Mediaboss Marketing

If youve gotten into a fight with a faceless twitter user, or been on certain sub-reddits, you might be familiar with being called a cuck. Short for cuckold, the slang term has become one of the American alt-rights favorite insult used to emasculate men perceived to be weak or being taken advantage of, in an attempt to shame them towards their point of view, or better yet, shut them up. If you look at the core fears of Trump supporters, its clear no one is more terrified of being a cuck than the alt-right.

Where did cuck come from? Cuckold is a derogatory term for a man whose wife or girlfriend sleeps with another man, originating from a Middle English poem written sometime between 1189 and 1296, entitled, The Owl and the Nightingale. The word is a derivative of the French term for the cuckoo, a bird which lays its eggs in other birds nests, leaving others to raise its offspring.

Shakespeare was a big fan of the term, and used it frequently in many of his most famous plays. The term made a comeback in the mid-2000s amongst the BDSM community, but was co-opted by 4chan users during the infamous and nauseating GamerGate, shortened to rhyme with a more visceral obscenity, and injected into internet discourse.

In short, cuck is a humiliating term. Michael Adams, a linguistics professor at Indiana University, explains how its different than other emasculating insults. Cuck stays in the masculine sphere, but it says youre an unnatural man, someone who cant stand for himselfinadequate, unable to hold on to whats his. To be a cuck is to be taken advantage of and made to look weak or foolish.

Unsurprisingly, users on the Donald Trump sub-reddit, r/The_Donald, adopted the term to describe their political opponents and those who like watching the interests of others surpass the interests of their country. The interests of the American nation were predictably tied most closely with those of white people and men. The word was tweeted 63,000 times on November 6, having risen steadily during the election cycle. Thomas Middleditch and Kumail Nanjiani of Silicon Valley were harassed by two men in a bar and called cucks after the inauguration.

So whos a cuck? Are you a feminist? Youre a cuck. How about if youre in favor of LGBTQ+ rights? Youre a cuck. Do you support movements like Black Lives Matter and others striving to eliminate racial disparities? Definitely a cuck. Do you acknowledge differences in privileges between different identities? Oh my goodness, even cuck-ier! Did you vote for Hillary Clinton, are a democrat, support immigration, and/or believe in climate change? Then on all charges you are a cuck.

The alt-rights perception of all of these alignments and beliefs as signs of weakness clearly illustrates exactly what they are most afraid of. They feel threatened, they feel cheated, and they feel taken advantage of. They feel like a bunch of cucks.

The opposition towards feminism is a fairly transparent retaliation against the notion of women having any bodily autonomy. Many men may feel they can only have women if theyre able to control or own them. Alt-right demagogue Milo Yiannopoulos has stated that men whose girlfriends are on birth control are cucks, implying women on birth control are undoubtedly sleeping around or cheating on their partners, an absurd myth built on a hatred for womens sexual independence, but one which plays directly into the fears of many in the alt-right.

No doubt, many alt-right men know the only way they could ever keep a girlfriend is if she couldnt get away, and are deeply distrustful and fearful of the women in their lives. They think women are going to take advantage of them and literally make them cuckolds. Calling feminist men cucks is a projection of the alt-rights own fragile sense of their masculine identity.

Those who hate the so-called experts in Washington or the scientific community are clearly lashing out because they resent the idea of someone being more intelligent than them. Rather than accept an inevitable fact of life, which is that there is always going to be someone who knows more about something than somebody else, the alt-right shuts their ears and scream. The men and women who profit from the denial of climate change cheer them on.

A rejection of LGBTQ+ rights is another symptom of the alt-rights own insecurity. The integration of new identities and expressions of gender threaten hierarchical power structures maintained by established roles. Men are supposed to be the free-roaming breadwinners and women are there to take care of them and push out kids. Gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, and non-binary people upset such an uneven system which benefits straight men. The acceptance of gay men in particular threatens the uniformity of a patriarchy by introducing differing definitions of manhood, thereby breaking down the sharp gap between whats masculine (greater) and feminine (weaker). The alt-right fears such social changes will make them weak. Sad!

Similarly, immigrants and POC represent threats to the privileges white men continue to enjoy in America. The alt-right claim their opposition to the immigration of POC stems from a desire to preserve white nationhood and culture, and while these ideas are already a reflection of a twisted racial philosophy, theres a deeper reasoning behind them.

Theyre scared theyre being erased, frightened of losing their stronghold on American culture, and insecure in the knowledge that if the power structures which benefit them did not exist, many of them would not be successful. They itch at the idea of inter-marriage because they see it as a threat, their xenophobia intersecting with their desire to trap and keep women. The alt-right fears the inclusion of new cultures into the American life because theyre afraid of becoming irrelevant. Theyre horrified by the idea of having to watch while America shares some of the love. Sound familiar?

