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[Pizzagate]; or, Ain't No Rest for the Wikileaks

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Posts

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    It's really hard to sue someone for re-tweeting a false story, because you're basically required to demonstrate that they knew it was false when they re-tweeted it.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    It's really hard to sue someone for re-tweeting a false story, because you're basically required to demonstrate that they knew it was false when they re-tweeted it.

    I'd say it's almost impossible. Since if I make statements based on disclosed facts, like "this tweet I just retweeted", I'm covered for libelslander.

    Though I don't know if the pizza place would require "actual malice" which is what you're referencing with the knowingly bit. I can see arguments for or against that they are a "public figure" and don't know how the law falls on businesses. I idly wonder if "tortuous interference" could come up which is sorta like libelslander for businesses but that's usually just as much of a pipe dream.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Phoenix-D wrote: »
    Fencingsax wrote: »
    Nobeard wrote: »
    IANAL, but does this kinda shit get into "slander" territory, or the kind of law that says you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre?

    You can't really sue Anonymous on the internet for slander. or Libel.

    Some of the people repeating this crap aren't anonymous.

    They're protected by Section 230.

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  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

  • Edith_Bagot-DixEdith_Bagot-Dix Registered User regular
    Satanic panic never left.

    There's been a pretty consistent effort to brand culture warriors on the right as bravely facing off against baby-eating satanists for decades.

    I think Slacktivist put it best by saying many people are earnestly role-playing. They're willing to believe the worst about others because of the thrill they get out of the idea of fighting against REAL satanists. Some of them would say when pressed that they get that a single mother getting an abortion probably isn't really a demon. Some of them when pressed will shoot up a pizza joint.

    I think there are a real cluster of issues behind this sort of thing.

    I'm old enough to remember the 1980s Satanic Panic and had a bit of a brush with it. I was a budding tween nerd in the late 1980s, which meant being super into Dungeons & Dragons. My town had a group of high school kids that played and were into heavy metal, smoking weed, and general teen misbehaviour. One incident involved them knocking over some grave stones in a local cemetery. This got blown out of proportion to a full on satanic ritual involving sacrificing cats (to my knowledge they never did, but this is a rural Canadian town so outdoor cats did disappear from time to time, more likely the victims of cars or coyotes than devil worshippers though) and it wound up that concerned moms got all the D&D stuff pulled from the local book store and it was banned from local schools. Incidentally this led me to get into other RPGs (Robotech and TMNT) which were not verboten. The salient point of this was that all those involved in the banning of stuff were, frankly, people with too much time on their hands and pretty mundane things, so in an odd way, they were having a D&D style adventure of their own, essentially LARPing that they were on some important mission thwarting the devil.

    Fast forward to the late 1990s and I'm in university and involved in Vampire the Masquerade. This game had a LARP component and the same sort of thing would happen - people with too much time on their hands and nothing going on in their lives wound up getting way too into it and kicking off drama through their crazy actions (in one specific case, a person in a game I was involved in started an international incident in a shared meta game after a character died and she kept playing it online, and was apparently threatening suicide unless her character got resurrected).

    Back on the non-RPG side, you have this concept in certain Christian circles on "spiritual warfare" with demons. I'm not a sociologist, so I'm strictly relating anecdotes, but this seemed to become a bigger and bigger thing during the 2000s. Perhaps it's just that the Internet made it more visible (I'm sure many remember the god warrior woman who went on a rant about "dark sided people" on Wife Swap or whatever it was). We have this coming to prominence with Sarah Palin and her spiritual warfare network.

    At the same time as Palin is on the national stage, there's a huge financial crisis that we are still under the effect of. One of the results is the rise of a class of people that the folks at Chapo Trap House deemed "failsons" (and of course there are "faildaughters" as well, and I believe the term was kicking around before they used it). These people are (with varying degrees of involuntariness) living a lifestyle that was once reserved for very marginal weirdos (of the type you're bound to encounter hanging around RPG circles). Generally speaking they are at least reasonably intelligent, have some degree of education, but are just never able to jump off to the traditional adult milestones (career, spouse, home, kids) and are living at home. By definition, they've got too much time on their hands. And (once again, anecdotal) a lot of the ones I know are super into conspiracy theories and constitute the vast majority of individuals I'm personally familiar with who believe in shit like Pizzagate.

