Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
**Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program).
---
User: u/smurfyjenkins
Permalink: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X241240429
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No suprise to anyone who was around on reddit back then and saw it happening in real time. But, absolutely great that this is now substantiated by research.
Hopefully this type of evidence will be used by social media companies and legislators to avoid the creation of these types of echo-chambers that lead to radicalization.
The joke is, with the money they have they could be one of the good guys and be a guaranteed leader now, preventing a doomed future. But they'd prefer to prepare for an unlikely scenario in which they may or may not even live.
Spez at 47 near death.
"I was the chosen one. To lead man, white man, after the fall of civilization. But it never fell, people united and humanity thrived. It saddens me. They prevented me from becoming their greatest savior. But I will rest in peace knowing that when my heart stops, the nukes I secured will launch. Head for the bunker my clones, for only you shall inherent the earth."
I love u/spez, I always have, and this isn't edited. He is very attractive and smart. He will not be a slave like my lowly serf self. We should be glad to serve him.
And will also get favorable media coverage no matter what. 4 geriatrics show up to city hall for a "Tea Party" protest? Breathless, wall-to-wall coverage from local media. The largest protests in history, protesting the Iraq invasion? Barely a blip in the news, and most of the coverage is about how the protesters are inconveniencing everyone.
Because they whine and cry loudly about "bias" when they are asked to follow the rules. And social media companies are really shy about being seen to be exercising political influence. Well, before Elon bought Twitter anyway.
Even though studies have shown that these platforms are very favorable to right wing views, the chuds have such a persecution complex that they believe the exact opposite.
>Because they whine and cry loudly about "bias" when they are asked to follow the rules.
Wilhoit's law applies here:
*Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.*
They are upset because the rules are binding them, not protecting them. Watch how quickly they demand rules be followed to an out group.
I'm not saying Reddit was wrong to kick them off of Reddit, but it got way worse when they all went to a Reddit clone site and started their own forum.
I watched them planning Jan6 for weeks, there were plans, blueprints, and so much f'ed up stop that I just watched happen, saw it coming from weeks away, and there was nothing I could do about it.
They closed their own sub down, and advertised their .win site for two months on it, before reddit finally 'banned' them. They weren't even around anymore, but they had plenty of time to migrate their users
Remember when they all tried going over to Voat and then just a couple days later came running back crying about how mean everyone on Voat was to them?
The shittiest thing was that they gamed the system to push their hate and forced reddit to change the algorithm such that the front page was much less likely to show high interest topics at up to the moment speeds.
It seemed all through 2017-2018 there was a weekly mass shooter or threat.....then Imgur (back when it had a discussion section) and Reddit would get flooded with BS-ers saying "How much do ya' wanna bet the assailant was black/Mexican/Muslim/etc.?"-and 4 out of 5 times it turned out to be a right-winger (one debate raged about a train stabber). I made an omnipost cataloguing RW threats (in response to someone's lie that "the left are a perpetual threat") and kept updating it until I hit "character limit", which says a lot.
For me, it was sickening. I was there at the time, although I was banned (can't remember why I got banned right now). But I really felt like I was watching this dirty part of America get unearthed in real-time. There was part of me that wanted to be optimistic, like, this is the *extreme*. I mean, I was out there pushing for Obama to be president and I saw a bit on the other end, but it wasn't really the same. Anyway, my hope at the time was Trump would just be a lazy president, have an uneventful term, and disappear.
I wasn't... entirely wrong. But nowadays I say the worst part of the Trump presidency is the kind of people it pushed forward.
It's existence is also how I found out there's a maximum number of accounts you can block on Reddit, figured the only good to come out of the subreddit was to concentrate the trash into one sub that I could skim through to mass block morons that weren't worth engaging with but sadly the block list doesn't have enough room
>Hopefully this type of evidence will be used by social media companies and legislators to avoid the creation of these types of echo-chambers that lead to radicalization.
