culture and, naturally enough, there was already a term for people like them in Japan, hikikomori — meaning “pulling inward, or being confined” — teens and adults who withdrew from society into fantasy worlds constructed by anime, video games, and now the internet. And of course, it’s relevant to note here the themes of Fight Club itself, a film about a male collective that regains its masculinity through extreme acts after it has been debased by modern corporate culture.

Also like adolescent boys, 4chan users were deeply sensitive and guarded. They disguised their own sensitivity (namely, their fear that they would be, “forever alone”) by extreme insensitivity. The rules, like everything else, were always half in jest. Everything had to be a done with at least a twinkle of winking irony. This was an escape route, a way of never having to admit to your peers that you were in fact expressing something from your heart, in other words — that you were indeed vulnerable. No matter what a user did or said, he could always say it was “for the lulz” (lols). Like (by comparison the tame and sophisticated precursor) “Something Awful” board that spawned it, 4chan defined itself by being insensitive to suffering in that way only people who have never really suffered can — that is to say, young people, mostly young men, protected by a cloak of anonymity. The accepted standard was a sort of libertarian “free speech” banner, in which isolated man-boys asserted their right to do or say anything no matter someone else’s feelings. This meant generally posting pornography, swastikas, racial slurs, and content that reveled in harm to other people.

Before 4chan’s dispute with Scientology it had banded together for practical jokes they had called “raids”. The board would flood particular chat rooms or online networks. Thousands of 4chan users would appear in the virtual child’s world Habbo Hotel to cause chaos, for no other reason than that it was an amusing way to pass their near limitless idle time (“for the lulz”).

During the raids, they would enforce “Rule #1” and conceal the very fact of 4chan. An ongoing joke was to claim they were from a rival site, newgrounds.com. The Scientology “protest” was also in large part a “raid”. Videos were made directed at Scientology pretending “Anonymous” was a shadowy and powerful cabal, something akin to Hydra from Marvel comic books. Since no one knew who Anonymous was at the time, they could pretend they were anything. This meant that there was another more serious component in the protest. The part that wasn’t a joke was an experiment in political power. What could they do with their numbers? Could they actually destroy Scientology? If not, how far could they get? There wasn’t a consensus of course. Many on 4chan expressed indignation and rage at the protests. They were afraid that “Rule #1” would be broken; 4chan would be outed and as a consequence the only community in which they had found acceptance would disappear.

The morning of the protest was a brutally cold Saturday. My roommate and I, bleary-eyed, boarded the subway and took it two stops to Times Square. We had a vague feeling we were being trolled.

“No way these nerds are leaving their parents’ basements…” my roommate grumbled as we ascended up the NQR steps. Times Square was abandoned. Not even the tourists were out. All you could see was the trash billowing about on the streets. Then we turned the corner on to 46th street and to our astonishment several hundred people were screaming and shouting, cordoned off in front of the Scientology building. Anonymous. Every one. They all wore masks, mostly Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by the Wachowski sisters’ adaptation of a comic book. This was, in comic book parlance, the mask’s “first appearance” (IRL). I interviewed the perplexed Scientologist standing between the columns of his temple. He was wearing a gleaming silver suit, the threads iridescent. He looked horrified and perplexed.

“These are terrorists,” he insisted, of course having no idea who they were, which was message board users. “This is a terrorist organization. And we are religion protected by the First Amendment.” Then he handed me a packet, surprisingly thick, full of glossy pamphlets about Scientology, like something you might get from a college admissions office.

I interviewed a pimply faced boy, his Guy Fawkes mask pulled up over long, curly, orange locks.

“How was this protest organized?” I asked.

“It was organized on a site called newgrounds.com,” he answered.

“Is the protest a joke or serious?”

“It’s serious business.” he replied. Serious business was a meme, a joke on 4chan. And so it went down the line, “anonymous” protestors, all 4chan users, following Rule #1, trying to conceal 4chan from me, and obscure the source of the joke, just like a real life “raid” into a chatroom, hiding their motivations behind a mirrored chamber of repeated memes. Habbo Hotel by way of Lord Xenu. Xenu was Scientology’s ultimate revelatory secret, the intergalactic space ruler who seeded earth in the primeval past. So Anon chanted his name as a meme. It was their only real political statement: all information was free now that we had the internet. Scientology acolytes the same age, handing out copies of Dianetics, stopped up their ears.

When the protest broke up (it was scheduled to end at noon), a nerd dressed like Neo from The Matrix in a long black duster shouted, “Now back to our parents’ basements!” and the whole crowd laughed

imgchan’s first day out. The Scientology protests of 2008 off Broadway.

