[aarond0623]

> who got to decide what is extremist or as the study also put it "alternative"?

That's explained in the paper:

> Our list of extremist channels consists of those labeled as white identitarian by Ledwich and Zaitsev (26) (30 channels), white supremacist by Charles (45) (23 channels), alt-right by Ribeiro et al. (24) (37 channels), extremist or hateful by the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (16 channels), and those compiled by journalist Aaron Sankin from lists curated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Counter Extremism Project, and the white supremacist website Stormfront (157 channels) (46).

[didntcheck]

Unfortunately I'm not surprised. The SPLC are the Fox News of declaring everyone they don't like hate groups, and the ADL do a lot of the same, in addition to finding excuses for actual hate when it's the types they like

[a_shovel]

I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.

[cocoricamo]

Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech and not a hate group while easily listing any other organization that opposes their political views as hate groups.

If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.

[dragonwriter]

> Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech

Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.

It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)

Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.

> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.

The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)

And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)

[snapplebobapple]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k41PI54ExFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsX7mO4Iu_k https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/17/southern-p... https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/years-of-turmo... https://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/12-ways-southern-povert... https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/southern-... https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/109266/documents/...

I can go on, the google results are quite numerous on this issue....

[dragonwriter]

> I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham

Hate groups have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around (and especially since it started tracking hate groups, but even when it was just doing pro-civik-rights legal work for 20 years before that) and the US has lots of hate groups.

Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.

[netbioserror]

ADL and SPLC are not serious organizations. They're closer to circus shows. The rest reek of DC think-tank elitism and I'm unsure why I should care about their opinions.

[thinkingtoilet]

Can you specify which of the 23 white supremacist channels are DC think-tank elitism?

[seiferteric]

Do they provide a list of all the channels? I didn't see it in the link.

[netbioserror]

Can you reread my post?

[fallingknife]

1. Form an org with a vaguely anti-hate sounding name

2. Declare certain things "extremism" based on subjective criteria that totally have nothing to do with whether or not they agree with you

3. ??????

4. Your opinion is declared scientific truth

[cocoricamo]

Would be nice to be able to review the actual lists that they used.

[whiddershins]

So the only interesting type of extremism is US right wing Caucasian extremism?

[mikewhy]

The "caucasian" there is redundant.

[baggy_trough]

Were any communist or socialist channels included?

[mikewhy]

Are any of them associated with domestic terrorism?

[baggy_trough]

Does advocating for revolution or "burning the system to the ground" count?

[the_third_wave]

Parents who do not want their children to be indoctrinated by "gender ideologues" were labelled as "domestic terrorists" by the Attorney General [1] so the term does not seem to mean what most people think it does.

Having said that Antifa comes to mind as do a number of similar groups, past and present. As to whether you call these "communist" or not does not really matter as political terminology is intentionally vague - anything to the right of a "progressive" soon becomes "extreme-right/fascist/nazi/...", anything to the left of a "hard-line conservative" soon becomes "communist/socialist/anarchist/...".

So yes, there is plenty of violence on the left side of the political spectrum, probably more than there is on the right side of the spectrum. Take e.g. the 2020 BLM riots as an example for what this looks like. The media tends to tone down their reporting when it comes to the former which lead to terms like "fiery bur mostly peaceful protests" [2,3] while exaggerating the latter but the facts speak for themselves.

Violence is violence no matter whether it comes from the right, the centre of the left. A rock thrown by a Muslim does as much damage as one thrown by an atheist or a flag-waving "patriot".

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-domestic-terrorists...

[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-myth-behind-blms-peaceful-protes...

[3] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-...

[kbelder]

'Associated'

Sure.

[mikewhy]

Would you prefer "labelled as by the US Department of Homeland Security"?