    And that's my worry right there. The combination of economic trends and automation suggest to me that the world is headed toward something like what areas such as Japan, the Middle East, and some of the Mediterranean European countries have been experiencing for awhile - lots of reasonably educated youth with absolutely no prospects who seem to be falling further and further behind. A combination of general frustration, boredom, and free time makes the possibility of more "heroic" world view appealing to them, and the result is you get a twenty something guy in a small town deciding to pick up a rifle and "self-investigate" some bullshit he saw on the Internet.



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  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Like, maybe they can make a case about being able to compel companies like Twitter and Facebook to take down these stories when they are posted.

    But this isn't a situation where you have an actual fake news site that started it, like some of the other fake Hillary news.

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

    This is due to differences in philosophy. The US upholds dissemination of information regardless of the damage that it may do, which is why truth is an absolute defense against defamation. The UK instead prioritizes reputation, which is why their laws allow for people to be sued for dissemination of actual facts.

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  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

    Not exactly. If you were to say "American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like about public figures" then you'd be like 99% right. Since we almost always talk about speech in regards to public figures it can definitely feel that way.

    There are other ways around libel/slander laws as well but for the average person (with spare money for a lawyer) you could have issues if you go around and say bad but not obviously absurd things about them.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

    Not exactly. If you were to say "American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like about public figures" then you'd be like 99% right. Since we almost always talk about speech in regards to public figures it can definitely feel that way.

    There are other ways around libel/slander laws as well but for the average person (with spare money for a lawyer) you could have issues if you go around and say bad but not obviously absurd things about them.

    Those who were targets of GamerGate found out there was pretty much nothing you could do.

  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    It's really hard to sue someone for re-tweeting a false story, because you're basically required to demonstrate that they knew it was false when they re-tweeted it.

    No, the actual malice standard doesn't apply here, because this pizza place and its staff don't qualify as public figures (in any way that would make that distinction meaningful at least).

    IANAL, but the real issueis probably anonymity, costs, etc. It's not feasible to shut down an anonymous mob via the courts.

    A high profile person joining in on it would presumably be someone you could get.

    And frankly, the sheer absurdity of this and widespread debunking seems like it could pass actual malice anyways (reckess disregard for truth, which I am given to understand means willful ignorance more or less).

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  • Squidget0Squidget0 Registered User regular
    how is the alt right tiny and powerless?

    This SSC post has a section that nicely breaks down the statistics of this.
    The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

    The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

    Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

    4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

    Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

    50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)

    So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.

    Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.

    The tl;dr version is that a very generous guess at the alt-right's membership puts it at about 50,000 members, or 0.02% of the US population. It's a tiny movement. They are neither a strong political force, or someone that's important for any candidate to appeal to. I won't say that they're trolls because I'm sure at least some of them genuinely believe what they claim to believe, but I will contend that they're tiny and largely meaningless.

    If you disagree, and think they are larger or more powerful than this post suggests, I would need to see some membership numbers that contradict these. People commit gun crimes in America every day, for all kinds of crazy reasons. The fact that the media has latched onto this one particular gun crime/weird meme is not evidence of a larger movement, its just evidence that the media really really doesn't want to stop campaigning for Hillary.

    (Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right had had a membership swell recently. Given that the ENTIRE media has been shouting "White-nationalism has won!" as loud and as often as they possibly can. People like winners. Who could have foreseen such an unexpected development!)

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

    Not exactly. If you were to say "American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like about public figures" then you'd be like 99% right. Since we almost always talk about speech in regards to public figures it can definitely feel that way.

    There are other ways around libel/slander laws as well but for the average person (with spare money for a lawyer) you could have issues if you go around and say bad but not obviously absurd things about them.

    Those who were targets of GamerGate found out there was pretty much nothing you could do.

    Laws on harassment haven't really caught up with technology.

  • BlindPsychicBlindPsychic Registered User regular
    @Edith_Bagot-Dix Yeah I think this explains an aspect of it I wasn't quite able to express. There's a few angles all converging in the Trump movement and this is definitely one aspect. Its been bizarre to me to see a few old alt sites that used to trade in aliens and conspiracy theories first become putin worshippers and then either pro-trump or warm-trump. And its like, here it is, here's the big evil dictator you've been trying to be the first to spot out of the crowd and warn people about but that's not the case at all. I think Trumps embrace of conspiratorial thinking and basically 'saying what we've been saying' effect has given him enormous power over the political fringe.