3. New Horizons

The peculiar thing about the Scientology protest was how little 4chan cared about Scientology. The original cause of the dispute had to do with 4chan’s access to “lulz” on the internet. Scientology had removed a funny video featuring Tom Cruise rambling incoherently about Scientology. 4chan believed this had interfered with their unlimited right to post anything (and keep it) on the internet. There was a moral component to their protest, but it was tangential at best.

When, several years later, Occupy Wall Street came to Zuccotti Park, it too only tangentially touched upon 4chan’s political interests and complaints. 4chan was libertarian. During the 2008 presidential election, it supported Ron Paul (replacing its traditional greeting “sup /b/” with “ron paul /b/”). 4chan wanted the right to do as it pleased and not much else. Where large organized systems like corporations, the government, or Scientology interfered with that “right”, they opposed them. Anonymous attacked corporations like Paypal and American Express, not because of their corporateness, but because they had frozen the assets of Julian Assange who had similar beliefs about the freedom to distribute information on the internet.

At Occupy Wall Street, 4channers were a distinct minority. Now and again someone in a Guy Fawkes mask would voice libertarian ideas among a group of radical leftists discussing socialism.

However, despite not being on the left, Anonymous is often conflated or confused with the leftist Occupy movement. For example, in the T.V. series Mr. Robot, a group of clandestine anonymous hackers (“F Society”) releases a video that is clearly derived from 4chan’s/Anonymous’ video for the Scientology protests. The hackers in Mr. Robot, who wear masks similar to those of 4chan’s Guy Fawkes mask, want to destroy the corporate hegemony and free everyone from their debt, student or otherwise. That is to say, they have the agenda of Occupy Wall Street.

The absurdity here shouldn’t go without note. Emulating fiction from T.V. and comic books, 4chan forum go-ers pretended to be an international cabal of powerful hackers. Then almost a decade later, a T.V. show about a fictional cabal of powerful hackers copies their video, closing the loop.

img

n image saved off 4chan in February of 2011 by me, the lurking author.

By the end of 2011, 4chan had finally been outed. Subsequently, the group splintered in a sense; anyone could and did pick up the banner of Anonymous. Hackers labeling themselves as such pursued different agendas, some anti-corporate, some truly noble — like helping convict the Steubenville rapists. (This became the distinct leftist “hacktivist” group “Anonymous”.) But philanthropic and anti-corporate hacking was not at the heart of what 4chan was about. It had started and always was in some way about the “lulz”, using the computer for entertainment, for passing the time. Perhaps there was a moment when it could have been something else, a shining possibility that emerged on the horizon in one of those magical revolutionary moments in which all things are possible, like Occupy Wall Street itself. But, it was not to be. At least, not yet.

4chan was now spread along a network of websites and IRC channels of which 4chan.org was one. The press often lamented how, like Occupy Wall Street, they could not define Anonymous. No one person represented it. But this same reasoning could also be used to make the opposite point. If no definition existed for Anonymous, why were millions of people identifying as one of the group? Just because the borders were as amorphous as a cloud, didn’t mean it wasn’t as large or real as one. It was still united by a common culture and set of values, fuzzy around the edges, but solid at the core. And what was this solid core that defined it? The same thing it had always been.

It was still a group of hikikomori — a group of primarily young males who spent a lot of the time at the computer, so much so they had retreated into virtual worlds of games, T.V., and now the networks of the internet. This was where most or all of their interaction, social or otherwise took place. The real world, by contrast, above their mothers’ basements, was a place they did not succeed, perhaps a place they did not fundamentally understand.

img

This, of course, did not describe everyone, but it was the bulk of the bell curve. Sometimes, while meeting virtually to commiserate about the problem, 4chan sought to fix it. For example, 4chan created a /fit/ board, teaching “Anons” how to exercise and groom themselves. The advice was so basic, it was endearing. (“You have to shower once a day” etc.) There were professionals and successful people on the board who used it only for amusement. And there were hackers who did indeed use their knowledge of virtual worlds to effect substantive change in the real one. But the core of the culture remained more or less unchanged. It was a culture that celebrated failure — that from the very beginning encouraged anyone who posted to “become an hero” (their term for killing themselves, and sometimes others in the bargain). And 4chan’s next big effort reflected that. In fact, it was such a big deal for them because, after all their groping for a prank that might become a cause 4chan cared about, they finally hit on one that expressed their strange, unique complaints.

