Potato Salad posted:

What does this sentence mean

Prester Jane posted:

So apparently you have never been a visible minority and/or woman with an opinion that the Alt-Right dislikes on social media. It is very easy to mention the wrong topic and suddenly have every electronic device you own screaming death threats at you for weeks solid. She is 100% justified in her caution and not even remotely tooting her own horn.

Crane Fist posted:

Imagine I posted that Tyler the Creator tweet here

Prester Jane posted:

So apparently you have never been a visible minority and/or woman with an opinion that the Alt-Right dislikes on social media. It is very easy to mention the wrong topic and suddenly have every electronic device you own screaming death threats at you for weeks solid. She is 100% justified in her caution and not even remotely tooting her own horn.

papa_november posted:

You are severely overestimating how well organized the alt-right is

420 Gank Mid posted:

How does someone pointing out that the 'alt right' is a frothing lurching mass of rage that endlessly lashes out in every direction it perceives criticism from make you think that person assumes they are 'well organized'

420 Gank Mid posted:

https://twitter.com/swimjohn2199/status/947370414946254848

papa_november posted:

You are severely overestimating how well organized the alt-right is. That's OK, so is everyone else on Twitter, which leads to weird tics like everyone talking about a dreaded individual or site like they're Lord Voldemort.

It's a big problem though, because acting like the pizzagate clowns (or any of the other extremely online rightist clowns since, well, the start of Twitter really) have any kind of power is part of the mechanism that gives them power. This is something we've known since this very site was a hub of trolly behavior but nobody seems to get it.

quote:

Like many white Americans who grew up with a distanced awareness of the discrimination, physical dangers, and blunt racism launched at Black Americans every day, I've experienced new levels of horror in the past few years as social media has allowed the true scope, details, and real-time impacts of such behavior--our behavior--to become ever more glaringly apparent.

Thanks to the work and patience of many communities of color, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have helped to promote Black voices, positivity, and strength and distribute the real data on discrimination across the web in recent years, driving (inching) white awareness, too.

All the while, these tools have also been empowering legions of dedicated and 'everyday' racists to wage war against visible Black women with all the fresh hell and tired tropes they can muster--effecting a digital siege on Black women and girls, and, ultimately, on everything our big, unwieldy country as a whole holds dear.


To be clear, that's not an accusation, or a confession; it's just the facts.

For these relentless attacks are part of a greater culture in the U.S. that research shows is literally killing Black women and families from inside and out, as well as keeping their wages down, among many other things.

It's a blood relative of the cultural biases whereby all women, but especially women of color, are given fewer opportunities to advance, less pay, and less medical attention than men are in the same situations; it's tied to Black and Hispanic men's disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment for crimes everyone is committing (and to their lower pay and level of medical care, too).

In some ways, this underlying culture that permits continuous abuse of Black women is even linked to the stereotypes and built-in hurdles that keep poor and middle-class Americans of all genders and races from getting real chances to get ahead--chances that only very few of us receive in abundance from birth, while the vast majority are encouraged to divide and clash over what's left.

Because if someone wants to keep you down and avoid a fair fight by suggesting that you're 'less than,' they'll find a way, no matter who you are or what you've accomplished--nor whether you helped target others along the line.

quote:

New York Times]
Following the tragic events in Las Vegas last month, as the gun debate reached new heights of intensity, I joined the fray. Though in favor of increased gun control, I spoke out on Twitter in support of transgender people being able to arm ourselves in self-defense — because, I felt, our newly heightened levels of visibility have led to increased levels of violence against us.

One of my tweets took off. What resulted was a multiday, multi-pronged onslaught of harassment from not only gun-control activists but groups who target transgender people. Ultimately, after days of doing nothing while other users hurled slurs and made threats, Twitter finally took action: It suspended me for 12 hours after I said one of those users was “garbage” for trying to incite further harassment.

If this was an isolated incident, this could be written off as a mistake. But it isn’t just that Twitter makes it easy for users to abuse certain targets with impunity. Pushing back — as the actress Rose McGowan found just days after I did — routinely invites suspensions from the Twitter safety team. This pattern of harassment followed by punishment is particularly acute for transgender users, who are often targets for abuse and for whom the abuse can have serious consequences.

During own my particular experience of Twitter harassment, I tried, in good faith, to use the tools the platform makes available to its users to stop abuse. When someone crossed the line into what I considered abuse — calling me, for instance, a “tranny” or “mentally ill” — I would report the tweets in question. Each time, Twitter ruled they’d violated no rules — each time with no further explanation provided.

So, I would block them. But these accounts would respond by creating numerous secondary accounts, to circumvent the blocking in order to harass me again.

