<p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see also 4chan</font></b></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">escalator fake news</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">619 bak</font></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma tag</font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></p><p><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/networks-and-outlets/reddit">https://www.mediamatters.org/networks-and-outlets/reddit</a></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx many pix twt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">escalator/ reddit?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Here's how a fringe smear targeting E. Jean Carroll reached Donald Trump Jr.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Blog ››› June 26, 2019 6:35 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sarah Wasko / Media Matters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll reported that President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., pushed a conspiracy theory that the claim was "ripped-off a plot" from a 2012 episode of NBC procedural Law & Order. Before being amplified by Trump Jr., the conspiracy theory was spread by a Twitter account associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory and another account whose content has regularly been shared by “seemingly-automated accounts.” It has also been pushed by the Daily Mail's political editor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On June 21, Carroll wrote in <b>New York magazine’</b>s The Cut that 23 years ago, Trump assaulted her in a department store dressing room. According to Carroll, Trump “lunge[d] at me, pushe[d] me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and [put] his mouth against my lips.” She wrote that he then pulled down her tights and assaulted her. Carroll told two close friends at the time, both of whom “confirmed the allegations to New York and to [The New York] Times.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Even though her friends confirmed that Carroll told them about the incident at the time, social media accounts and message boards have claimed that Carroll “ripped-off a plot” from an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that dealt with a similar sexual assault against an actor. However, the episode aired in 2012, well over a decade after the incident allegedly occurred.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s how the smear spread from social media to message boards to some right-wing sites and to Donald Trump Jr.:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter user @RickMcCargar:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter user @tksusie:</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Twitter user @thebradfordfile (real name John Bradford Williams) also tweeted about the Law & Order episode. The Outline reported last year that Williams’ account has “more than 100,000 followers, a penchant for spreading far-right propaganda, and a curious network of seemingly-automated accounts regularly amplifying the reach of its tweets.” One of Williams’ former coworkers told The Outline that Williams “farms a significant portion of his engagement from direct-message based group chats on Twitter”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8chan’s "/pol/" amplified @thebradfordfile’s tweet:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter account @Trump454545 posted a clip of the episode in a tweet calling for Carroll to be prosecuted. The account's profile contains a hashtag of the abbreviated slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory -- “where we go one, we go all” or “WWG1WGA”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Reddit forum “r/The_Donald” amplified the smear </b>and @thebradfordfile and @Trump454545’s tweets:</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitchy cited @thebradfordfile to push the claim:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter user @thebradfordfile then dug up this clip from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” The detectives are interviewing a man who’s hired to play out women’s rape fantasies, and he mentions one in particular that took place … in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">No, for real.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A user on 4chan’s “/pol/” cited the same link</b> that @thebradfordfile tweeted earlier.</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>YouTube conspiracy theorist and far-right troll Mark Dice tweeted</b> another video of the episode (Donald Trump Jr. liked the tweet):</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Model and reality television star Mindy Robinson</b> later tweeted the same video as the account @Trump454545 did:</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Multiple videos of the episode were posted on <b>YouTub</b>e to push the smear:</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Gateway Pundit published a piece headlined “Fraud Gets Caught! Crackpot Trump Accuser’s Story Likely Stolen from Law and Order Episode of Rape Fantasy in Bergdorf Dressing Room (VIDEO).” </b>The article cited both @thebradfordfile and @Trump454545 to push the claim:</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Boston Herald columnist Adriana Cohen quoted tweeted Robinson's post of the video.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Donald Trump Jr. also quote tweeted Robinson’s post of the video to push the smear, writing, “As long as the media gives these nut jobs unfettered air time they will keep coming”:</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Multiple other conservative figures also pushed Robinson’s tweet, including right-wing commentator David Wohl, the Daily Mail’s David Martosko, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush Ned Ryun, and RedState:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Additionally, when searching for Carroll’s name on Google (via incognito search), the phrase “e jean carroll law and order” now appears as an automatic search suggestion:</b></font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted In</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Network/Outlet</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4chan, Reddit, Gateway Pundit, Google, Twitter</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Person</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump Jr., David Wohl, David Martosko</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Show/Publication</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitchy.com, YouTube, RedState</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stories/Interests</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake News</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b></b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/how-white-power-went-viral/507473/">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/how-white-power-went-viral/507473/</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>