4. Gamergate: Anon Defends his Safe Spaces

It’s difficult to recall what started Gamergate because, like much of 4chan-style content, it never made sense on the surface. The mind tends to discard such things as nonsense. Nonetheless, there was a beginning. In 2014, a jilted lover claimed his ex-girlfriend had been unfaithful to him. He tried to prove to the internet that he was wronged in an embarrassing and incoherent blog post. The target of his post, his ex, happened to be a female game developer.

Soon 4chan and other like minded-men who felt wronged by women took up the rallying cry. The effort somehow moved from lurid interest in a particular woman’s sex life to a critique of video games. Gamergaters believed that “SJWs” (Social Justice Warriors) were adding unwanted elements into their video games, namely things which promoted gender equality.

Strangely enough, they believed this was happening not because video game creators and the video game press were interested in making and reviewing games that dealt with these issues, but because there was a grand conspiracy perpetrated by a few activists to change video games.

While this whirling connective tissue of nonsense doesn’t seem to make much sense at first glance (and indeed, much of the game-making community and the press in general struggled to understand it), it makes perfect sense if we look at this New York Times story about how more than 16% percent of men in the nation are unemployed.

Again, here we can understand this group as people who have failed at the real world and have checked out of it and into the fantasy worlds of internet forums and video games. These are men without jobs, without prospects, and by extension (so they declaimed) without girlfriends. Their only recourse, the only place they feel effective, is the safe, perfectly cultivated worlds of the games they enter. By consequence of their defeat, the distant, abstract concept of women in the flesh makes them feel humiliated and rejected. Yet, in the one space they feel they can escape the realities of this, the world of the video game, here (to them, it seems) women want to assert their presence and power.

If this sounds hard to believe, take for example Milo Yiannopoulos, the “Technology Editor” at Breitbart News, whose scheduled lecture this month at Berkeley spawned massive riots and protests. Yiannopoulos rose to prominence via Gamergate. He is not a “technology” editor because he compares the chip architectures of competing graphics cards. Rather the “tech” here is code for the fact that his audience is the vast population of sad young men who have retreated to internet communities. Likewise the mainstream press sometimes describes him as troll as a way of capturing his vague association with 4chan. This term, too, is inaccurate. He is 4chan at its most earnest, after all these men have finally discovered their issue — the thing that unites them — their failure and powerlessness literally embodied (to them) by women.

img

Yiannopoulos is depicted as the last on the right in an Instagram image posted by Donald Trump in September of 2016.

Yiannopoulos’ rambling “arguments” against feminism, are not arguments at all, as much as pep talks, ways of making these dis-empowered men feel empowered by discarding the symbol of their failure — women. As an openly gay man, he argues that men no longer need be interested in women, that they can and should walk away from the female sex en masse. For example in a long incoherent set of bullet points on feminism he states:

The rise of feminism has fatally coincided with the rise of video games, internet porn, and, sometime in the near future, sex robots. With all these options available, and the growing perils of real-world relationships, men are simply walking away.

Here Yiannopoulos has inverted what has actually happened to make his audience feel good. Men who have retreated to video games and internet porn can now characterize their helpless flight as an empowered conscious choice to reject women for something else. In other words, it justifies a lifestyle which in their hearts they previously regarded helplessly as a mark of shame.

Gamergate at last (unlike Habbo Hotel, Scientology, Paypal, or Occupy Wall Street) was a “raid” that mattered, that wasn’t just a fun lark to pass the time or a winking joke. Here was another issue (besides “let me do what I want on the internet all the time”) that spoke to the bulk of 4chan users.

Anon was going to get “SJW”s (ie. empowered women) out of their safe spaces — video games — the place from which they retreated from women by indulging in fantasies in which they were in control (that is to say, ones which demeaned women).

However, their efforts failed, not so much for lack of trying (though there’s that, too) but because the campaign itself was a fantasy. Gamergate was, quite poetically, defined by the campaigners poor reality-testing. The people carrying it out did not interact with real life all that much, only the virtual escapist worlds of video games, message boards, and anime.

And thus the campaign proceeded like the video game it wasn’t. Menus of “target lists” were drawn up, their enemies (mostly women they wanted to harrass) labelled “warriors”. 4chan users pretended a furious amount of mouse clicking and virtual action would somehow translate into a concrete reward appearing in their computer screens, like it does, say, in World of Warcraft.

Namely, gamergaters believed that online sleuthing would uncover a tangible conspiracy about how game creators colluded to further a “Social Justice Warrior” agenda. Among many others, they hacked the Skype account of the indie game developer I was working for at the time, presumably reading our conversations about the game we were making looking for the moment when we uttered “now to further the secret SJW agenda”. What they found instead was my boss patiently explaining to me the best ways to make a video game. One of the cardinal rules was that every action the user takes must have a carefully calibrated system of escalating rewards. Complete a level, get a cut scene. Video games in this sense, are meticulously constructed to make sure the user is entertained at every moment through a challenge-reward system.

