[ssaew333]

If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true.

How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this?

Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.

I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.

[nvahalik]

> Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.

The internet is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil. It depends on the people using it. In fact, the internet is arguably a victim of it's own success. It has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are. That's why we are having this specific conversation, is it not?

> I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.

Don't judge your work by what others are doing. It's not right. You can choose to use your skills for good by doing things that are beneficial. You can work for a non-profit, a church, a community to connect, build-up, and support people. Technology for technology sake will not bring you peace or joy—technology for the sake of others just might.

[ssaew333]

>It has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are.

I don't think a majority of people hold these views. What we're doing is amplifying vocal minorities and drowning out everyone else.

Granted, no communication mass platform is going to accurately reflect the public. That's why we hold media especially accountable for spreading falsehoods. We haven't seen that sort of criticism of Social Media, however, until very recently. Twitter, Facebook, etc make editorial decisions to make some content more visible than others, and they chose to reward this kind of crap. But because they outsource their decisions to an algorithm, we have treated them less like television channels and more like telephone companies (dumb pipes).

> You can choose to use your skills for good by doing things that are beneficial. You can work for a non-profit, a church, a community to connect, build-up, and support people.

I strongly agree. And tech skills aren't even necessary. Try to get involved with local politics, volunteer, give money to good causes, and help your neighbors and friends in need. It's the antidote to the division and loneliness in our world.

[nvahalik]

> I don't think a majority of people hold these views. What we're doing is amplifying vocal minorities and drowning out everyone else.

Then I'd argue perhaps people haven't thought about it well enough. My point in another comment was that people formerly who could find no audience would likely get shut down since there was a bit of inoculation against certain ideas. However, with the internet you can reach an audience who finds your ideas acceptable far more easily than you could before.

> And tech skills aren't even necessary.

Absolutely. If you care enough, you'll find a way to help. My opinion is that tech thinks way too highly of itself. It thinks that technology itself can actually be a panacea. I've found that generally to be the opposite—that tech most often gets used to "get around" the hard work. However, that's probably just my cynicism speaking.

[dgudkov]

>The internet is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil.

I prefer to view the internet as amplifier. Per se, it's not good or bad. It just amplifies whatever it has on its inputs. The inputs of early internet were nerdy, but we mistook this nerdy utopia of internet as good force for axiom. Now internet amplifies whatever humans are and boy its ugly.

[nvahalik]

Absolutely. The barrier to entry initially was high, so the SnR was really high. However, now anyone can create 1080p videos and the tools to do basic editing are practically free. Whereas someone whose ideas were unpopular with those around them might find themselves unwelcome and perhaps would quiet down, now you can address your message to your specific audience and get positive feedback which wasn't possible before.

[DanBC]

> t has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are. That's why we are having this specific conversation, is it not?

No. We only heard about her ideas when she murdered people. No-one on HN had heard anything from her before then. The internet did nothing to promote or supress her ideas, other than the news coverage she got after killing people.

[VikingCoder]

When you read "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Stephen Levy, you can just feel how excited they all were about bringing people together. Maybe that was just Levy's twist on it, but it's feeling tragic to me right now.

[digi_owl]

Adam Curtis takes a chunk out of that excitement as part of his All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

[tripplethrendo]

One of my favorite docu-tainment pieces.

[ghostbrainalpha]

I just searched her name on Twitter, and I didn't see a single reference in the first 50 posts to ISIS, or the NRA. So 0% for me.

Maybe it's just your feed? I searched by her real name AND her instagram name.

I did see a lot of weird things praising her, saying RIP, which I totally don't understand. Twitter is such a weird gross place. And some rather excellent yoga almost pornography, that might be her.

It seems like the most common right wing talking point I can see is saying that this was because she was 'a radical vegan'.

[ssaew333]

My search was on search.twitter.com I don't have a twitter account

The results have been changing. The newer you go, the more you see "radical vegan" and the less you see "jihad." That's... .encouraging.

[justicezyx]

> 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists

Right in a post complaining labelling, a labeling slapping to my face.

I am a bit depressed by our species ability to do rational thinking.

[ng-user]

A little contradictory, I concur.

Does claiming someone is a member of ISIS automatically make you a right-wing conspiracy theorist or is it different under these circumstances?

How is the number 40% actually determined, surely it must be an assumption from scrolling through the feed for a little while? To my knowledge it's difficult (near impossible without 3rd party tools) to determine in real-time the number of tweets pertaining to a certain topic.

[ssaew333]

I thought it was clear from my post i was guesstimating. I don't typically do rigorous analysis of what I see in twitter results, so I'll just say, it seemed like a lot of right wing accounts implying that media was covering up the shooting, or that the shooter was actually motivated by radical islam.

[justicezyx]

Right, this statement, if were used by the original post, to me, is quite accurate.

[kurthr]

Please stop labeling the labelers it's labelist.

... and so is this.

[ssaew333]

I wasn't complaining about labeling. I was complaining because assertions that she was an NRA or ISIS supporter were false.