</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atlantic</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sitting on the neon-lit stage, Dave McClure couldn’t contain himself<b>. The 500 Startups founder and investor used his appearance at the Web Summit conference on Wednesday to loudly criticize his own industry for President-elect Donald Trump’s victory:</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Technology has a role in that we provide communication platforms for the rest of the fucking country. It’s a propaganda medium and if people aren’t aware of the shit they’re being told; if they’re being told a story of fear; if they’re being told a story of other; if they’re not understanding that people are trying to use them to get to fucking office then, yes, assholes like Trump are going to take office and it’s our duty and our responsibility as entrepreneurs, as citizens of the fucking world, to make sure that shit does not happen.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He’s not the first to place the blame (or credit, depending on one’s view) for Trump’s unexpected win on digital platforms like Facebook, which allowed fake-news sites to proliferate and spread pro-Trump hoaxes such as, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Facebook</b>, where nearly half of Americans get their news, has borne the brunt of the ire, both for creating echo-chambers of partisan news and for failing to promote high-quality information over false drivel. But online extremism researchers say America’s misinformation problem is bigger than Facebook. They are also pointing fingers at sites like 4chan, Twitter and Reddit, online free-for-alls that lack Facebook’s relatively strict stance on hate-speech and have allowed racist communities to flourish in recent years. These forums have grown angrier and more multitudinous since Trump announced his candidacy, and while it’s not yet clear how much they contributed to the triumph of Trump, they certainly lined up behind him.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels</b>,” the journalist Siyanda Mohutsiwa, who said she has been following the so-called <b>“alt-right” forums on Reddit for years</b>, wrote in a Twitter thread earlier this week. “These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Groups that oppose immigration and political correctness, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the “alt-right,” have bloomed online in recent years. (It’s worth noting that these groups consider themselves distinct, and most don’t use the term “racist;” at most, they prefer the term “racialist.”) A study published in September by George Washington University extremism researcher J.M. Berger found “major American white nationalist movements on Twitter added about 22,000 followers since 2012, an increase of about 600 percent.” Berger found that people who followed white nationalists on Twitter referenced Trump “more than almost any other topic.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Nazi and white nationalist accounts in Berger’s sample rarely tweeted about Mitt Romney in 2012, but this year, “three of the top 10 hashtags for both white nationalist and Nazi datasets were related to ... Trump: #trump, #trump2016, and #makeamericagreatagain,” Berger wrote. The most common hashtag was “whitegenocide;” <b>Trump retweeted a user with WhiteGenocide in his username in January.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">(Trump’s campaign said the tweet wasn’t related to his personal views. In response to past stories about their white-power supporters, the campaign has said, “We have rejected and rebuked any groups and individuals associated with a message of hate and will continue to do so.”)</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It’s impossible to tell how many people were motivated by racism to vote for Trump, who used anti-immigrant rhetoric and, occasionally, white-nationalist memes, all while telling black Americans he would “be your greatest champion.” Other issues, like abortion, the economy, and dissatisfaction with Obamacare also turned out Trump voters. But some Trump supporters were energized by concerns that people of color are somehow overrunning the nation, spreading violence and sucking up precious resources. Eight of 10 people who favor the deportation of illegal immigrants voted for Trump, according to exit polls, and Trump also performed better among voters who said their top issue was immigration or terrorism.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Early on, Republicans who felt white Americans were under threat preferred Trump to his rivals. In a Pew survey in April, those who felt it was “bad for the country” that in 30 years the U.S. will consist mostly of people of color were more likely to feel warmly toward Trump, as were those who felt Islam is violent. Other issues—homosexuality, family values, or economic fairness—didn’t polarize Republicans similarly.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Several mainstream platforms, including Reddit, Twitter, and even Google, all became fertile ground for white-power groups to discuss these ideas, voice support for Trump, and often, recruit new followers, according to Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors online extremism.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="">Reddit</b>, for example, has long been a racist haven.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Keegan Hankes, a research analyst for the SPLC, documented in Gawker how the racist subreddit “GreatApes” was formed in 2013 and grew into a larger network called "the Chimpire," organized by a user calling themselves "Jewish_NeoCon2." Their mission statement, riddled with Nazi references and n-words, mentioned expanding their “sphere of influence.” At the time Hankes was writing in 2015, the Chimpire had grown to 46 subreddits, including two dedicated to discussing Trayvon Martin and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. One of the subreddits, CoonTown, had 3,287 subscribers, ranking it within the top 2 percent of subReddits, Hankes wrote. CoonTown was later banned, but other <b>“WhiteRights” subReddits persist</b>.