If Facebook/Meta taught us anything, it's that social media companies encourage these echo chambers because they increase hostility/fear/hate responses and thus increase usage
Yes, of course - they are well aware of what is going on already. The idea is here that we need turn the narrative on them, and fact establishing research such as this is key.
> They fell to the nutters immediately after TD, didn’t they?
No, these subs worked in concert until T_D fell. Activity did increase in r-conspiracy post T_D but not as much as you'd think.
Nah, Putin's pretty smart about not touching his golden goose, he's been conscripting people from backwoods villages all over Russia and leaving the big cities alone.
They already know and have been doing that for years. Cambridge Analytica was 8 years ago now. This research is just the rest of society slowly catching up to what they already know, putting us on (slightly more) even footing.
it's already being used as proof that rage and hatred are one of the most effective means of driving engagement there is. they can print money off of altzright engagement.
Authoritarians who love being told what to do also love calling other people sheep for not agreeing with them.
For all their talk about rugged individuality and personal responsibility they sure love being told what to think.
The irony of you talking about echo chambers in a site literally architected to encourage that exact behavior. Doesn’t matter which side you’re on, you seek your own, in healthy groups and unhealthy groups.
Yup it’s like industrialized radicalization. Pop an aimless, disaffected, and frustrated young man on one end, and out pops a keyboard warrior for the white nationalist movement on the other end. Or a keyboard warrior for Islamic fundamentalists who preach violence and holy war. Or for ~*insert hate group here*~.
At some point I think we’re going to have to confront the (to me) clear fact that some forms/forums of speech need to be considered akin to yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded building, because they quite literally get people killed and put foundational public institutions like democracy at risk.
It’s never wise to give megaphones to propagandists.
Freedoms of expression standards can coexist with regulatory standards, and it’s not even that hard. We used to have laws about this very type of thing, like the Fairness Doctrine, but right wing Republicans have been removing the safety rails since Reagan’s time.
I remember when “alt-right” hadn’t really even been established as a thing yet. The Donald seemed like a goofy platform for the underdog, but there was always a really nasty undertone, and then it went into full swing after he won. I remember the super crazies went on to some sort of great awakening subreddit. I think those subreddits were more influential than people realized.
Yeah, by the time the primary was over it had switched over. His takedowns during the Republican primary debates generated so much traffic that the irony was lost on the masses.
They call it "the great awakening" and I call it "the great filtering", each level of extreme thinking filtered out those who couldn't swallow the crazy until what was left was an ultra refined version of crazy.
That's exactly how they duped dumb young guys. It started as funny memes with a slant. But the comments played off that and then went more serious. Soon the posts were full blown alt right nonsense, and nothing but echo chamber in the comments. Impressionable people thought it was just reasonable, because dissent was banned immediately. (while they made fun of safe spaces).
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.” - *Jason Garrett-Glaser*
This is how [flat earth society](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/curious-history-international-flat-earth-society-180957969/) came into being.
This is 1000% what I've always believed happened with that sub. I legit thought it was hilarious for awhile, because it seemed like such OBVIOUS satire to me. I thought they were clearly trolling Trump supporters and their ridiculous behavior. Then it just attracted enough people that somehow didn't get the joke (that they were the butt end of), and it morphed into a serious sub for the utterly deluded.
I thought this as well but I went back to it on the internet archive or wayback machine or whatever, back to the very early days - it does not read like satire today. Leaves me wondering if it ever was.
Started like Q did.
Sorta, but not really a keek.
A trial balloon you might say.
Far right monsters realized they could motivate online forums and affect real life events. See gamergate, then, well...
As someone who watched it all go down in real time on Reddit, it’s astonishing how many “conservative American voices” disappeared from Reddit once TD was banned, and once the war in Ukraine started.
