|
The far right disavows nothing as much as "identity politics," so any venue which provides anonymity and doesn't have an effective method of moderating content or banning bigoted speech is going to be dominated by the right. If somebody can call someone a slur word without losing access to the platform, then 10 people posting it often enough and repeatedly is enough to make a lot of the left walk away, disgusted. I don't really read Reddit but I understand they suffered some problems because of it, Twitter is only just starting to understand the issues around it and starting to ban some of the loudest offenders. I used to admin on the largest Facebook feminist group and for awhile, I was getting death threats once a week, because people registered accounts with names like "Uncle Sam" and "Smooth McGroove." Some of them openly said they registered under pseudonyms so that they could talk about how women didn't belong in the military without being disciplined. At the time, you actually couldn't ban people from large groups more quickly than they could register a new account, because there was a glitch with large member lists that caused a delay in them showing up as having "joined," so it took literally days before you could ban anyone. I have mixed feelings about the way Facebook cracks down on forcing people to use their real names, but once it started the trolls basically vanished, although I suddenly got a lot of angry messages accusing me of censoring free speech by people who wanted to post the feminism was a conspiracy started by the Rockefellers. Once anonymity is involved, the only method of avoiding a flood of "Show your boobs!" or a bunch of racist or transphobic bullshit is moderation that isn't afraid of banning people for using slurs or engaging in harassment, or else the left is inevitably going to leave. There are concrete examples of this on this very forum.
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 19:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:05 |
|
|
Related: I have to roll my eyes a little at all the thinkpieces which accuse society at large of isolating themselves in echo chambers (there have been a great many this election cycle), because there is just a natural difference in the way discussion works when "Racism and sexism are real and very prevalent" is a statement that somehow becomes political. People very justifiably want to extract themselves from rhetoric like "They're bringing crime, they're bringing rapists," entirely. It's not as if you need to read the writing of people who agree with those kinds of sentiments to understand them, and there is a point at which arguing or conversing with people who believe it isn't actually helpful.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 19:40
|
|
|
falcon2424 posted:This doesn't fit with the numbers I've seen. I am saying that the left identifies more with "identity politics" than the right, and that anonymity and a lack of moderation increases the chances that identities (in respect to privilege metrics) are not respected. On Something Awful specifically, I would hesitate to call GBS "heavily moderated" anymore, since the direct attempt to decrease the level of moderation, which is why the culture has shifted significantly toward the right.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 19:59
|
|
|
blowfish posted:Yes. And the key thing to understand is that ~HuffPo~ (and same for basically all other internet news sites) isn't a liberal outlet, it's an outlet that makes money off liberals and generating hype because some basically irrelevant dick said a racism is good business even though it unnecessarily magnifies the message. I do also agree that Culture Wars nonsense ("See what got this virtually irrelevant Brady Bunch star banned from her unheard of talk show - wow, racist much?") magnifies the presence of some of the more outright bigoted ideologies, eschewing a more nuanced discussion, but I don't think this is exactly new, or even as new as the internet. It's not like The Daily Mirror didn't exist before then. It's possible the internet has contributed to the increased polarization of the Culture Wars, but I actually think television is a bigger contributor to that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:07
|
|
|
Death Bot posted:At least on the social media that I have seen, it's because the right and alt-right are generally left alone. People imagine tumblr to be a safe space but there's plenty of nazis and other hate groups with their own insular community even there, and any figure with enough followers will regularly get anonymous hate mail. My most followed post on Tumblr by far (mine was always pretty low key and I stopped posting awhile ago) was one in which a Men's Rights Activist took offense and about a dozen more piled on, some of them literal self-identified Nazis. Tumblr is not some leftist utopia (or dystopia, depending on whose side you're on), and it's extremely weird to me that it has this weird reputation for that. It hink it's because the way you can control the content you see and the extensive tagging creates a lot of subcultures, and one of them is, quite naturally, the far left.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:13
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:In a universe where the far right were actually dominant on the internet, this story would be about how it took facebook a few days to ban feminists from your group. You are not describing a dominant group. It's not that the group was dominant i terms of their numbers, to be clear. They were, and I really mean this, maybe 20 people in a group of thousands. It was that they posted literally 100s of times a day, in every thread we posted, such that you could no longer read the content we normally posted. At one point, somebody registered 3-4 accounts to just Longcat.jpg in every discussion until we agreed to engage with points he had pulled from angryharry.com. It was dominant in that it shut down all discussion for a couple of days until the technology for Facebook caught up and I could boot them.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:17
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:
I respect your experience here, but the moment people had to post with their real names in the Feminist Group, things changed. There was one individual posting under a pseudonym who followed a rape victim around demanding that, if she were really raped, she would tell her whole story. This was back when Facebook required a .edu address, and he would not have posted what he did otherwise, as openly stated by him, for fear of retaliation from university administration. There's a discussion to be had about what's too far in terms of "outrage culture," maybe, which could be related to the left turning against itself, vendettas, doxxing, and the like, but having your identity tied to what your write does make a lot of people adjust what they say - at the very least, they aren't flat-out going to drop the N-word if they're students or if they work for a corporation which has a brand to maintain.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:22
|
|
|
falcon2424 posted:The real-name seems less important than an inability to re-register after a ban. I think they're both important and related. "Smooth McGroove" re-registered constantly under fake names. He registered as dead dictators from the Congo, as a fake Islamic terrorist, as a woman who loved The Vagina Monologues and raping teenagers, and those are just the ones I can remember. If he'd had to constantly re-register under his real name: 1) it would have been easy enough to deny his registration and 2) even if he could have re-registered under his real name, he couldn't have constructed false identities specifically designed to sow discord by demanding respect for his "culture." I don't think anonymity is a bad thing, for reference, I just think that one of the costs of anonymity is that people who would otherwise keep more hateful sentiments to themselves feel vindicated in expressing it, and that it makes it very easy to be a concern troll. e: blowfish posted:That's because jobless basement dwellers with lovely opinions and a misplaced sense of priority are the only people with the time and inclination to literally stay up six nights in a row to call someone an idiot on the internet. Well, yes. But if "dominant" means "taking up the bulk of discussion," then, welp...