I believe my assertions were true. Here are the first two people I saw on my twitter search:

Jack Posobiec Wikipedia: "John Michael "Jack" Posobiec III (/pəˈsoʊbɪk/ pə-SOW-bik; born 1985) is an American alt-right[1][2][3] internet troll, conspiracy theorist,[4][5] and self-described journalist, known primarily for his controversial and pro-Donald Trump comments on Twitter."

He was claiming that google removed her videos from youtube as part of a coverup because she didn't fit the narrative of conservative white males causing mass shootings

Laura Loomer Wikipedia: "Laura Elizabeth Loomer is an alt-right[1] American political activist and Internet personality. She was a reporter for Canada's The Rebel Media during the summer of 2017, resigning that September.[2][3][4][5][6] Prior to June 2017, she worked for Project Veritas with James O'Keefe.[3]"

Her tweets are calling the youtube shooting "an act of jihad". Also made a tweet that seemed to imply, because the shooter has an androgynous name and muscular build, that she could be trans. As if that has anything to do with it.

[chillingeffect]

I followed this story last night into a live youtube stream where the presenter asserted everything with an authoritative voice:

After bumbling his way through some half-hearted doxing attempts and watching her videos, he was smugly confident in his extrapolations of her psychological diagnosis, political affiliations, family history, &c. And his commenters formed a sycophantic chorus.

Ideology is the failure of a mental model to adapt to error. It's an inflexible coping strategy that rams all perceptions into presuppositions.

Its air of authority is evidence of the delusion, not of successful reality-checking.

[Balgair]

Whenever I see these people my mind goes back to Annihilation Elvis from Akira, the semblance is usually stark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl_mg2w95D0

[gameswithgo]

>I am a bit depressed by our species ability to do rational thinking.

you can do your part by quit being a right wing conspiracy theorist?

[weberc2]

FWIW, I checked Twitter (hashtags #YouTubeShooter) this morning, and it was ugly, but I only saw one tweet that made inferences to Islam. Most of the right wing comments were to the effect of "Gun laws didn't stop this" or pointing out that her beliefs (veganism, animal rights) are traditionally associated with left wing beliefs. The left wing comments were to the effect of "NRA is a terrorist organization" and "ban AR15s" and general wishes of harm on 2A supporters.

I took special note of this because there is this meme of conservatives applying the "terrorist" label on the basis of race or ethnicity, and this meme has scarcely matched my experiences.

EDIT: Some people are downvoting, presumably because they think I'm making a political statement. I'm not; just sharing my data points.

[antisthenes]

> Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.

It did, once. Unfortunately, we have to accept that the average person's contribution will generally be thoughtless, emotional, and not very substantive. I wouldn't say it's their fault. They honestly do not know any better and feel like they are honestly expressing themselves in that manner.

Just saying that perhaps we should take it with a big grain of salt.

Building intelligent consensus is very hard.

[scragg]

Some people are so cynical of information that doesn't fit their beliefs they end up spreading lies.

[classicsnoot]

I know this may seem like a silly response, but i mean it in all earnestness: Democracy may not be a basically "good thing." I know this flies in the face of a ton of social programming, but at some point we have to take the evidence as it comes to us, and if it is consistently pointing to something we did not expect or like, we can only re-jigger the pretext so many times before we have to confront the fact that maybe our assumptions were wrong. Maybe the internet is the perfect vehicle for democracy, and mob rule isn't such a great thing.

[lolc]

Given how widely the definitions for "Democracy" diverge, it must be taken as given that some of those definitions will not be "good" for some people.

As a frequent point of contention: Is vote-by-majority democratic?

[classicsnoot]

I would argue Yes. It is definitely one type of democracy.

[ssaew333]

Or, democracy and mob rule are not the same thing. And the internet (in it's current form) is better at promoting mob rule.

[classicsnoot]

That is an interesting delineation. Disregarding Platonic definition, how would you argue they are different, or at least distinguished from each other?

[travmatt]

>If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true. >How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this?

Propaganda is part of the standard far right response to any outbreak of violence, I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. They’ll usually link the shooter to which ever group is closest to their skin color (isis, antifa, or blm) and probably doctor some photos if any evidence surfaces which could otherwise generate cognitive dissonance (e.g., Nicolas Cruz wearing his MAGA hat). The NRA angle is interesting though, I wonder if those are just more right wingers trying to muddy the waters or if the far left is adopting propaganda tactics of their own.

[tristor]

I think a critical examination of the political sphere would show you that the far left has been using propaganda tactics for a very long time. It might even be most accurate to say that throughout recent human history that most of our current propaganda tactics were first discovered or invented by the far left.

[travmatt]

Could you give me a rundown on American far left propaganda tactics you think I’m not aware of? Could you give me a rundown on why you believe the far left invented modern propaganda tactics?

As far as I can tell, most modern propaganda tactics originate or start with Russia’s new nonlinear warfare campaigns (gerasimov doctrine), and have been used heavily by Putin in Ukraine and more recently across Europe. I have a hard time seeing him as a far left figure, for obvious reasons.