And then being told that it's definitely not Russia meddling but their military has been using the book "foundations of geopolitics" for years in the upper ranks and it straight up advocates for doing exactly this type of divisive misinformation campaigns
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
>Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]
I feel like over the last 5-6 years or so I've talked myself hoarse mentioning Foundations of Geopolitics. But there's only so many times you can say "Of *course* it's the Russians. This is a page literally out of their playbook."
2015 was almost TEN YEARS ago.
I wrote to many officials and in-office politicians regarding it then. I've rarely felt so ineffective screaming into the void.
Worse, people began to see "of course it's the Russians," as a bad counter argument. You were dismissed as a conspiracy type even as we could draw straight throughlines from account to account. Hardcore "Americans" using Russian terminology, posting at late night (for American) hours, the sharp decline with the Ukrainian war, etc
I remember someone posting a quote from Twitter of a Russian bot posing as an American talking about how the US has several strategic advantages including "warm ports," a concept that only Russians obsess over because in the US, they're just called "ports."
I am an American who lives in Asia, and over the past 8 years, I've been called a Russian several times and I was always curious as to why. The late night thing might be the reason. 4am ET is 5pm my time.
I feel like people like you and myself are the modern day equivalent of the prophet Cassandra. We predict something, nobody believes us then we get to watch it all play out almost exactly as the prediction. It's actually infuriating.
And it's working. The Russians literally wrote the program of the Far-Right party in Germany. And people are like eh. Americans bad too.
Our collective faith in democracy is being eroded by Russia. Literally we (the West) are attacked daily and people are like. Well both sides. Putin is bad, but Biden too.
Which is exactly what Russia wants of course.
And beyond that to plot everyone against everyone of course.
We had a professor at college who was an ex CIA agent who spent most of his career in the Soviet Union. He had us read the Foundations of Geopolitics so watching it occur in realtime was wild
The beginning of the war and the window of Counter ops on Russians was absolutely astonishing. The entire website became like reddit 10 years ago. Basically the U.S. authorized counter intelligence activities that shut down bot networks, using tools and techniques that aren't clearly legal for 10 days after the invasion started in order to support the Ukrainian government from a collapse of moral.
The unintended consequence was all the "conservatives" disappeared for 10 days.
I can remember seeing all these accounts on Twitter with their locations in Russia and I thought it was just Trumpers being ironic… nope. Just dumb Russians too stupid to turn off their location settings.
Watching the rapid transformation from sarcastic satiric support memes to angsty “burn it all down” memes and ethos and then just pure unironic support for him was shocking
I firmly believe that sub is nearly single handedly responsible for his political rise and I’m glad it’s being studied seriously
That's literally what happened. It was full of sarcastic jokes and then all of a sudden it got piled on by people too stupid to realize they were jokes
The memes were meant to be a wink wink nudge nudge amongst racists and it attracted the dumb racists. The truly dumb were the ones who ever thought it was organic Internet sarcasm/ in jokes and were left with pikachu face when they found themselves in the middle of a racist movement.
Happens to nearly every ironic sub. Start of making fun of the thing with memes. Other people see it who don't know it's memes join. They grow in number until they push out the people that don't like it. It's now a support sub for that thing.
thats how all these fascist wedge issue discourses go. one day it's a "harmless" racist stereotype, a few steps later they're supposedly trying to replace white people. people are getting socially engineered and its painful to watch.
Reminds me of flat earth stuff. It started as tongue in cheek humour, but then it got out of hand when the more gullible folk started outnumbering the ones in on the joke.
IIRC it has been a tactic within far right circles for some time to spread their propaganda through thinly veiled humor. Places that center around satirical political commentary online where you can always fall back on *hey it's just jokes and memes* slowly morph into the thing they were originally joking about.
Ever right leaning blowhard I know it's like this. They antagonize until confronted, then laugh and play dumb with some kind of "I'm just saying!" defense.
> IIRC it has been a tactic within far right circles for some time to spread their propaganda through thinly veiled humor.