Jokes aside, I do want to make something clear. Many of these beliefs are spread and perpetuated by manipulative demagogues, glorified trolls with microphones like Alex Jones, Bill OReilly, Sean Hannity, Yiannopoulos, Tomi Lahren, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

These people prey on the disenfranchised with their twisted ideas, and I do not intend to mock those who are actually suffering. I dont want to deny the desperate struggle of workers whose entire lives are built around dying industries like coal, or those who are trapped in destitute poverty and feel they have nowhere else to turn. People who are in desperate situations are easy to trick, and I dont want to make fun of those with serious problems.

These Americans are owed better than the idiotic ideals of the alt-right, and its important to expose the ideology as a twisted, insecure, and weak belief system, perpetuated by small, mean-spirited people and spread by online trolls to poor and working-class white people with nowhere else to turn, intended to seriously harm and destroy the lives of countless women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and everyone in-between.

When all is said and done, the alt-right is a group of bullies, and bullies are classically acting out of a sense of gnawing inadequacy, so the alt-right are figuratively and literally angry children. However, their motives ultimately dont matter. The alt-rights insecurity doesnt excuse them, but does explain why theyre so intolerable, and makes clear just how small and sad these puny little people really are. Dismiss the demagogues and trolls. Youre stronger than them. Dont let those cucks get you down.

See original here:
The Alt Right's Fear of Getting 'Cucked' - Study Breaks

Most Americans met Wednesday nights news that Arizona SenatorJohn McCain was facing a dire diagnosis of brain cancer with shows of respect for the elder statesman and former prisoner of war. But to some on the extreme right, the longtime Republican is a traitorworthy of scorn, presumably because ofhis willingness to work with Democrats, as well as his criticism of President Donald Trump.

The attack on McCain--a war hero who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prisonis faintly reminiscent of the early days of Trumps presidential campaign. During a family values summit in Iowa in the summer of 2015, just a month after hed announced his seemingly quixotic bid for the White House, Trump lashed out at McCain: Hes not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured.

At the time, Trump was angry because McCain had complained that Trump "fired up the crazies" during an anti-immigration rally in Phoenix.

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

Trump has in no way endorsed or encouraged the alt-rights attacks on McCain, which have thus far been limited to the fringes of digital discourse. Trump sent a statement of support for McCain on Wednesday. "Senator John McCain has always been a fighter. Melania and I send our thoughts and prayers to Senator McCain, Cindy, and their entire family. Get well soon," that statement said.

The attacks came regardless.

The last president for McCain will be Trump. Theres some godly justice right there, wrote one user on the Politically Incorrect message board of social media network 4chan, a hothouse of right-wing memes.

Im pretty sure that God is punishing him, wrote another 4chan user. God made it pretty clear that he supports New Right now.

"John McCain = a war mongering, never Trumper whom I dislike," wrote a user on Gab, another social media network popular with the alt-right.

The attacks, for the most part, focused on McCains willingness to work with Democrats during his three decades in the Senate. Those attacks, some of which are too tasteless to mention here, speak to the utter debasement of civic discourse, particularly on the internet.

On Twitter, some called McCain a cuck.

Cuck is short for cuckservative, a portmanteau that combines cuckold and conservative. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained, the imprecation aims to depict conservatives who dont kowtow to ultra-right political views as inept traitors to the conservative base that elected them.

Any death of a genuine eternal cuck should be celebrated. John McCain's passing, assuming he passes, will do our race a lot of good and that's what matters, wrote a user on Reddit.

The vitriol against McCain seems especially striking given his record of military service, as well as his leadership of the Republican Party. The attackers, it would seem, have more fealty to alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog than to the GOPs iconic elephant.

Mike Cernovich, among the most vociferous members of the alt-right, implicitly defended such attacks on McCain with a tweet:

Hes a traitor and a psychopath, one responder said. His interests are of the globalists. They all need to die, faster the better. Then we straighten things out.

See more here:
John McCain Cancer Is 'Godly Justice' for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims - Newsweek

What is the alt-right? Where did it come from? And how has this strange online subculture blossomed into a mainstream political movement with real-world power?

A new book by Angela Nagle, an Irish academic and writer, answers these and many other questions. The book is called Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Its a taxonomy of the alt-right a reactionary political movement whose adherents include white nationalists like Richard Spencer and more influential people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, both of whom serve as key advisers for President Trump and a sweeping survey of the subculture that spawned it.