[tristor]

I don't think that a comment on Hacker News is the right place for me to write an expository essay, but I was making reference to a few things in particular. Before I briefly respond I should point out that I don't necessarily think propaganda is inherently bad, it's just a fact of democracy and the need to influence large groups of people to a particular viewpoint. There's a huge negative connotation in the term, but propaganda in a lot of ways is no different socially than advertising.

1. Both the far right and the far left are utilizing memes and "fake news" on social media in order to influence opinion through directed propaganda. This is a relatively new development, because social media is a relatively new development. Interestingly, politicians on the left and similar activist groups have been far more effective and successful in this regard, partly because they're often the first to make use of new platforms and they tend to be managed and composed of younger audiences which innately are more familiar with the social media territory including the uses of meming. If you look back to the early 2000s you'll see that social media was an important gathering place for activists and organizers on the left preparing for the push after the 2nd term of Bush and how effective social media was in helping the election of Obama. Not all of this was strictly propaganda, but a lot of it was.

2. Most of the basic techniques of manufacturing and spreading propaganda were created far before the Internet was even a concept. Many of them were explicitly created and used by the Left as a method to organize people across wide geographic areas to do coordinated activities. This is most strongly associated with the way that Marxist rebellions occurred in many parts of the world in the early parts of the 20th century. This later morphed under these Leftist government to adopt some of the propaganda techniques developed during WWII by both sides of the conflict along with other new techniques in order to effectively control the populace after they seized power. Probably the primary outcome of this, and a doctrine which was extensively used by the USSR in particular, was the creation of the model for agitprop. Agitprop continues to be created to this day and is an effective method of inculcating ideas into a populace and shifting the Overton window. It's used by Leftists in Hollywood to help influence the viewpoint of Americans and those abroad, and in some cases is used through the US's worldwide cultural influence to spread the ideas of democracy itself. I reiterate that propaganda isn't necessarily inherently bad.

3. The Gerasimov Doctrine doesn't exist. Not only that, if it /did/ exist, the outcome of it is that it makes the US look weak and particularly makes Trump/Republicans look weak on the international stage. While there is strong evidence that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the 2016 election in the US, this does not in and of itself imply that this is "right-wing propaganda" or that it's necessarily a tool of the Right. The person who originally coined the term "Gerasimov Doctrine" has written an editorial on this topic [1]

[1]: http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-th...

[travmatt]

Thank you for the thorough reply, and for arguing in good faith.

I disagree with (1): I don’t see this as a ‘both sides’ issues, and I don’t believe that the left, as a whole, has been as amenable to inflammatory propaganda as the right has been. As my prime example, I’d note the Macedonian fake news phenomenon that occurred right around the election. As the creators themselves have stated, those articles targeted right wing voters because those were the people who were interested in reading, spreading , and talking about the propaganda they were spreading. Since these creators were solely interested in financial profit, it stands to reason that they would have preferred to make money appealing to left wing audiences as much as they did right wing ones. There was no explosion in fake news from these sources to the left because there was no demand. As my secondary examples, I’d maintain that most left wing media outlets (tyt, mother jones) have much higher journalistic standards than their counterparts Breitbart and infowars - and the equally opportunistic propagandadists as Russia Today. If you’d like to point me towards the cases you believe the left has pushed fake news I’d be interested in learning more.

2) that’s why I specified ‘modern’ propaganda- things like troll farms, planting anti immigrant stories (faking rapes, murders, massacres) along with investment into finer targeting mechanisms (the hacking of state voter rolls and CA data to be used for micro-targeting). I should note that I brought up the election collusion because it is propbabaly the place the left could be most prone towards conspiratorial fantasies, and the first place you’d find such ideas.

3) I liked the piece but I thinks it’s a stretch to try and use it to refute my points. We could call them active measures, political warfare, nonlinear or hybrid warfare, but the point still exists that Russia is pioneering new weapons to attack western and western leaning democracies. And you’re saying if those measures did exist the result would be making the us look weak on the international stage - isn’t that ‘exactly’ the point of them? I assume when Russia launched a chemical weapons attack in the UK the purpose was exactly the same - to underscore British weakness and estrangement from her allies.

[njarboe]

Propaganda is part of the standard for any group trying to control the narrative in a democracy. I would suggest Chomsky and Herman's book "Manufacturing Consent" for more details.

[travmatt]

The American far left creates and disseminates far less propaganda than the far right does, although I’m open to hear evidence otherwise. For whatever odd reason it seems that the left in general is far less amiable to inflammatory propaganda - for example, there’s much more evidence that Donald trump coordinated his campaign with foreign intelligence services than there is evidence that Obama is a socialist Muslim or that Hillary Clinton was complicit in child sex trafficking or satanic rituals.

In my estimation I’d say that the main tools of the far left are currently censorship and ostracism within communities, although the far right engages in these practices just as avidly.