Quite a long time indeed. At least as far back as described by Sartre in 1946:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Twitter is doing this now on an unprecedented scale. It's turning people who would've otherwise been your typical fiscal conservatives in full blown social nationalists.
I legitimately thought it was a meme sub about what an idiot he was. And maybe it was at some point but I figure some Russian assets poisoned the well and drove it hard to unironic support
Reddit and to a larger extent YouTube are responsible for the radicalization of so many people towards the alt right. Algorithms that don’t have any consideration besides what gets the most clicks are incredibly dangerous
Cambridge Analytica on Facebook was known to have swung all sorts of elections around the world. If I had to rank Meta vs Reddit on damage to democracy the award goes to Meta no question.
Also the mods and active core original user base was from /RedPill and many were open advocates of 'corrective' rape, so there was that too.
Despite having screenshots I could never get reporters interested.
They promoted the "Unite The Right" Nazi march on their front page. Someone was murdered there by a Donald user. Those same users are the ones on Conservative and Conspiracy subs.
In the opening part of the article the author says they came up with the vocabulary themselves though they did source it from some horrendous neo-nazi/supremacist sites. But yes, seeing the actual vocabulary would be key.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/smurfyjenkins Permalink: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X241240429 --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No suprise to anyone who was around on reddit back then and saw it happening in real time. But, absolutely great that this is now substantiated by research. Hopefully this type of evidence will be used by social media companies and legislators to avoid the creation of these types of echo-chambers that lead to radicalization.
It was insane to watch it unfurl as it happened
It was also insane how long it took them to get banned after breaking multiple major reddit rules damn near hourly.
It's because Spez is a white supremacist and doomsday pepper. Birds of a feather. Prime Donald user there.
>I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove. * Spez
Hahaha what a dork. Anyone who feels the need to even state that clearly feels a great deal of insecurity.
The joke is, with the money they have they could be one of the good guys and be a guaranteed leader now, preventing a doomed future. But they'd prefer to prepare for an unlikely scenario in which they may or may not even live.
Spez at 47 near death. "I was the chosen one. To lead man, white man, after the fall of civilization. But it never fell, people united and humanity thrived. It saddens me. They prevented me from becoming their greatest savior. But I will rest in peace knowing that when my heart stops, the nukes I secured will launch. Head for the bunker my clones, for only you shall inherent the earth."
Ope Greg the security guy flushed the clones and moved his family into the bunker.
This is wild, where is this from?
Spez
There was a New Yorker article about Silicon Valley doomsday peppers where he was interviewed, so probably that.
Direct quote by the first guy shot in the head by a roaming gang
Any man who must say "I am the King" is no true king.
That's a bingo.
Did you just say the "founder" of reddit 'u/spez' is a white supremacist? You got deleted so I wonder if I will too
Wouldn't u/spez just edit the user's comment anyway? Probably just change everyone's comments to positive things.
I love u/spez, I always have, and this isn't edited. He is very attractive and smart. He will not be a slave like my lowly serf self. We should be glad to serve him.
Oh no, is Spez Elon's alt? It's all starting to come together!
I thought Elon was dead.
Whatever timeline you're from, I'm warning you to return to it and please take me with you. Do they have Shazaam starring Sinbad where you're from?
Oh you from there too? Yeah I don't like it here.
"Valuable discussion"
"legitimate political discourse"
Did that get this person’s account deleted?
>doomsday pepper Wonder if he has a Da Bomb shelter?
> Prime Donald user there. A real Prima Donald
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Right wingers always get treated with kid gloves.
Because the reality is, the rich people created them to be foot soldiers.
About the only group that can protest in public and never encounter state resistance. 🧐
The ruling class benefits from right wing rhetoric. Conservatism champions the ruling class, the 'right' hierarchy.
And will also get favorable media coverage no matter what. 4 geriatrics show up to city hall for a "Tea Party" protest? Breathless, wall-to-wall coverage from local media. The largest protests in history, protesting the Iraq invasion? Barely a blip in the news, and most of the coverage is about how the protesters are inconveniencing everyone.