</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Certain corners of Twitter have also become cesspools of white supremacy,</b> Beirich said. In the Washington Post in September, Jonathon Morgan, a researcher of violent extremism, described how alt-right Twitter accounts appear to have become more virulent throughout the year. “The social media content of the alt-right in July was 25 percent more radicalized than it was in January,” he wrote. “And the rate of radicalization is increasing exponentially.” In January of this year, for example, the accounts Morgan monitored rarely mentioned Jewish people. By July, the word “Jewish” in these forums “implies a belief in large-scale conspiracy, racial antagonism and even explicit support for Hitler,” he wrote. The Anti-Defamation League also found an uptick in anti-Semitic tweets in the first half of this year.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For some, even a simple Google search can be a pathway to radicalization</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Dylann Roof, who allegedly killed nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year, was indoctrinated almost entirely online, according to the SPLC. In his manifesto, Roof described typing “black on White crime” into Google, ending up on a racist website, “and I have never been the same since that day.” The third result in a Google search for “Martin Luther King,” for example, is a white supremacist site, “MartinLutherKing.org,” which paints the civil-rights leader as a fraud. (Regarding that site, Google has said, “Our search results are generated objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”)</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Racist propagandists have motivation to put that stuff out,” Beirich told me. “The anti-Semites can flood an area, and there’s no contradictory evidence. There aren’t people out there trying to prove that Jews aren’t running the government.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Beirich said white supremacists, far from talking amongst themselves online, do try to bring new followers into the fold. Academic literature suggests online white-supremacy groups grow rapidly after launching and use social issues of the day, such as illegal immigration, to build bridges with potential new recruits.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; margin-top: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morgan suspects racist forums on mainstream sites like Reddit might be attracting users who are not active white supremacists—at least not at first. “I think it’s a similar pattern to people who end up in jihadist extremism,” he told me. “It’s people who are ostracized and disengaged, threatened by the mainstream culture. To them, it feels good [reading these subreddits] ... it validates the kinds of things you’re not supposed to stay in polite society.”</font></p><div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; margin-top: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; margin-top: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike ISIS, which targets specific new fighters, Berger writes that white nationalists promote the idea that they are the enlightened ones. They have taken the so-called “red pill,” a <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Matrix</em> reference to seeing things the way they “really are”—in this case, that widely accepted values, like tolerance and multiculturalism, are actually deeply flawed.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; margin-top: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beirich believes Trump’s presidency may serve as yet another recruitment tactic for these groups. Trump’s past comments about refugees and immigrants, “makes it less ostracizing to agree with racist sentiments. This is in the White House now,” she told me, adding hypothetically, “So why shouldn’t you? What’s wrong with hating Muslims?”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">-=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b></b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">book origin culture</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We Are the Nerds</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?452474-2/we-nerds">https://www.c-span.org/video/?452474-2/we-nerds</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Journalist Christine Lagorio-Chafkin reported on the growth and culture of the website Reddit.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>
</b></font></p><p /><p></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5em; font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(41, 128, 185); transition: color 0.35s ease 0s; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; width: 400px; float: left; min-width: auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The internet has given us many things, some of them wonderful and some of them awful. The so-called alt-right—the racist, misogynist collective of angry white men—deserves a place in the digital garbage pile, alongside cyberbullying, revenge porn and “2 Girls 1 Cup.” (And to a far, far lesser degree, </font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;">
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</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">choreographed wedding dance videos</font><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">.) In short, the alt-right is a product of online troll culture, a direct outgrowth of the internet’s digital Wild West. For years it expanded—or more appropriately, festered—in the dark corners of sites like 4chan and Reddit, where it ultimately became the group that gained peak visibility with the horrible events of Charlottesville.