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:34
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:One group makes the rules and decides who is allowed to post. Another registers, antagonizes the group for a few days before being banned. No one could reasonably cite the presence of trolls on stormfront as evidence that leftists dominate online, it's the same here. Trolls on Stormfront shutting down discussion is not exactly a common thing, though. Any niche group contains infiltrators and people trying to lock out conversation via subterfuge or spam, but it is considerably easier to execute in circumstances in which the evasion of bigotry is the objective of the community. blowfish posted:ok i'll just write two bots to simultaneously poo poo out 500 pro minority posts per second on stormfront extolling the virtues of the urban black muslim gay single mom and 500 posts per second in your feminist facebook group about how all feminists are ugly unwashed butch lesbos with an overabundance of body hair and/or beta cucks in need of a good redpilling. that way i dominate both the left and right wing discussion The former is not commonplace; the latter, even with your hyperbole, is.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:50
|
|
|
blowfish posted:So you're essentially saying that there are less liberals who can be bothered to go on a 72 hour mtn dew and cheeto powered shitposting spree in their mom's basement than there are right wingers who can be bothered to go on a 72 hour mtn dew and cheeto powered shitposting spree in their mom's basement. There are shitposting cheeto masters on both sides, but slurs are considerably easier to post and more effective at drowning out conversation and driving away users, and infiltration and distracting in-fighting is easier to bring about when there is nuance to engage with. There is very little nuance on Stormfront (how can you hijack a conversation on white supremacy, really?).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 21:08
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:This is the crux of it, really. The truth is that center-left liberalism is by far the dominant social viewpoint on the internet, much like everywhere else. Far-right hysteria feels dominant because it's antagonistic to the norm. If the far right were really so dominant, we wouldn't bother talking about it, it would be normal. I think we're into a semantics debate about what "dominant" means, maybe. I'd say soft center liberalism is definitely the prevailing viewpoint in terms of subscribers, so to speak, but that far right ideology is the loudest and can dominate discourse. It is, I think, possible to have a group with both anonymity and relatively little administrative content management that allows for a far-right oriented conversation to flourish, while I do not think the same is true of the left.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 21:22
|
|
|
falcon2424 posted:
We have already discussed Tumblr, but is it your contention that Twitter is a vehicle for the far left, or that center left liberal discourse dominates Twitter?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
I don't think it's about politeness at all. There are always going to be people who prefer to yell bumper sticker slogans at each other and high five their ideological cohorts than have an actual discussion. The issue is that actually, really believed viewpoints that espouse "Get back in the kitchen" sort of mentality lend themselves fairly easily to one-liners and will more effectively evacuate other online posters than anything else. There's a reason that the only thing most people know about LambdaMOO is Mr. Bungle's interference, and it's because one person managed to essentially shut down the community until anyone could figure out what to do with him.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 21:50
|
|
|
falcon2424 posted:
I think because many of the assertions that the far-right does not dominate rely on the assertion that the far left is equally dominant in derailing discussion (and a natural assumption, if things trend toward centrist liberalism, is that both extremes would involve vocal minorities who overpower conversation, an assumption I don't think bares out, for the reasons already stated).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 22:23
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:This is also true of news sourced from "left wing" media, as well as "center" media. Really, people - regardless of their ideological bent - should just post their sources if they're going to take an argument virtually verbatim from another site. Yeah, like even if it has been posted by people you trust only to post reliable sources, figuring out the actual background behind those single images with a chart. People like sharing them because they illustrate something clearly, but there's a methodology behind each and every one, which is either going to make you doubt it because of potential confounding factors, or make you understand it better when you find how its creators have controlled for confounding factors. It's not just where numbers come from, it's how they were obtained, how they might interact with other numbers, where they might be properly used and where it might not make sense to use them. If somebody is sharing a meme with numbers, my first step is to check Snopes. If it's marked as false, I can usually look through their own documentation for verification. If it's marked as true (or it's not on Snopes), then you go to the source of the info and form your own conclusions.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
"Kill all white people" is very obviously a troll, but I admit that there are people who misunderstand it for social cue reasons, which is fine, but that there are also people who will respond and demonstrate exactly what their level of ignorance is regarding race and privilege, which is honestly useful in determining how to engage with them. Either way, I think white people should stop saying it entirely, but that if a person of color says it in response to posting an article about racism, then white people should grow the gently caress up and shut their goddamn mouths unless its to offer support.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2016 01:43
|
|
|
Kilano posted:I mean this topic does a great job explaining why the far-right is so dominant on the internet. This makes sense to me up to the point where people are self-obsessed adolescents and I legitimately do not understand how it extends beyond that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2016 01:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:05 |
|
|
Kilano posted:You don't understand how white teenage boys are going to rebel against a liberal message that tells them they should die? I don't understand how they don't grow out of that rebellion.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2016 01:57
|
|