Twitter’s exact processes for handling abuse reports are a secret, but the company announced earlier this year that many of them are handled algorithmically — servers with not-so-carefully calibrated formulae analyze the reports for signs of harassment. Profanity is treated more seriously than slurs and threats — the mere presence of vulgarity in a reply is often enough, especially when blue checkmarks are involved. (One of the tweets the service flagged when I was suspended, for instance, contained a curse word, though it wasn’t directed at my harasser.) Mass reporting tweets in bad faith, a common tactic of Twitter harassers, is often enough to get a user blocked.

The company has said it’s aware of many of these problems: that automatically flagging curse words is too ham-handed, and that users intent on abusing others can create new accounts too easily. It has also said it’s taken steps to correct them; whatever those efforts have been, however, they weren’t enough to help me.

The result of all this is a dangerous power imbalance — it’s often the harassed who pushed back, not the harassers, who find their tweets deleted and their accounts suspended. This imbalance affects the trans community disproportionately: Transgender users who are active on Twitter are often targeted by everyone from social conservatives to so-called feminists espousing transphobic views in the name of “protecting” cisgender women.

The well-known transgender activist Laurelai Bailey had her verified account permanently shuttered; almost every day, a trans person I know is hit with at least a temporary suspension. While harassers create extra accounts to circumvent blocks, many of the regularly harassed keep a backup in store simply as an insurance policy against Twitter’s unequal treatment. (Ms. Bailey, in fact, had one prepared, and has begun using that instead.)

papa_november posted:

What fascinates me is that we know that our own intelligence agencies are capable of pushing the internet in various directions, and that they've historically demonstrated the ability to manipulate political movements, but as of now it's almost impossible to tell what's being pushed and who's doing the pushing.

It's because like you said, the various internet crazy subcultures have all grown to the point where they could plausibly have evolved into what they are today totally on their own.

papa_november posted:

What fascinates me is that we know that our own intelligence agencies are capable of pushing the internet in various directions, and that they've historically demonstrated the ability to manipulate political movements, but as of now it's almost impossible to tell what's being pushed and who's doing the pushing.

It's because like you said, the various internet crazy subcultures have all grown to the point where they could plausibly have evolved into what they are today totally on their own.

Prester Jane posted:

On a serious note I have had Atomwaffen propaganda telling me to kill myself (because all transwomen deserve death) PM'ed to me by a member of this forum (Snatch Duster, caught a perma for it.) and its WIDELY known among the Troon community that our every post on this website is monitored by offsites. Hell I was loving doxxed by an offsite while I was literally living in a homeless shelter. Got texts on my Obamaphone telling me to kill myself.

So while its nice that some posters here do not have to live with that reality, it does not change the fact that being a women or minority with opinions the Alt-Right dislikes runs a non-trivial risk of resulting in a weeks long harassment campaign from the Alt-Right.

Finally, the assertion that it takes a great deal of organization in order to coordinate a doxxing/harassment campaign is loving asinine. It doesn;t take poo poo to run a discord channel and have a bunch of Internet detectives share every bit of info they dig up on a person. "LOL the Alt-Right isn't organized enough to harass people online and the people protecting themselves from that harassment are just giving more power to the bullies" is some peak level white privilege IMO, I genuinely am happy for you that you do not need to deal with that, but please kindly sit down shut the gently caress up instead of choosing to speak so condescendingly to people who have to contend with barriers that you do not.

Trumps Baby Hands posted:

the internet is endless faceless people with endless agendas feeding you information, and it's not possible to tell where most of it's coming from

like, if you turn on the television and flip to HBO, you know that all that content is coming from HBO's parent organization. it's essentially vetted. still biased, but at least you have an idea of the source

but go to the front page of reddit and it's a complete mystery where all that content originates

i think ultimately we're going to see people walking away from the internet. it's too spooky and unregulated, and has too much access to our lives

Trumps Baby Hands posted:

i think ultimately we're going to see people walking away from the internet. it's too spooky and unregulated, and has too much access to our lives

Charles 2 of Spain posted:

The Internet was a mistake.

420 Gank Mid posted:

https://twitter.com/swimjohn2199/status/947370414946254848

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

two anonymous vox employees democrat

SpaceGoku posted:

the internet is gonna diverge into "normie" internet where everything is more thoroughly regulated and you need to sign in with facebook for every single service and facebook will require you to use your legal name and verify your identity through a dozen different annoying steps before you can post or use it as a login service for other services

and "garbage" internet where everyone can be anonymous if they want and it's mostly a nightmare hellshit fuckhole but at least you can post that picture of the chimp pissing in its own mouth without needing to let zuckerberg know about it

Ague Proof posted:

former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough
Killed intern
DEMOCRAT

Prester Jane posted:

Do go on about how minorities are being overdramatic attention whores when they have to protect themselves online from this kind of harassment.

papa_november posted:

Crane Fist posted:

Have you ever written a single post that didn't contain a detailed breakdown on how bad your life is

Crane Fist posted:

Have you ever written a single post that didn't contain a detailed breakdown on how bad your life is