All that work cracking Skype accounts with wordlists did not yield the tangible reward of evidence of a cabal. The real world behaves differently than a video game. There were shades of grey. It disappointed. What you did and what you got for your efforts were muddled. It was more challenging than the safe spaces of a video game, carefully crafted to accommodate gamers and make them feel — well, the exact opposite of how they felt interacting in the real world — effective. In the fantasy world of the game, actions achieved ends.

It was almost as if all these disaffected young men were waiting for a figure to come along who, having achieved nothing in his life, pretended as though he had achieved everything, who by using the tools of fantasy, could transmute their loserdom (in 4chan parlance, their “fail”), into “win”.

5. Trump: the Loser who Won

img

Another vintage 4chan meme from the author’s personal collection.

In Bukowski’s novel Factotum, the main character, Hank Chinaski, drifts through various demeaning blue-collar jobs until he ends up working the stockroom of an autoparts store. The job is no better than any of the others, except for one important difference: It ends early enough for Chinaski and another worker, Manny, to race to the track for the last bet of the day. Soon the other workers in the warehouse hear of the scheme and ask Hank to put down their bets, too.

At first Hank objects. He doesn’t have time to make their petty bets before the track closes. But Manny has a different idea.

“We don’t bet their money, we keep their money.” he tells Hank.

“Suppose they win?” Hank asks.

“They won’t win. They always pick the wrong horse. They have a way of always picking the wrong horse.”

“Suppose they bet our horse?”

“Then we know we’ve got the wrong horse.”

Soon Chinaski and Manny are flush with money, not from working for the $1.25 an hour at the warehouse or even making smart bets themselves, but from taking the money of the other workers and not betting it. That is, after all, why those same men handing over their bets work in the factory; they are defined by their bad decisions, by the capacity for always getting a bad deal. Their wages and their bets are both examples of the same thing.

Trump, of course, has made his fortune in a similar manner, with casinos, correspondence courses, and pageants, swindling money out of aspiring-millionaire blue collar workers, selling them not a bill of goods, but the hope of a bill of goods, the glitz and glamour of success, to people who don’t win, or in Trump’s parlance, “don’t win anymore”. As if once, in the mythic past he invented, they did once and soon will again, since at the heart of what he promised was, “you’ll win so much you’ll get sick of winning”. In other words, if we are to understand Trump supporters, we can view them at the core as losers — people who never ever bet on the right horse — Trump, of course, being the signal example, the man obsessed with “losers” who seemingly was going to be remembered as one of the biggest losers in history — until he won.

The older generation of Trump supporters the press often focuses on, the so-called “forgotten white working class”, are in this sense easier to explain since they fit into the schema of a 1950s-style electorate. Like the factory workers in Factotum, the baby boomers were promised pensions and prosperity, but received instead simply the promises. Here the narrative is simple. The workers were promised something and someone (the politicians? the economy? the system itself?) never delivered. Their horse never came in.

This telling of the story ignores the fact that, as Trump often points out, “it was a bad deal”. The real story is not that the promise was never fulfilled. Manny and Hank’s deal with the workers was the same as the factory’s deal with them: the empty promise was the bargain. The real story is not that the horse didn’t come in, it’s that the bet was never placed.

In the first presidential debate, Hillary evoked her conservative father as a way of appealing to the electorate, “My father was a small businessman.” she said. “He worked really hard… And so what I believe is the more we can do for the middle class, the more we can invest in you…”

No one noted how wildly outdated Clinton’s picture of the average voter was (her father, a suburban business man in the 50s) because we are used to every politician holding up the same faded 65-year-old snapshot anytime he or she regards the American electorate. Just like how images of Christmas on Coke bottles and catalogs are forever stuck in the 30s and 40s, so we expect politics to be eternally frozen in the 1950s. That is to say, as a nation still (somehow!) defined by its baby boomers, we understand this era as the baseline for understanding ourselves, considering it, “where we are from”.

But what does the American electorate look like if we put down the snapshot? Peel away how we perceive ourselves from what we actually are? How has that image of a 1950s businessman who owns his own home in the suburbs changed after decades of declines in wages, middle classdom, and home ownership?

To younger generations who never had such jobs, who had only the mythology of such jobs (rather a whimsical snapshot of the 1950s frozen in time by America’s ideology), this part of the narrative is clear. America, and perhaps existence itself is a cascade of empty promises and advertisements — that is to say, fantasy worlds, expectations that will never be realized “IRL”, but perhaps consumed briefly in small snatches of commodified pleasure.