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s important to remember that there are no card-carrying members of the alt-right. It’s not an official organization, and alignment is self-defined. What’s collectively described as the alt-right is a loose coalition of overwhelmingly white male representatives of various online communities, including anti-women “meninists,” gamers, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and their sympathizers, anti-government types, conspiracists, and dudes who’ve just decided that women and people of color are the reason they don’t have dates or C-suite jobs. The alt-right houses all of those groups, but they might not have come together so seamlessly under its big tent were it not for a unifying loathsome cause. Enter Donald J. Trump, King of the Internet Trolls and Patron Saint of Racists. Trump’s campaign—nearly two years of his gross and violent racist, xenophobic and anti-woman rhetoric and behavior—gave these groups a central figure around which to rally. The_Donald, the Reddit community that helped get the president elected, gave them a home base.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Perhaps the best way to describe <b style="">The_Donald </b>is as the internet hivemind of Trump’s most fervent—and vicious—supporters. Launched in June 2015, it now has nearly 450,000 subscribers, making it one of the most popular subreddits on one of the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/most-popular-websites-google-youtube-baidu/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">most popular sites</a> in the United States.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The_Donald is like a virtual local watering hole where aggrieved young men can come together, put their differences aside and celebrate the Trump that unites them amidst a cesspool of shared internet ephemera, Holocaust jokes and racist memes. More than a year ago, Vice’s </span><a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53d5xb/what-is-rthedonald-donald-trump-subreddit" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">Motherboard</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> summed up The_Donald as “a disconcerting melting pot of posts that run the gamut from InfoWars-style conspiracies, men's rights activists and GamerGate-style real and faux outrage, memes and shitposts (basically, jokes that are only meant to be understood by those in the community), and, yes, Donald Trump news.”</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As with all fraternal communities, The_Donald users have their own speak. Tim Squirrell, an expert in digital culture, wrote a lengthy <a href="https://qz.com/1056319/what-is-the-alt-right-a-linguistic-data-analysis-of-3-billion-reddit-comments-shows-a-disparate-group-that-is-quickly-uniting/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">piece at Quartz</a> on the unique identifying language markers used by the multiple groups in attendance at The_Donald</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. He identified the "4chan Shitposters,” a group that posts “the most extreme racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs, but without necessarily fully buying into racist ideology.” Consider them trolls who hurl horrific abuse online and then claim innocence with the defense that they were only joking. They most frequently use words like “Pepe, God Emperor Trump and </span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/06/11/some-trump-supporters-want-a-holy-war/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">deus vult</a>" </em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(Latin for “God wills it,” in this case, meaning Trump’s ascendancy).</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Another group Squirrell noted is “Anti-progressive Gamers,” who you might be familiar with because of their freakouts when fictional characters from fictional movies such as <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/paul-feig-on-trump-and-the-alt-rights-war-on-ghostbusters-and-female-heroes" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><em>Ghostbusters</em> are recast as women</a>. They frequently toss around terms like “snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist [and] triggering.” The “Men’s Rights Activists” lean heavily on words like “cuck” (taken from “cuckold,” a demeaning term implying male weakness but deployed against any man who disagrees with them), “bitch” (any woman who won’t sleep with them, aka all of us), and “beta” (a heterosexual male who treats women like actual human beings and thus gets laid). There are the “Anti-Globalists,” who rant about “the establishment, elites” and of course, “George Soros.” And the “White Supremacists,” who use a mixed bag of racial slurs and the phrase “western culture,” a stand-in for “we’re white and we’re right.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The_Donald brings all of these groups together into a powerful Trump-worshipping whole.</b> Recognizing the rapid expansion of the group last year, conservative provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos participated in AMAs (“Ask Me Anything,” or Q&A sessions) hosted by the<b style=""> subreddit.</b> So did <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/donald-trump-reddit-ama-wednesday" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Trump himself</a>, who during the campaign and as <b>recently as July has <a href="https://qz.com/1020045/us-president-donald-trump-sourced-his-cnn-wrestling-tweet-from-a-racist-troll-on-reddit/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">retweeted inflammatory Reddit-generated content</a>.</b> According to Vice’s Motherboard, Reddit administrators took pains to make The_Donald and its often highly offensive output less visible to site visitors, and <a href="http://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-tearing-itself-apart-1789406294" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Gizmodo</a>’s interviews with multiple other subreddit moderators led the outlet to conclude The_Donald is internally regarded as Reddit’s “most problematic community.” But with exponential growth on their side, members of The_Donald have chided site administrators and all other critics.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"First Reddit ignored our sub," The_Donald moderators wrote in their announcement of Trump’s AMA, per Motherboard. "Then Reddit laughed at our sub. Then Reddit fought our sub with Hillary's paid haters. And now we are winning with our God Emperor, the Nimble Navigator, Mr. Donald J. Trump!"