    So online, there's always been sort of an amorphous mass of alt-ers for lack of a better term, the terrain where eventually you march so far left or so far right you end up in this territory. There's a lot of fellow travelers in this group that are more or less anarchists, although not really in the pro-active sense. They just hate the establishment, local and global. Its a CYOA of whether its the reptiles, the illuminati, the aliens, the nwo, the rothschilds, or just plain old globalism. Pick one or all of the above. I think the largest unifying factor is that they are contrarian in the extreme. And Trump is contrarianism embodied as a political candidate.

    Now, why are these people important, as small a group as they may be? They're the zealots, the loud mouths, the chain mail forwarders etc. They're the ones hurriedly constructing and embracing these theories. I don't think the fake news people are purely just making things up, they're linking into this contrarian mindset and adding data to the cork board and pins reality. The largest fake news story was linking into the Clinton murder conspiracy. Confirming contrarianism is going to be a massive industry that is devoid of ideology, its purely anti everything. One can only hope that it will destroy Trump in the end, but if he keeps it up it will continue to give him power.

  • rockrngerrockrnger Registered User regular
    Squidget0 wrote: »
    how is the alt right tiny and powerless?

    This SSC post has a section that nicely breaks down the statistics of this.
    The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

    The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

    Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

    4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

    Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

    50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)

    So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.

    Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.

    The tl;dr version is that a very generous guess at the alt-right's membership puts it at about 50,000 members, or 0.02% of the US population. It's a tiny movement. They are neither a strong political force, or someone that's important for any candidate to appeal to. I won't say that they're trolls because I'm sure at least some of them genuinely believe what they claim to believe, but I will contend that they're tiny and largely meaningless.

    If you disagree, and think they are larger or more powerful than this post suggests, I would need to see some membership numbers that contradict these. People commit gun crimes in America every day, for all kinds of crazy reasons. The fact that the media has latched onto this one particular gun crime/weird meme is not evidence of a larger movement, its just evidence that the media really really doesn't want to stop campaigning for Hillary.

    (Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right had had a membership swell recently. Given that the ENTIRE media has been shouting "White-nationalism has won!" as loud and as often as they possibly can. People like winners. Who could have foreseen such an unexpected development!)

    How many people are in the heritage foundation?

    I would say that they are an extremely powerful political force.

  • Mr KhanMr Khan Not Everyone WAHHHRegistered User regular
    American free speech laws say you can say whatever you like, as long as it isn't directly threatening someone. In the UK it is much easier to sue someone for slander, which is why "Private Eye" is so arch (and also frequently sued.)

    The standard in the US is that you had to *know* it was false and deploy it with intent to damage. It's not unprovable, but it's a damned high bar. Because this all relates to Podesta, who would qualify as a public figure (where the bar is even harder to cross). That's the actual malice standard.

    Now the guy who showed up with a gun should have been cited at the very least for public endangerment or creating a disturbance, certainly, more if it could be demonstrated that he went there with intent to cause harm.

  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    rockrnger wrote: »
    Squidget0 wrote: »
    how is the alt right tiny and powerless?

    This SSC post has a section that nicely breaks down the statistics of this.
    The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

    The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

    Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

    4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

    Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

    50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)

    So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.

    Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.

    The tl;dr version is that a very generous guess at the alt-right's membership puts it at about 50,000 members, or 0.02% of the US population. It's a tiny movement. They are neither a strong political force, or someone that's important for any candidate to appeal to. I won't say that they're trolls because I'm sure at least some of them genuinely believe what they claim to believe, but I will contend that they're tiny and largely meaningless.

    If you disagree, and think they are larger or more powerful than this post suggests, I would need to see some membership numbers that contradict these. People commit gun crimes in America every day, for all kinds of crazy reasons. The fact that the media has latched onto this one particular gun crime/weird meme is not evidence of a larger movement, its just evidence that the media really really doesn't want to stop campaigning for Hillary.

    (Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right had had a membership swell recently. Given that the ENTIRE media has been shouting "White-nationalism has won!" as loud and as often as they possibly can. People like winners. Who could have foreseen such an unexpected development!)

    How many people are in the heritage foundation?

    I would say that they are an extremely powerful political force.

    Also, there is an alt-right cheerleader / supporter in the role of chief strategist of the white house.

    Small != influential.

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  • NobeardNobeard North Carolina: Failed StateRegistered User regular
    edited December 2016
    You don't need to nor should you try to sue people who retweet it or talk about it. In that case we would be culpable for talking about it here! I have no clue where to begin, but it is deeply wrong that internet trolls are now bullshit Rumpelstiltskins that can spin memes into reality and get an idiot with a gun to harass a small business.