Thus these Trump supporters hold a different sort of ideology, not one of “when will my horse come in”, but a trolling self-effacing, “I know my horse will never come in”. That is to say, younger Trump supporters know they are handing their money to someone who will never place their bets — only his own — because, after all, it’s plain as day there was never any other option.

In this sense, Trump’s incompetent, variable, and ridiculous behavior is the central pillar upon which his younger support rests.

Such an idea — one of utter contemptuous despair — is embodied in one image more than any other, one storied personage who has become a(n) hero to millions, the voice of a generation.

I am speaking, of course, of Pepe the Frog.

6. Trump the Frog

When Hillary’s campaign “explained” that Trump’s use of silly cartoon frog Pepe was a symbol of hate, it seemed to be yet another freakish oddity in a parade of horribles that was campaign 2016. Much of the attention at the time was focused on the question of: well, was he? Efforts to save Pepe got underway. Journalists, still falling for the same tricks of 2006, cited “anonymous” (that is to say, from 4chan) sources claiming they had invented the idea as a prank.

But there was little talk of why Pepe of all things? Was Pepe indeed meaningless? Another flotsam of senseless meme nonsense flung out of the “dumpster fire” of team Trump?

Pepe, like so many memes, was born on the “random” boards of 4chan’s /b/ (“b” for random) circa 2007, picked out of a webcomic by Matt Furie to become a macro. But why was he picked? We know now that 4chan’s actions are neither meaningless, “random”, or empty because they are labelled a “prank”.

Viewed through the lens of the people first posting him, Pepe makes nothing but sense. The original comic panels from which Pepe is excerpted feature him getting caught peeing with his pants pulled all the way down, his ass hanging out. Surprisingly, he is unashamed of this, “feels good man” he tells his roommate.

The grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog is an ideology, one which steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it. That is to say, it is what all the millions of forum-goers of 4chan met to commune about. It is, in other words, a value system, one reveling in deplorableness and being pridefully dispossessed. It is a culture of hopelessness, of knowing “the system is rigged”. But instead of fight the response is flight, knowing you’re trapped in your circumstances is cause to celebrate. For these young men, voting Trump is not a solution, but a new spiteful prank.

We know, by this point, that Trump is funny. Even to us leftists, horrified by his every move, he is hilarious. Someone who is all brash confidence and then outrageously incompetent at everything he does is — from an objective standpoint — comedy gold. Someone who accuses his enemies of the faults he at that very moment is portraying is comedy gold. But, strangely, as the left realized after the election, pointing out Trump was a joke was not helpful. In fact, Trump’s farcical nature didn’t seem to be a liability, rather, to his supporters, it was an asset.

All the left’s mockery of Trump served to reinforce his message as not only an outsider, but as an expression of rage, despair, and ultimate pathetic Pepe-style hopelessness.

4chan’s value system, like Trump’s ideology, is obsessed with masculine competition (and the subsequent humiliation when the competition is lost). Note the terms 4chan invented, now so popular among grade schoolers everywhere: “fail” and “win”, “alpha” males and “beta cucks”. This system is defined by its childlike innocence, that is to say, the inventor’s inexperience with any sort of “IRL” romantic interaction. And like Trump, since these men wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling these insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else.

Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite — a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he must assault women. In other words, to paraphrase Truman Capote, he is someone with his nose pressed so hard up against the glass he looks ridiculous. And for this reason, (because he knows he is substanceless) he must constantly re-affirm his own ego. Or as Errol Morris put it, quoting Borges, he is a “labyrinth with no center”.

But, what the left doesn’t realize is, this is not a problem for Trump’s supporters, rather, the reason why they support him.

Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother’s basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds.

Trump’s bizarre, inconstant, incompetent, embarrassing, ridiculous behavior — what the left (naturally) perceives as his weaknesses — are to his supporters his strengths.

In other words, Trump is 4chan.

Trump is steering into the skid embodied.

Trump is Pepe.

Trump is loserdom embraced.

Trump is the loser who has won, the pathetic little frog on the big strong body.

Trump’s ventures of course, represent this fantasy: this hope that the working man, against the odds dictated by his knowledge, experience, or hard work will one day strike it rich — Trump University, late night real estate schemes, the casinos. Trump himself, who inherited his wealth, represents the classic lucky sap.

But Trump also equally represents the knowledge that all of that is a lie, a scam that’s much older than you are, a fantasy that we can dwell in though it will never become true, like a video game.

Trump, in other words, is a way of owning and celebrating being taken advantage of.

Trump embodies buying the losing bet that will never be placed.