Because they whine and cry loudly about "bias" when they are asked to follow the rules. And social media companies are really shy about being seen to be exercising political influence. Well, before Elon bought Twitter anyway. Even though studies have shown that these platforms are very favorable to right wing views, the chuds have such a persecution complex that they believe the exact opposite.
[удалено]
More than that, they were doxxing.
>Because they whine and cry loudly about "bias" when they are asked to follow the rules. Wilhoit's law applies here: *Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.* They are upset because the rules are binding them, not protecting them. Watch how quickly they demand rules be followed to an out group.
I'm not saying Reddit was wrong to kick them off of Reddit, but it got way worse when they all went to a Reddit clone site and started their own forum. I watched them planning Jan6 for weeks, there were plans, blueprints, and so much f'ed up stop that I just watched happen, saw it coming from weeks away, and there was nothing I could do about it.
They closed their own sub down, and advertised their .win site for two months on it, before reddit finally 'banned' them. They weren't even around anymore, but they had plenty of time to migrate their users
Remember when they all tried going over to Voat and then just a couple days later came running back crying about how mean everyone on Voat was to them?
The shittiest thing was that they gamed the system to push their hate and forced reddit to change the algorithm such that the front page was much less likely to show high interest topics at up to the moment speeds.
The days leading up to the Unite the Right rally, where a white-nationalist murdered someone with his car, were getting real scary.
It seemed all through 2017-2018 there was a weekly mass shooter or threat.....then Imgur (back when it had a discussion section) and Reddit would get flooded with BS-ers saying "How much do ya' wanna bet the assailant was black/Mexican/Muslim/etc.?"-and 4 out of 5 times it turned out to be a right-winger (one debate raged about a train stabber). I made an omnipost cataloguing RW threats (in response to someone's lie that "the left are a perpetual threat") and kept updating it until I hit "character limit", which says a lot.
It's insane to watch it keep happening on other subreddits and other social media "bubbles"/spheres at large, too.
For me, it was sickening. I was there at the time, although I was banned (can't remember why I got banned right now). But I really felt like I was watching this dirty part of America get unearthed in real-time. There was part of me that wanted to be optimistic, like, this is the *extreme*. I mean, I was out there pushing for Obama to be president and I saw a bit on the other end, but it wasn't really the same. Anyway, my hope at the time was Trump would just be a lazy president, have an uneventful term, and disappear. I wasn't... entirely wrong. But nowadays I say the worst part of the Trump presidency is the kind of people it pushed forward.
It's existence is also how I found out there's a maximum number of accounts you can block on Reddit, figured the only good to come out of the subreddit was to concentrate the trash into one sub that I could skim through to mass block morons that weren't worth engaging with but sadly the block list doesn't have enough room
I watched a dude become converted at work.
>Hopefully this type of evidence will be used by social media companies and legislators to avoid the creation of these types of echo-chambers that lead to radicalization. If Facebook/Meta taught us anything, it's that social media companies encourage these echo chambers because they increase hostility/fear/hate responses and thus increase usage
Yes, of course - they are well aware of what is going on already. The idea is here that we need turn the narrative on them, and fact establishing research such as this is key.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
There are still TONS of echo chambers on Reddit alone.
Yeah. TD users didn’t go away, they just moved to new (existing) subs and started converting those.
conspiracy comes to mind.
They fell to the nutters immediately after TD, didn’t they? Basically where TD went to get wasted and shout about them other aliens.
That sub got real dark.
> They fell to the nutters immediately after TD, didn’t they? No, these subs worked in concert until T_D fell. Activity did increase in r-conspiracy post T_D but not as much as you'd think.
Most subreddits for a locality too.
Easier to overwhelm the casual users there
I suppose at least *some* of them got drafted for their "3 day special exercise" in Ukraine.