</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And to think—the American conversation about online radicalization focuses almost solely on Muslims. But as Tim Squirrell notes, The_Donald is a site “for disaffected white men from all walks of life to share a communal hatred...They start out in different corners of the internet with different interests and different lexicons...but the more time they spend in [The_Donald], the more pernicious views of the world they are likely to pick up by osmosis.” He continues:</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>They are forming a coherent group identity,</b> represented in the language they have begun to speak, which coalesces around their common hatred of liberalism and their love of Donald Trump. We’re witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isn’t yet united, but it soon will be.</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We’ve seen the deadly results of the alt-right’s actions so far. If what Squirrell writes is true, it bodes terribly for the rest us, but especially to those who are their direct targets. The_Donald is the president’s base. And like the man they put in office, the danger they pose to this country is only growing.</font></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></b></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">escalator fake news</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div class="headline" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><h1 class="node-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine</font></h1><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span property="dc:title" content="The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine" class="rdf-meta element-hidden" /></font></div><div class="byline story" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-kaplan-0">Alex Kaplan</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></em> / <span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/">Media Matters</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span></span></span></span></font></div><div class="story-date" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">April 6, 2017</font></em></div><div class="story-date" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div class="story-date" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div class="the_body body_story clearfix" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, fake news and the white nationalist <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/25/what-alt-right-guide-white-nationalist-movement-now-leading-conservative-media/212643">“alt-right” movement</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span> have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both <a href="https://mediamatters.org/video/2017/03/30/sen-mark-warner-russia-used-internet-trolls-push-out-disinformation-and-fake-news-which-was-then/215870">government officials</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span> and websites like <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/02/12/warning-european-facebook-fact-checkers-heres-how-conservatives-will-try-discredit-you/215270">Facebook</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span> and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-google-step-up-efforts-to-combat-fake-news-1486396476">Google</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span> are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news <a href="http://www.politifact.com/personalities/blog-posting/">continue to mislead</a> <span class="print-footnote">[7]</span> 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 <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news">“alt-right” website</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/16/new-alt-right-theory-obama-was-secretly-behind-judicial-halt-trumps-muslim-ban/215712">pushing conspiracy theories</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> and <a href="https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/27/internet-trolls-are-trying-get-undocumented-immigrants-rounded-and-deported/215156">leading</a> <span class="print-footnote">[10]</span> <a href="https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/03/15/trump-supporters-8chan-launch-harassment-campaign-against-reporter/215690">harassment campaigns</a> <span class="print-footnote">[11]</span>.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that brings us to Rice.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>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</b> 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 <b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reddit </b>[17].</font></p><p><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">img</font></span></p><p><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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”).</font></b></span></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">e<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> claim was then <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-03/top-obama-adviser-sought-names-of-trump-associates-in-intel">echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake</a> <span class="print-footnote">[20]</span>, who added a layer of credibility </span>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 <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2016/12/14/websites-peddling-fake-news-still-using-google-ads-nearly-month-after-google-announced-ban/214811">fake news purveyors</a> <span class="print-footnote">[21]</span> <a href="http://truthfeed.com/breaking-susan-rice-could-be-headed-to-jail-leaking-unmasked-info-a-federal-felony/62013/">hyped</a> <span class="print-footnote">[22]</span><a href="http://madworldnews.com/obama-susan-rice-exposed-nsa/">the</a> <span class="print-footnote">[23]</span> <a href="http://www.angrypatriotmovement.com/traitor/">allegations</a> <span class="print-footnote">[24]</span>, dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[imgs]</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.”