    Nobeard on
  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.

    This is what happens when you harbor members of the pedophilliac conspiracy known as the Democratic Party in Trump's America.

    This started with that War on Christmas shit. That's what happens when you let the truth take it's boots off.

  • SurfpossumSurfpossum A nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
    Squidget0 wrote: »
    how is the alt right tiny and powerless?

    This SSC post has a section that nicely breaks down the statistics of this.
    The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

    The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

    Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

    4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

    Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

    50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)

    So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.

    Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.

    The tl;dr version is that a very generous guess at the alt-right's membership puts it at about 50,000 members, or 0.02% of the US population. It's a tiny movement. They are neither a strong political force, or someone that's important for any candidate to appeal to. I won't say that they're trolls because I'm sure at least some of them genuinely believe what they claim to believe, but I will contend that they're tiny and largely meaningless.

    If you disagree, and think they are larger or more powerful than this post suggests, I would need to see some membership numbers that contradict these. People commit gun crimes in America every day, for all kinds of crazy reasons. The fact that the media has latched onto this one particular gun crime/weird meme is not evidence of a larger movement, its just evidence that the media really really doesn't want to stop campaigning for Hillary.

    (Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right had had a membership swell recently. Given that the ENTIRE media has been shouting "White-nationalism has won!" as loud and as often as they possibly can. People like winners. Who could have foreseen such an unexpected development!)
    Milo has nearly 400,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly a million on facebook. He writes for Breitbart, which has a readership somewhere around 20 million.

    He's pushing this thing, along with having written favorably about the alt-right (neonazis).

    I'd say this is actually more like gamergate all over again: nobody is really part of the bad stuff, there are like, probably 5 people tops doing all the bad stuff, if it's even happening, which it isn't, you're just making it up to discredit the good people.

  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    I'd say this is actually more like gamergate all over again: nobody is really part of the bad stuff, there are like, probably 5 people tops doing all the bad stuff, if it's even happening, which it isn't, you're just making it up to discredit the good people.

    Gamergate: No actual supporters, but many people who think that they had a point but absolutely don't condone harassment of women (but those women were no angels anyway.)

    CelestialBadger on
  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Standard SWARMfront tactics. Gamergate is all BUGs anyway. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stormfront

    Edith Upwards on
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Surfpossum wrote: »
    I'd say this is actually more like gamergate all over again: nobody is really part of the bad stuff, there are like, probably 5 people tops doing all the bad stuff, if it's even happening, which it isn't, you're just making it up to discredit the good people.

    Gamergate: No actual supporters, but many people who think that they had a point but absolutely don't condone harassment of women (but those women were no angels anyway.)

    FRUsTKa.png

  • Nova_CNova_C I have the need The need for speedRegistered User regular
    It's interesting to me that 4chan, a site notorious for the amount of child pornography that shows up there, claims to have broken this secret code where the code is their own language. This is pedophiles assuming everyone else is just like them.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.

    This is exactly why the comparisons to Satanic Panic are completely off imo. This isn't a moral panic. This is a conspiracy theory breeding in the echo chambers of right-wing media and social media combined with internet hatemobs. The GamerGate comparisons are quite apt.

    It's a brave new world for this shit. Make some stuff up, a ton of people believe it and are whipped into a frenzy and then the harassment and intimidation and threats of real violence and actual real violence begin. And there's basically nothing to do to predict it or stop it. It's a diffuse issue. A wide ranging group of people all over the place doing anything from just supporting the mob to actively being it's physically violent forefront.

    It's a new phenomenon, or at least a fundamental shift in an old one, and it's pretty terrifying because all you can really hope for is that they don't notice you.

  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.


    It's a brave new world for this shit. Make some stuff up, a ton of people believe it and are whipped into a frenzy and then the harassment and intimidation and threats of real violence and actual real violence begin. And there's basically nothing to do to predict it or stop it. It's a diffuse issue. A wide ranging group of people all over the place doing anything from just supporting the mob to actively being it's physically violent forefront.

    Since a lot of people believe there is no smoke without fire, making a lot of smoke is very powerful.

    If *one* Democrat in office is found to be a pedophile (pretty much guaranteed thanks to crappy human nature) this will confirm all their worst paranoias.

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.


    It's a brave new world for this shit. Make some stuff up, a ton of people believe it and are whipped into a frenzy and then the harassment and intimidation and threats of real violence and actual real violence begin. And there's basically nothing to do to predict it or stop it. It's a diffuse issue. A wide ranging group of people all over the place doing anything from just supporting the mob to actively being it's physically violent forefront.