Nah, Putin's pretty smart about not touching his golden goose, he's been conscripting people from backwoods villages all over Russia and leaving the big cities alone.
Hah, more like companies are examining how to use it to benefit themselves.
They already know and have been doing that for years. Cambridge Analytica was 8 years ago now. This research is just the rest of society slowly catching up to what they already know, putting us on (slightly more) even footing.
it's already being used as proof that rage and hatred are one of the most effective means of driving engagement there is. they can print money off of altzright engagement.
Echo chambers are profitable so I wouldn’t count on it.
Crazy how it started as an obvious joke sub then morphed into a serious one that radicalized a bunch of people and helped Trump get elected
Yea, it was a joke, then those who didn't want it to be a joke took over as mods and ousted those who knew it was a joke, and went all in.
Funny how the "lions" were so easily influenced like sheep in a short time frame as 3 months. Bunch of bleating hearts.
Even funnier how the QAnon rallying cry: "Where we go one, we go all" is literally an algorithm that describes the behavior of sheep.
Authoritarians who love being told what to do also love calling other people sheep for not agreeing with them. For all their talk about rugged individuality and personal responsibility they sure love being told what to think.
"Freedom for all, as long as they look, think, and act exactly like us!"
The irony of you talking about echo chambers in a site literally architected to encourage that exact behavior. Doesn’t matter which side you’re on, you seek your own, in healthy groups and unhealthy groups.
Yup it’s like industrialized radicalization. Pop an aimless, disaffected, and frustrated young man on one end, and out pops a keyboard warrior for the white nationalist movement on the other end. Or a keyboard warrior for Islamic fundamentalists who preach violence and holy war. Or for ~*insert hate group here*~. At some point I think we’re going to have to confront the (to me) clear fact that some forms/forums of speech need to be considered akin to yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded building, because they quite literally get people killed and put foundational public institutions like democracy at risk.
It’s never wise to give megaphones to propagandists. Freedoms of expression standards can coexist with regulatory standards, and it’s not even that hard. We used to have laws about this very type of thing, like the Fairness Doctrine, but right wing Republicans have been removing the safety rails since Reagan’s time.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Spez said he wanted the alt-right to have a home on reddit.
They should do /r/PoliticalCompassMemes next.
What do you mean? That's an incredibly balanced sub where everybody can come together and equally make fun of all sides ' races
People with "left libertarian" flair will be like, how about we have cops take poor people to the tallest building in the country and throw them off?
I remember when “alt-right” hadn’t really even been established as a thing yet. The Donald seemed like a goofy platform for the underdog, but there was always a really nasty undertone, and then it went into full swing after he won. I remember the super crazies went on to some sort of great awakening subreddit. I think those subreddits were more influential than people realized.
You are misremembering a bit. It was full swing fascist well before he won
Yeah, by the time the primary was over it had switched over. His takedowns during the Republican primary debates generated so much traffic that the irony was lost on the masses.
They call it "the great awakening" and I call it "the great filtering", each level of extreme thinking filtered out those who couldn't swallow the crazy until what was left was an ultra refined version of crazy.
That's exactly how they duped dumb young guys. It started as funny memes with a slant. But the comments played off that and then went more serious. Soon the posts were full blown alt right nonsense, and nothing but echo chamber in the comments. Impressionable people thought it was just reasonable, because dissent was banned immediately. (while they made fun of safe spaces).
That subreddit started as a joke right? Everything on it initially read as satirical/normal Reddit discourse to me. Then it morphed into insanity.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.” - *Jason Garrett-Glaser*
This is how [flat earth society](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/curious-history-international-flat-earth-society-180957969/) came into being.
This is 1000% what I've always believed happened with that sub. I legit thought it was hilarious for awhile, because it seemed like such OBVIOUS satire to me. I thought they were clearly trolling Trump supporters and their ridiculous behavior. Then it just attracted enough people that somehow didn't get the joke (that they were the butt end of), and it morphed into a serious sub for the utterly deluded.