He is both despair and cruel arrogant dismissal, the fantasy of winning and the pain of losing mingled into one potion.

For this reason, the left should stop expecting Trump’s supporters to be upset when he doesn’t fulfill his promises.

Support for Trump is an acknowledgement that the promise is empty.

He is both the “promise” (“the labyrinth”, the “alpha”) and the empty center (“the promise betrayed”, the “beta”), in a sublime, hilarious, combination that perfectly reflects the worldview of his supporters.

In other words, we can append a third category to the two classically understood division of Trump supporters:

1) Generally older people who naively believe Trump will “make America great again”, that is to say, return it to its 1950s ideal evoked by both Trump and Clinton.

2) The 1 percent, who know this promise is empty, but also know it will be beneficial to short term business interests.

3) Younger members of the 99 percent, like Anon, who also know this promise is empty, but who support Trump as a defiant expression of despair.

7. The Un-rarest Pepes of Them All

As I said when I began this essay, because I work in comics, video games, and animation, I’ve watched 4chan grow from a group of people who could fit inside a single room to a worldwide collective.

But I should also note there’s another reason I was there from the beginning. It’s because, like so many young writers, journalists, and artists that are now despised by 4chan, I’m an inch away from their demographic.

When my father died after I left college in 2004, the last of my family’s wealth evaporated. And ever since then, I have lived well below the poverty line. (Even now, though I work as a professor, this is true). But I had the benefit of an education.

It was not too difficult for me to imagine an alternate version of myself that didn’t happen to have that. Like the men in those studies, I drifted unemployed and unemployable for many years in my 20s. Often when I did have a job, I quit, realizing that, in fact, laboring behind the counter in the service economy for minimum wage paid less than sitting at home idle in front of my PC, waiting for a gig in the gig economy, posting and selling comics, or trading virtual items in online games.

And I knew, I was on balance, luckier than most. My private school and private college education was the deviation from the norm. My chances were better than the majority of people my age. Yet here I was stone broke. All I owned (and still own) is my college debt. So it wasn’t a surprise there were a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out. Why not then retreat into your parents’ basements? And instead of despairing over trying and failing, celebrate not-trying? Celebrate retreating into the fantasy worlds of the computer. Steer into the skid — Pepe style. Own it. And why wouldn’t they retreat to a place like 4chan? To let their resentment and failures curdle into something solid?

8. 4chan vs. Gender

In a previous essay about contemporary counter-culture, I mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men, a feminist critique that discusses how gender roles bind and control men. Ehrenreich writes about how, in post-war hyper-capitalist 1950s America (the baseline America to which both Trump and Hillary harken back) a new role was invented for men. A man’s wage and his Playboy “bachelor pad” linked his earning potential to his role as a ladies man. This replaced a previous, more conservative ideology in which your earning potential meant you were able to support a wife and children. These two schemes, Ehrenreich maintained, are still the dominant ideas that control men’s behavior in the U.S.

As she pointed out, only “hipsters” managed to break and destroy this schema — the first and most famous ones being the wife-leaving beats, whose sexual adventures both gay and straight were totally disconnected from their earning potential and all societal expectations. They were dead broke (“Dharma”) bums, who much to the frustration of the pro-capitalist Hefner-style playboys, got laid all the time despite being stone broke and sometimes gay to boot. In other words, their enjoyment of life and sex was decoupled from the ideological demands of capitalism.

Recall the central themes of Gamergate: women represent Anon’s “beta” failure in capitalism. Anons have achieved neither of these ideological ideals; they are not playboys with bachelor pads or wage earners with families. If the U.S. were in fact what it pretended to be, that is to say, the best way to become either the playboy or the family man, Anon would not exist. But it is this gap between ideological expectation and cruel reality which created him. Instead, Anon resides in the very opposite of bachelor pads: his mother’s basement. We learned from the New Yorker profile of the alt-right leader Mike Cernovich, that he broadcasts from his girlfriend’s parent’s house, letting his male viewers believe the pool in the background of his webcasts is his, not theirs.

Video games were Anons’ way to retreat from this painful reminder of his failure, a failure which was literally embodied by women — whose physical attainment is the end goal of both ideologies. Gamergate was a pained cry, that here too, even unto their escapist fantasies, empowered women, like the mythological furies, were hounding them.

We can see now why several weeks ago 4chan went to “war” with artists and their “safe spaces”, trying to shut down music and arts venues across the country. What’s striking is how close the populations of 4chan and those who wanted to shut down the “safe spaces” are. The artists themselves are young people on the fringes of the economy who are also immersed in romantic fantasy. The main difference is that the artists have learned different ways to cope with the same problem. Instead of residing in their mother’s basements, they created ways to live together cheaply in warehouse spaces.