    Since a lot of people believe there is no smoke without fire, making a lot of smoke is very powerful.

    If *one* Democrat in office is found to be a pedophile (pretty much guaranteed thanks to crappy human nature) this will confirm all their worst paranoias.

    Look at how many Republicans have had sex scandals, hell, even flying to another country on taxpayer dollars...

    but when a Democrat does it, it's huge

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.


    It's a brave new world for this shit. Make some stuff up, a ton of people believe it and are whipped into a frenzy and then the harassment and intimidation and threats of real violence and actual real violence begin. And there's basically nothing to do to predict it or stop it. It's a diffuse issue. A wide ranging group of people all over the place doing anything from just supporting the mob to actively being it's physically violent forefront.

    Since a lot of people believe there is no smoke without fire, making a lot of smoke is very powerful.

    If *one* Democrat in office is found to be a pedophile (pretty much guaranteed thanks to crappy human nature) this will confirm all their worst paranoias.

    Look at how many Republicans have had sex scandals, hell, even flying to another country on taxpayer dollars...

    but when a Democrat does it, it's huge

    It's almost like one party has a major propaganda network and the other doesn't.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Ninjeff wrote: »
    Can we take a second and think about how absolutely terrifying this is for the shop owner?
    I mean, its hard enough to run a successful business as it is, let alone run one while accidently (through no fault of your own) getting caught in a nutbag right wing conspiracy theory.

    I feel really bad for the shop owner just trying to run a pizza place and now because people cant recognize reality, he has people showing up with guns.


    It's a brave new world for this shit. Make some stuff up, a ton of people believe it and are whipped into a frenzy and then the harassment and intimidation and threats of real violence and actual real violence begin. And there's basically nothing to do to predict it or stop it. It's a diffuse issue. A wide ranging group of people all over the place doing anything from just supporting the mob to actively being it's physically violent forefront.

    Since a lot of people believe there is no smoke without fire, making a lot of smoke is very powerful.

    If *one* Democrat in office is found to be a pedophile (pretty much guaranteed thanks to crappy human nature) this will confirm all their worst paranoias.

    Look at how many Republicans have had sex scandals, hell, even flying to another country on taxpayer dollars...

    but when a Democrat does it, it's huge

    It's almost like one party has a major propaganda network and the other doesn't.

    So much for the lie-beral media, eh?

  • PeccaviPeccavi Registered User regular
    Nova_C wrote: »
    It's interesting to me that 4chan, a site notorious for the amount of child pornography that shows up there, claims to have broken this secret code where the code is their own language. This is pedophiles assuming everyone else is just like them.

    A website full of Trumps.

  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Nope nope nope. This is Stormfront finally realizing what kind of people they were propagandizing.

    Like, the oldfriend's call and response was "Do you like cheese pizza?" "No, I like plain pizza, what the hell is wrong with you?". Then, the newfriend recognition signal became "Do you like mudkips?" "Nah, every gen after two fucking sucked.".

    Like, the entire SWARMfront playbook, the Mantra, BUGs, redpilling, MRA, swatting? That shit was all honed by Stormfront to take over 4chan! And it worked! Then it worked on reddit!

    Edith Upwards on
  • rockrngerrockrnger Registered User regular
    Nope nope nope. This is Stormfront finally realizing what kind of people they were propagandizing.

    Like, the oldfriend's call and response was "Do you like cheese pizza?" "No, I like plain pizza, what the hell is wrong with you?". Then, the newfriend recognition signal became "Do you like mudkips?" "Nah, every gen after two fucking sucked.".

    Like, the entire SWARMfront playbook, the Mantra, BUGs, redpilling, MRA, swatting? That shit was all honed by Stormfront to take over 4chan! And it worked! Then it worked on reddit!

    Can you, like, translate that?

  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    The people talking about lizard people are nazis from stormfront. Their operation is called SWARMfront. Individuals propagandizing use The Mantra, which is "anti-racist is code for anti-white". They are referred to as BUGs, or if you're antifa, cockroaches.

    These people discovered that 4chan used to use "cheese pizza" to mean child pornography, and now they're in a borderline psychotic tizzy going after pizzerias that hosted Democratic functions.

  • ForarForar #432 Toronto, Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    I think I could suss out more of that with some time spent on Google.

    And ending up on at least three new watchlists.