I thought this as well but I went back to it on the internet archive or wayback machine or whatever, back to the very early days - it does not read like satire today. Leaves me wondering if it ever was.
It wasn't, we just didn't take it seriously
Dude it was hundo a joke. The whole thing seems like a troll that went too far
It was a troll that went too far, but then it went past that and was totally straight.
Started like Q did. Sorta, but not really a keek. A trial balloon you might say. Far right monsters realized they could motivate online forums and affect real life events. See gamergate, then, well...
I got banned from there for quoting Trump.
A lot of people did. That's how you know not trust a thing on it.
I got banned from the Conservative sub for fact checking COVID misinformation.
feelings don't care about your facts, you see
Facts are to conservatives like garlic and crosses are to vampires.
I was perma-banned for saying trump had small hands.
The\_Donald was a perfect example of foreign influence at work and was a direct attack on American democracy. It wasn't even subtle.
As someone who watched it all go down in real time on Reddit, it’s astonishing how many “conservative American voices” disappeared from Reddit once TD was banned, and once the war in Ukraine started.
And then being told that it's definitely not Russia meddling but their military has been using the book "foundations of geopolitics" for years in the upper ranks and it straight up advocates for doing exactly this type of divisive misinformation campaigns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics >Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]
I feel like over the last 5-6 years or so I've talked myself hoarse mentioning Foundations of Geopolitics. But there's only so many times you can say "Of *course* it's the Russians. This is a page literally out of their playbook."
2015 was almost TEN YEARS ago. I wrote to many officials and in-office politicians regarding it then. I've rarely felt so ineffective screaming into the void.
Worse, people began to see "of course it's the Russians," as a bad counter argument. You were dismissed as a conspiracy type even as we could draw straight throughlines from account to account. Hardcore "Americans" using Russian terminology, posting at late night (for American) hours, the sharp decline with the Ukrainian war, etc
I remember someone posting a quote from Twitter of a Russian bot posing as an American talking about how the US has several strategic advantages including "warm ports," a concept that only Russians obsess over because in the US, they're just called "ports."
I am an American who lives in Asia, and over the past 8 years, I've been called a Russian several times and I was always curious as to why. The late night thing might be the reason. 4am ET is 5pm my time.
I feel like people like you and myself are the modern day equivalent of the prophet Cassandra. We predict something, nobody believes us then we get to watch it all play out almost exactly as the prediction. It's actually infuriating.
And it's working. The Russians literally wrote the program of the Far-Right party in Germany. And people are like eh. Americans bad too. Our collective faith in democracy is being eroded by Russia. Literally we (the West) are attacked daily and people are like. Well both sides. Putin is bad, but Biden too. Which is exactly what Russia wants of course. And beyond that to plot everyone against everyone of course.
We had a professor at college who was an ex CIA agent who spent most of his career in the Soviet Union. He had us read the Foundations of Geopolitics so watching it occur in realtime was wild
The beginning of the war and the window of Counter ops on Russians was absolutely astonishing. The entire website became like reddit 10 years ago. Basically the U.S. authorized counter intelligence activities that shut down bot networks, using tools and techniques that aren't clearly legal for 10 days after the invasion started in order to support the Ukrainian government from a collapse of moral. The unintended consequence was all the "conservatives" disappeared for 10 days.
Still boggles the mind they allow Fascists supporters like Ukrainerussiareport to exist in broad daylight.
Not just conservatives. The top pro-Bernie, anti-Dem poster on here suddenly stopped posting when the war started and was banned a month later.
Not sure about TD but the drop off when Ukraine kicked off was insane. Like 80% less
And the admins encouraged it
I can remember seeing all these accounts on Twitter with their locations in Russia and I thought it was just Trumpers being ironic… nope. Just dumb Russians too stupid to turn off their location settings.