</b> Legal and national security experts <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/04/03/latest-wiretap-bombshell-turns-out-be-another-dud/215900">echoed that conclusion</a> <span class="print-footnote">[25]</span>, 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 <a href="https://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2017/04/05/53002/prn-theseanhannityshow-20170403-lake">radio</a> <span class="print-footnote">[26]</span> and <a href="https://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2017/04/04/53000/fnc-hannity-20170404-hannity-susanrice">Fox News show</a> <span class="print-footnote">[27]</span>, where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/national-media-slow-to-cover-susan-rice-unmasking-story/article/2619262">not giving the story enough attention</a> <span class="print-footnote">[28]</span> or for <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/4/susan-rice-media-providing-cover-obama-administrat/">not presenting it</a> <span class="print-footnote">[29]</span> the way they would. Although <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-jim-sciutto-susan-rice-news-appears-to-be-a-story-largely-ginned-up-partly-as-a-distraction/">some</a> <span class="print-footnote">[30]</span> mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, <a href="http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/media/327177-scarborough-on-susan-rice-what-if-cheney-had-asked-for-unmasking">others</a> <span class="print-footnote">[31]</span> have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/did-susan-rice-ask-to-unmask-trump-officials/521688/">also suggested</a> <span class="print-footnote">[32]</span> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/04/susan-rice-isnt-a-smoking-gun-but-she-does-have-some-explaining-to-do/?utm_term=.3882d57973e5">that Rice</a> <span class="print-footnote">[33]</span> 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, <a href="https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/849000798197501952">likely outed themselves</a> <span class="print-footnote">[34]</span>as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2010/07/12/the-fox-cycle-from-bogus-right-wing-attack-to-m/167534">pressure to cover them</a> <span class="print-footnote">[35]</span>. 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 <a href="https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/02/20/conservatives-shocked-discover-milo-yiannopoulos-terrible-human-being/215400">prominence</a> <span class="print-footnote">[36]</span> and <a href="https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/24/fox-correspondent-defends-alt-right-it-s-much-more-nationalist-populist-white-supremacist-movement/212624">acceptance</a> <span class="print-footnote">[37]</span> in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while <a href="https://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2017/04/04/52998/prn-rush-20170404-cernovich">hyping</a> <span class="print-footnote">[38]</span> 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’ <em>60 Minutes</em> “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/16/new-alt-right-theory-obama-was-secretly-behind-judicial-halt-trumps-muslim-ban/215712">pushed a conspiracy theory</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/16/new-alt-right-theory-obama-was-secretly-behind-judicial-halt-trumps-muslim-ban/215712">spread among</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> <a href="http://madworldnews.com/obama-hawaii-trump-travel-ban/">fake news</a> <span class="print-footnote">[39]</span> <a href="http://truthfeed.com/obama-makes-a-sudden-trip-to-hawaii-48-hours-before-judge-blocks-travel-ban/57721/">purveyors</a> <span class="print-footnote">[40]</span> and was <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/16/new-alt-right-theory-obama-was-secretly-behind-judicial-halt-trumps-muslim-ban/215712">pushed by</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like <a href="https://mediamatters.org/video/2017/03/16/hannity-suggests-judge-who-blocked-muslim-ban-did-weed-and-blow-obama-college/215717">Hannity</a> <span class="print-footnote">[41]</span> and the <a href="https://cdn1.ijr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/FmrPresidentObamaMadeSurpriseVisittoHawaiiDaysBeforeJudgeIssuedTravelBanRuling-2.pdf?ga=1.157461626.1581854083.1483454228">Independent Journal Review</a> <span class="print-footnote">[42]</span>. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars <a href="https://mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/20/birthers-and-fringe-outlets-claim-nsa-documents-back-trump-s-wiretap-lie/215766">dubiously claimed</a><span class="print-footnote">[43]</span> 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 <a href="http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2017/03/19/20170319_224055.htm">at the top of the Drudge Report</a> <span class="print-footnote">[44]</span>.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/60-minutes-upside-down?utm_term=.jc5RAPO7A#.hkEAXD6lX">understand</a> <span class="print-footnote">[45]</span> 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. </font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">splc</font></b></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Although Spencer has positioned himself as the effective leader of the Alt-Right, other proponents include several well-known names on the far right, including <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jared-taylor" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s;">Jared Taylor</a> , editor of the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/american-renaissance" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s;"><i style="box-sizing: inherit;">American Renaissance</i></a> racist journal; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/matthew-heimbach" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s;">Matthew Heimbach</a> of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Mike Enoch, who runs The Right Stuff blog. </span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But the general population of the Alt-Right is composed, by and large, of anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and Internet platforms like <b>Reddit</b> and Twitter.</span></font></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/27/misinformer-year-ecosystem-fake-news-and-alt-right/214899</font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....</font></b></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; -webkit-margin-before: 1em; -webkit-margin-after: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is not clear to what extent this vitriol on Facebook overlaps with the “alt-right” proper (to whatever extent there even <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">is</em> an “alt-right” proper). But Facebook crowd-sourced virulence is at least overtly reminiscent of what is seen from the “alt-right.