By contrasting 4chan with their self-proclaimed enemy, their counter-culture counterparts, we can see that, though demographically they are so similar, the real difference is introduced here — at the thorny of issue of the girlfriend. 4chan’s self-described “beta” males are trapped in this ideology, hating their counterparts whose key difference is a willingness, like the beatniks of old, to slough off the “gender binary” and live how they please.

But rather than take this as reason to be ever more contemptuous of Anons and their misogyny, the left should regard Anon/the deplorables as a failure on its part, a terrific mangling of the left’s own arguments that has resulted in alienating the very group of people who could be the most helped by their ideas, if not the most convinced.

To the deplorables, whose central complaint is one of masculine frailty, pride, and failure — to deny their identities as men is to deny their complaint. They are a group who define themselves by their powerlessness, by being trapped into defeat. But if they are to accept the left’s viewpoint, they must accept that the problem at core of their being is all in their heads. That is to say, the left’s viewpoint of sexual-difference-as-illusion is exactly what they don’t want to hear — that they have cornered themselves into their mother’s basements.

The left does more than simply declare their opposing viewpoint wrong, the radical idea of sex/gender-as-illusion denies their viewpoint an existence. To the left, a complaint stemming from being a man is null space, lying outside the realm of what it will acknowledge as true.

The irony here, of course, is the radical idea of sexual-difference-as-illusion is meant to solve the deplorables’ problem. It was created to liberate those who are oppressed by the concept of sexual difference by dispelling it as a cloud of pure ideas. But to these powerless men, it’s as if the left were addressing their issue by saying in an Orwellian manner, “There’s no such thing as your problem! Problem solved!”

Here the notion of sexual-difference-as-illusion is not performing the work it was built to do, rather the opposite. Ironically, it works to convince alienated men that sex/gender has marked them as a unique sort of outsider/failures, who cannot be accepted even into the multicultural coalitions that define themselves by their capacity for acceptance. In this way, 4chan’s virulent hatred of gender-bending “safe spaces”, though not justified, makes at least a perverse sort of sense, one tangled in wounded masculine pride.

9. Can Pepe be un Nazi-fied?

In Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, she notes that the inevitable result of a society built around the endless accumulation of middle class wealth is a man “degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of the machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.”

Such a picture of man, as a helpless cog in the vast juggernaut of society that grinds on to mangle everyone in its path, is not particularly new to us. In fact, it exists as a sort of folkloric way of understanding our modern condition, popping up again and again in our myths about escaping such a fate. Hollywood’s new hero is often one who must dramatically capitulate with an evil, hegemonic regime to stand against it. In the latest re-telling of the anti-fascist fable Star Wars, a hero must invent and build the fascist Death Star in order to destroy it. In the children’s story, The Hunger Games, the would-be revolutionary Katniss must do everything the regime tells her so that she may ultimately effect its annihilation. And indeed, in the previously mentioned Anonymous-inspired T.V. series Mr. Robot, the main character, a revolutionary hacker, works in a cubicle job in service of an evil corporation (so tired is this cliche it must be playfully named “Evil Corp”) that dominates almost all aspects of life.

As both Sanders and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek noted after Sanders lost the primaries, left and right are in some sense outdated ideas. The new division in politics is those who favor the current global hegemony and those who are against it. Like the Hollywood heroes, right and left have been competing to become this new radical anti-status quo party. And so far, in both Europe and America, the right has won, implying that, as Arendt predicted, the powerlessness created by bourgeoisie systems of capitalist exploitation might once again implode into far right totalitarianism.

However, as we have seen, the right’s anti-feminist message is one that only provides a momentary sense of relief (“you are acting powerful by retreating into video games and the internet!”) but like scratching a mosquito bite, it ultimately causes more dissatisfaction. That is to say, the only solution they can offer is, “keep retreating!” Likewise, Trump and the mocking cruel anguish he represents is not a genuine solution to the electorate’s powerlessness, but rather, simply the one closest at hand.

An adult does not freeze in mute horror when a child throws a tantrum. Nor do we generally regard such emotional outbursts as meaningless. Likewise, the left should not be paralyzed with horror by the deplorables, but rather view them as a symptom of a larger problem, one which only the left can truly solve.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman

2014 cute kittens?

4chan, that most elusive of Internet beasts, has seen a whole lot of press lately — little of it good. First the site was blamed for leaking the stolen nude photographs of dozens of female celebrities. Later it invented an unfunny and inexplicable “mascot” for Ebola, and encouraged witless new iPhone owners to microwave their phones. (That latter rumor gained so much traction, the Los Angeles Police Department felt compelled to weigh in.)