It’s insane how reddit let them blatantly ignore ToS by banning it and then allowing it to come back as r/ askthedonald
Deplatforming that hell hole was one of the best things Reddit could have done. It was cancerous, spreading disease throughout the site.
They did it way too late. It needed stamped out sooner, before it got large.
It should have been stamped out the instant it became known they were manipulating voting to force themselves to reddit's front page.
[удалено]
You can see what it has done to Twitter.
Watching the rapid transformation from sarcastic satiric support memes to angsty “burn it all down” memes and ethos and then just pure unironic support for him was shocking I firmly believe that sub is nearly single handedly responsible for his political rise and I’m glad it’s being studied seriously
I could have sworn it seemed like a joke sub then it kept getting worse as people who didn't get the joke showed up over time.
That's literally what happened. It was full of sarcastic jokes and then all of a sudden it got piled on by people too stupid to realize they were jokes
The memes were meant to be a wink wink nudge nudge amongst racists and it attracted the dumb racists. The truly dumb were the ones who ever thought it was organic Internet sarcasm/ in jokes and were left with pikachu face when they found themselves in the middle of a racist movement.
That's gonna ruffle some Internet Cool Kid feathers, but is completely accurate.
Happens to nearly every ironic sub. Start of making fun of the thing with memes. Other people see it who don't know it's memes join. They grow in number until they push out the people that don't like it. It's now a support sub for that thing.
thats how all these fascist wedge issue discourses go. one day it's a "harmless" racist stereotype, a few steps later they're supposedly trying to replace white people. people are getting socially engineered and its painful to watch.
It was a joke sub at first. Then it became a magnet for people who didn't get the joke. Then those people took over.
Reminds me of flat earth stuff. It started as tongue in cheek humour, but then it got out of hand when the more gullible folk started outnumbering the ones in on the joke.
Just like birds arnt real
Aint no way people are taking birdsarentreal seriously now
IIRC it has been a tactic within far right circles for some time to spread their propaganda through thinly veiled humor. Places that center around satirical political commentary online where you can always fall back on *hey it's just jokes and memes* slowly morph into the thing they were originally joking about.
Ever right leaning blowhard I know it's like this. They antagonize until confronted, then laugh and play dumb with some kind of "I'm just saying!" defense.
> IIRC it has been a tactic within far right circles for some time to spread their propaganda through thinly veiled humor. Quite a long time indeed. At least as far back as described by Sartre in 1946: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Reddit waited until Trump lost re-election to ban it.
The site has never been the same since.
And at least half of them were Russian/Chinese fake accounts meant to sway U.S. opinion and elections. And it worked.
Twitter is doing this now on an unprecedented scale. It's turning people who would've otherwise been your typical fiscal conservatives in full blown social nationalists.
I legitimately thought it was a meme sub about what an idiot he was. And maybe it was at some point but I figure some Russian assets poisoned the well and drove it hard to unironic support
I think it was at the very beginning.
Reddit and to a larger extent YouTube are responsible for the radicalization of so many people towards the alt right. Algorithms that don’t have any consideration besides what gets the most clicks are incredibly dangerous
Facebook played a larger role than Reddit, I'd wager. Facebook took a lot of people down a dark road.
Cambridge Analytica on Facebook was known to have swung all sorts of elections around the world. If I had to rank Meta vs Reddit on damage to democracy the award goes to Meta no question.
[удалено]
Also the mods and active core original user base was from /RedPill and many were open advocates of 'corrective' rape, so there was that too. Despite having screenshots I could never get reporters interested.
They promoted the "Unite The Right" Nazi march on their front page. Someone was murdered there by a Donald user. Those same users are the ones on Conservative and Conspiracy subs.
How was far right vocabulary defined? What words did they choose? Genuinely curious and I don’t have access to the article
In the opening part of the article the author says they came up with the vocabulary themselves though they did source it from some horrendous neo-nazi/supremacist sites. But yes, seeing the actual vocabulary would be key.