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; -webkit-margin-before: 1em; -webkit-margin-after: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A particular hub for the “alt-right” is Reddit’s “r/The_Donald” subreddit. As Bryan Menegus <a href="http://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-tearing-itself-apart-1789406294" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">explained</a> for Gizmodo:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 25px 30px 10px; margin: 20px 20px 25px; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-shadow: rgb(204, 204, 204) 0px 6px 0px -4px; clear: both;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; width: 543px; -webkit-margin-before: 1em; -webkit-margin-after: 1em; margin-top: 0px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Reddit’s The_Donald subreddit</b> was founded a year ago as the premier online meeting place for Trump supporters. It has since sought to—in CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman’s words—“dominate the conversation” on the site<b>. Its members spread coded hate speech, openly antagonize other Redditors, and break the site’s most basic rules with impunity while moderators feel the brunt of the abuse, and Reddit leadership fail to adequately address the problem.</b></span></font></font></font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; -webkit-margin-before: 1em; -webkit-margin-after: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is abuse, and it is abuse for a particular political purpose. Whether it is under the guise of news or commentary, the fabricated stories bouncing around r/The_Donald, often cloaked in shockingly venomous rhetoric, do not adhere to and cannot be judged by traditional journalistic standards. This type of fake news needs to be understood in tandem with its context and purpose. Some of it is just for profit. But other pieces are intended to serve as weaponized propaganda meant to inspire harassment or even worse.</font></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></b></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news">http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news</a></font></b></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.fyovdvW932#.hqPXYXMjLo" style="text-decoration: none;">Buzzfeed News</a> analysis found that the top 20 fake political news stories in circulation during the election got more clicks, views, shares and reactions on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories. The vast majority of those fake stories—all but three—were “overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton,” meaning they pinged around the conservative webosphere, where they were accepted without question by millions and then passed to the next gullible consumer.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Paul Horner, among the most prolific and successful fake news writers, recently told the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/fake-news-writer-feels-guilty-helping-put-trump-white-house" style="text-decoration: none;">Washington Post</a> that Trump voters and other “right-wing Republicans” were almost single-handedly responsible for the $10,000 he pulls in every month, because they “post everything, believe anything,” and continue to share fake news even when they find out it isn't true. That might explain why so many fake news stories seem specially tailored for the conservative news reader.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of Horner’s most popular stories was a fabricated interview with a made-up person who said he’d been paid to protest Trump ahead of the election</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. During the campaign, </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">multiple members of <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/fake-news-writer-feels-guilty-helping-put-trump-white-house" style="text-decoration: none;">Trump’s team</a> retweeted the story,</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> even though many sources pointed out it wasn't true. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The ludicrous idea that anti-Trump demonstrators are each paid thousands of dollars by billionaire George Soros—who plays a starring role in pretty much every right-wing conspiracy—has now become conservative gospel.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Eric Tucker, a marketer in Austin, Texas, was probably very familiar with this rumor when he recently sent an erroneous tweet that launched a viral right-wing story.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=NovHighMC&mcdt=2016-11&subid=NovHighMC&ad-keywords=AudDevGate&r=0" style="text-decoration: none;">New York Times</a> decided to examine how Tucker's tweet became a major topic of conservative discussion, following its online travels step by step. On the evening of November 9, just as protests against President-elect Trump were erupting all over the country, Tucker tweeted the photo and message below to his tiny group of 40</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">followers. </span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;" /><div alt="" class="media-image" height="447" width="480" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[img]</font></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to the Times, Tucker heard about anti-Trump demonstrations in Austin hours after he saw the buses in the photo, and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (except that if you look for boogeymen everywhere you will find them), assumed a connection between the two.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The Times confirmed that Tucker’s photo actually features buses booked for employees of Tableau Software, which was having a conference in the city. </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(Tucker told the Times he did a search for nearby conferences but didn’t find anything.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">) Roughly four hours after the original tweet went out, it ended up </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5c6ag1/breaking_they_found_the_buses_dozens_lined_up/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">on </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reddit</span></a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. “BREAKING: They found the buses!”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> the header reads. “Dozens lined up just blocks away from the Austin protests.” The thread of comments that follow indicate subreddits full of Trump supporters who, riding high on an election victory, are ecstatic to have a new conspiracy they can hang on the left.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Alex Jones is based in Austin,” one commenter declares. “Let him know, and his crew can check it out.