Apparently convinced the “ninth circle of Hell” was not doing enough to sabotage itself, shady viral marketers posing as 4chan users then pretended to hack Emma Watson’s nudes and — in the ensuing Internet-wide cacophony — demanded that 4chan be shut down.

“The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks have been an invasion of privacy,” the hoaxsters railed in an open letter against 4chan, “and [are] also clear indication that the Internet NEEDS to be censored.”

How, exactly, does one anonymous Web site generate such outrage? And how can a series of wholly anonymous, time-sensitive message boards — message boards with an interface straight out of the Geocities age — have such a profound, ranging impact on the Internet at large? More importantly: Who the heck are these people, and don’t they have anything better to do?

No worries, bewildered reader. We have answers.

What is 4chan?

4chan is a series of wholly anonymous, anything-goes forums. 4chan, in its layout and fundamental operation, is not terrifically different from Reddit, Something Awful, or other large-scale Internet forums. The site is broken up into threads where users can discuss different topics — everything from civet coffee to sex toys — and something like 22 million users do just that every month.

4chan founder Christopher Poole (left) at a convention in 2008. (Brennan Moore/Flickr)

A couple things make 4chan unusual as a forum, however. For one thing, unlike Reddit, users never need to make an account or pick a username — even a pseudonymous one. That means participants can say and do virtually anything they want with only the most remote threat of accountability. It also means you can’t message other users or establish any kind of social relationship with them, unless they reveal their identity in some way. For a social network, that’s pretty weird. In fact, a number of sociologists have spent time studying exactly how it works.

To further complicate things, 4chan threads expire after a certain amount of time — less time for R-rated boards, more time for G or PG ones — which lends a sense of impermanence to the whole operation and means that users rarely see the exact same thing. Few posts last more than a few days before they’re deleted from 4chan’s servers. Posts are organized reverse-chronologically — although “organized” maybe overstates it. 4chan’s interface is deliberately, anachronistically minimalist, which can make it difficult for non-regular users to access.

Bottom line: 4chan is a forum — nothing crazy or mysterious there. It’s just a forum with no names, few rules and few consequences, which is (a) the philosophical antithesis to virtually every other mainstream social property and (b) means people can (and do!) say just about anything they want.

Who uses 4chan?

According to the site’s own statistics, the vast majority of its users are young, college-educated men with an interest in Japanese culture, video games, comics and technology. Most live in English-speaking countries — the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia — but the site also sees sizable traffic from Germany, Sweden and France. In late 2010, a 4chan user conducted a (wholly unscientific) survey of other site users, which found that, among other things, most 4chan users don’t discuss the site offline and most users wouldn’t let their kids join it. The site’s founder urged readers to take the survey with “a massive grain of salt” — since the site thrives on anonymity, he pointed out, there’s ultimately no way to know who uses it with any certainty.

Why is 4chan important/why should I care?

Three reasons: First, 4chan is the original incubator for a huge number of memes and behaviors that we now consider central to mainstream Internet culture. Second, 4chan is responsible for some of the largest hoaxes, cyberbullying incidents and Internet pranks of the past five years. Third, Anonymous got its start on 4chan — and the hacktivist collective is an increasingly important player in news events from Ferguson to the Steubenville rape. In short, the full list of things 4chan has given the Internet would be pretty extensive. But here’s a start on the good:

escalator fake news

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine

...

The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine

By Alex Kaplan [1] / Media Matters [2]

April 6, 2017

For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.

Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement [3] have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials [4] and websites like Facebook [5] and Google [6] are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead [7] news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website [8] Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories [9] and leading [10] harassment campaigns [11].

These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.

And that brings us to Rice.

On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described [12] member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium [13] that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit [14] -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars [15], and spread via posts on 4chan[16] and Reddit [17].

img

As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter [18], Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted [12]Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich [19] for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).

...

e claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake [20], who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors [21] hyped [22]the [23] allegations [24], dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”

[imgs]

Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion [25], saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio [26] and Fox News show [27], where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."

As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention [28] or for not presenting it [29] the way they would. Although some [30] mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others [31] have also suggested [32] that Rice [33] could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves [34]as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.

Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.

This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them [35]. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence [36] and acceptance [37] in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping [38] the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.

This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory. In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory [9] that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among [9] fake news [39] purveyors [40] and was pushed by [9] Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity [41] and the Independent Journal Review [42]. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed[43] it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report [44].

This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand [45] this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them.