    First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • DoodmannDoodmann Registered User regular
    rockrnger wrote: »
    Nope nope nope. This is Stormfront finally realizing what kind of people they were propagandizing.

    Like, the oldfriend's call and response was "Do you like cheese pizza?" "No, I like plain pizza, what the hell is wrong with you?". Then, the newfriend recognition signal became "Do you like mudkips?" "Nah, every gen after two fucking sucked.".

    Like, the entire SWARMfront playbook, the Mantra, BUGs, redpilling, MRA, swatting? That shit was all honed by Stormfront to take over 4chan! And it worked! Then it worked on reddit!

    Can you, like, translate that?

    Ya... I know most of those words but I can't parse what he's actually saying there.

    Whippy wrote: »
    nope nope nope nope abort abort talk about anime
    Sometimes I sell my stuff on Ebay
  • GoumindongGoumindong Registered User regular
    "Do you like mudkips?" is/was code?

    Also not sure why old or new friends would have call/response code unless those terms are also entirely foreign to me. I was under the impression that "oldfriend" was just someone who had been on the forum for a long time and a "newfriend" was someone who was new... With "friend" replacing "f**" as that fell out of fashion. (And a quick google confirms this)

    Granted my only intodruction to /b/ memes comes from osmosing goon culture when in goonfleet.. Which was on their end also osmosed/mocked and so second hand. So I could be entirely wrong. But I don't feel wrong.

    wbBv3fj.png
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Lizard people conspiracy theorists also often believing in anti-Semitic Zionist NWO conspiracy theories does not mean that the first is a kind of codephrase for the other.

  • DisrupterDisrupter Registered User regular
    Nova_C wrote: »
    It's interesting to me that 4chan, a site notorious for the amount of child pornography that shows up there, claims to have broken this secret code where the code is their own language. This is pedophiles assuming everyone else is just like them.

    This describes the right wing of this country to a tea as well. We always talk about trump projecting and the reason is because since he is doing it then they must be "obviously doing it" too

    616610-1.png
  • SchrodingerSchrodinger Registered User regular
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuGjK0kYBOc

    The sad thing is that this guy is a Hillary supporter who seems to fully understand that he's a shit lord and doesn't even bother coming up with much of a defense for it.

    But I think he's mentally at the point of, "Well if I don't do this, then somebody else will."

  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Lizard people conspiracy theorists also often believing in anti-Semitic Zionist NWO conspiracy theories does not mean that the first is a kind of codephrase for the other.

    It does when BUGs use the crazy lizard people videos to broach the subject of their anti-Semitic NWO conspiracy theories as part of their organized campaign of fascist propaganda.
    Goumindong wrote: »
    "Do you like mudkips?" is/was code?

    Yes, and if you do illegal shit for Anonymous and are stupid enough to say such in public, you like Skitties instead! :drumroll:

    Edith Upwards on
  • KupiKupi Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    rockrnger wrote: »
    Nope nope nope. This is Stormfront finally realizing what kind of people they were propagandizing.

    Like, the oldfriend's call and response was "Do you like cheese pizza?" "No, I like plain pizza, what the hell is wrong with you?". Then, the newfriend recognition signal became "Do you like mudkips?" "Nah, every gen after two fucking sucked.".

    Like, the entire SWARMfront playbook, the Mantra, BUGs, redpilling, MRA, swatting? That shit was all honed by Stormfront to take over 4chan! And it worked! Then it worked on reddit!

    Can you, like, translate that?

    I'm going to take a crack at it.

    ***

    This is Stormfront having figured out how to most effectively convert and retain their target audience.

    These conspiracy theories serve as shibboleths. If you spend enough time in the circle, you'll understand that the response to "Do you like cheese pizza?" is a reference to pizzagate, and you know to give the correct response, which is "No, I like plain pizza, what the hell is wrong with you?" It's stupid but it makes you feel like part of the group, and it marks you as someone who's in-the-know and probably agrees that pizzagate is real. On the other hand, someone who answers the question seriously (as in the case of thinking "Do you like Mudkips?" is a genuine reference to Pokemon as opposed to a particular cringe-inducing anecdote) is new and probably needs more grooming before they can be trusted.

    Stormfront and their culture is well-versed in the use of this coded language to create and retain converts. 4chan, independent of politics, had its own culture of using shibboleths; Stormfront insinuated itself in their culture and brought a lot of people over to their side by figuring out what the lingo was and speaking it fluently. They executed the same playbook to expand their influence on Reddit.

    Kupi on
    My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
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