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s followed by a lot of wishing the worst on Soros, complaints about “cucks,” suggestions that<b> James O’Keefe get involved</b>, and a lot of assumptions rooted in racism and paranoia. “Busing in violent mobs? Please tell me how this isn't inciting treason,” one person demands. This inexplicably devolves into a conversation about Obamaphones.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>By the morning of November 10, the story appeared on right-wing message board Free Republic,</b> where a user linked back to the original tweet. Here’s the point at which things <b>quickly build momentum,</b> picking up the pace across right-wing echo chambers. According to the Times, that same day, “Facebook pages like Robertson Family Values, which is named for but not affiliated with the stars of ‘Duck Dynasty,’ and Donald Trump Commander in Chief 2020, linked to the Free Republic discussion.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> A Times screengrab of a<b> Free Republican Facebook post repeating the Reddit message shows 307,616 shares.</b> The paper also cites 5,000 shares of each of the aforementioned blog posts.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By now, the story had trickled upward to <b>local news outlets.</b> When the <b>Austin-based affiliate for Fox called Coach USA North America bus company </b>to get more information, they were told by spokesperson Sean Hughes that the company wasn’t involved in any protests. Hughes even sent the station a <a href="http://www.fox5ny.com/news/216900687-story" style="text-decoration: none;">statement clarifying</a> that buses were in town "for a conference” and that “at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests." The television station’s website, now empty of most of the content that appeared there, still features photos of the buses taken by Tucker, with a caption that poses this<b> leading question: “Were tens of thousands of protesters across the U.S. paid to walk the streets, hold signs, and chant anti-Trump sayings?”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That evening, <b>Gateway Pundit,</b> a major conservative blog, posted a story with the headline, “Figures. Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed in to Austin #FakeProtests.” They used Tucker’s original pictures, and according to the Times, linked the nonexistent busloads of fake protesters to “Soros money.” Three hours later, President-elect Trump or someone on his team took to social media <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/796900183955095552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="text-decoration: none;">to tweet</a> about the fake story to his 16 million followers.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” the message reads. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As of this writing, the tweet has more than 71,000 retweets and 240,000 likes.</b></font></p><div class="in_content_ad_container ad_13" style="width: 300px; height: 250px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); float: left; margin: 0px 15px 15px 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="div-gpt-ad-1420251685282-1" data-google-query-id="CNm1-YvAxNACFUIGgQodYvQMMw" style="width: 300px; height: 250px;"><div id="google_ads_iframe_/1010624/New_AlterNet_300x250_STORY_EMBED_2_0container" style="border: 0pt none; display: inline-block; width: 300px; height: 250px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></div></div></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;" /><div alt="" class="media-image" height="258" width="480" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="258" width="480" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/screen_shot_2016-11-23_at_4.22.48_pm.png" style="border: none;" /></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On November 11, a spokesperson for Tableau, the tech company that rented the buses for its conference attendees, sent a statement to the Austin American-Statesman. The newspaper, in turn, published <a href="http://austin.blog.statesman.com/2016/11/11/anti-trump-protesters-in-austin-not-bused-in-contrary-to-twitter-verse/" style="text-decoration: none;">an article</a> debunking Tucker’s original tweet and all of the stories that followed. Included was an interview with<b> Eric Tucker, who praised Alex Jones</b> and stated, “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”</font></font></font></font></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Later in the day, according to the Times, Tucker sent a tweet that acknowledged the possibility his first suggestion may have been “flat wrong.” There was also a <a href="http://www.snopes.com/anti-trump-protesters-bused-into-austin/" style="text-decoration: none;">Snopes article</a> declaring the rumor false.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Instead of stopping the fake news dead in its tracks, the case essentially turned into proof that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes. Also, the internet loves a lie that supports its political agenda. </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to the Times, “Mr. Tucker’s initial twee</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">t continued</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to generate thousands of shares on Facebook through Free Republic and pages like Right Wing News and Joe the Plumber.”</span></b></font></font></font></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>On the night of November 11, Tucker put up the tweet below, which shows his original message updated to carry a bright red “FALSE” across it. The corrected tweet, as of this writing, has a paltry 60 retweets and 66 likes.</b> He told the Times that moving forward, "I can assure you I’m going to try my best to be balanced with the facts and be very clear about what is opinion and what is not." He also said that knowing what he knows now, he “might have still tweeted it but very differently. I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement.”</font></font></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The same night, Tucker finally trashed the tweet that started it all. While that’s been scrubbed from social media, its impact isn’t going anywhere. Neither, coincidentally, is President-elect Donald Trump. </b></font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></b></font></font></p></div>