I reached out to Nagle to talk about the book and what she learned while writing it. She sees the alt-right as a product of a hopelessly cynical age, one defined by skepticism and alienation. On the right, she argues, young men have latched onto a burgeoning counterculture that rejects social taboos around race and gender. On the left, intellectual culture has become increasingly insular, creating space for reactionaries on the right.

The result, she says, is a complete absence of any kind of hopeful inspiring vision of the future. This is the broader sickness, she told me, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

You can read our full conversation below.

How did this book come about?

I started studying online anti-feminist movements seven or eight years ago. At the time, what was interesting to me about them was their countercultural style, and it didnt resemble traditional anti-feminist movements. One of the big themes of the book, really, is the fact that the same ideas can be translated through very different political and aesthetic styles. Its very hard to describe online politics because it doesn't take the same formation as traditional politics, and that was interesting to me. So I started studying it and just naturally found my way into this world.

Is there a Big Bang moment for the alt-right, a cultural event that helped explode it into being?

Trump was the big explosive moment. Obviously there have been reactionary online for many years before Trump, but Trumps campaign was the moment where it all went completely mainstream. Gamergate was very significant in bringing together a whole cross section of people who were antipolitical correctness, but a lot of these people werent necessarily right-wing. They were cultural libertarians or free speech enthusiasts, but there wasnt a lot of political organizing. That changed with Trump. All the anti-PC stuff, the anti-immigration politics, the trolling campaigns Trump boosted all of that into the mainstream.

When someone identifies themselves as alt-right, what are they trying to signal? Or maybe a better way to put it is what are they defining themselves against?

If they're using the term in the strict sense, it says they're against the idea that problems in society are socially constructed or even that most of our experiences are socially constructed. So they would say that gender is not socially constructed but a biological category. They say the same thing about race. They reject the idea that America is founded on abstract principles and instead believe it's a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that it could be no other way.

I always wonder when it comes to stuff like this if its more about a mischievous contrarianism or if they actually believe what theyre propounding.

I think a lot of them start off by trolling and doing the anti-PC thing and resisting what they feel is dogma being shoved down their throats by liberal professors and parents, but where do you go from there? Do you reject all of these principles? There's not much else there in the way of new ideas to replace them, so it's very easy to end up going very far to the right at that point.

Half the time, I cant tell if theyre waging a civilizational battle or a heroic trolling campaign.

At this stage, anyone who thinks theyre doing it for LOLs is either deluding themselves or hiding behind that ironic style in order to avoid being interpreted, because at this point the stakes are actually quite high, and Trump is in the White House, and this movement has spread far beyond the confines of a few obscure message boards.

For a long while, I saw the alt-right as this weird quasi-nihilistic subculture that latched onto politics purely as a tool of disruption and not necessarily as a means to some actual political outcome. But either I was wrong or at some point this movement shape-shifted into something much more serious than that.

Yeah, I think definitely the latter. But there are different components that make up the alt-right; its only recently that theyve melted together. Some of the younger people who got into in the last couple of years just started out trolling and saying outrageous things for its own sake. It was almost like performance art, a kind of game.

Now I would say that it has changed, especially as more extreme and organized elements of the far right have latched onto this movement and, in some ways, helped to legitimize it. I see a rightward drift because the people who thinks it's all funny and transgressive and ironic are bringing people in but then they have no ideas to keep them there because they don't know what they believe in. But the extreme right groups, led by people like Richard Spencer, do know what they believe in and they do have solutions for the problems they identify.

Its basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos around race or culture or gender are bullshit and that theyre poking holes in all of it. Its a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

Can you give me a typical psychological profile of the kind of person drawn into the alt-right movement?

I think it's slightly different depending on where you get drawn in. There are all kinds of characters in this movement that appeal to different people for different reasons. But I suppose the main things that they have in common, and this is why they use the term red pill so much, is that they feel they have stumbled upon this dark truth and that nobody is willing to reckon with or to think about what they have discovered.

And whats that dark truth?

Its basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos around race or culture or gender are bullshit and that theyre poking holes in all of it. Its a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

The people you describe in the book, especially the younger, more online-oriented people, seem to be struggling with a contradiction: They want to be relevant in a culture they claim to hate. Or maybe they just read too much Nietzsche.

Yeah, definitely with those guys, I think they are both participants in and very disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture. Which is why I think its so interesting that a political ideology that is so disgusted by modern libertinism and gender-bending sexuality and porn and everything would find a home in 4chan of all places, because these are people who spent years watching the most horrific and dehumanizing porn you can find on the web, and they all suddenly went right-wing reactionary.

What does that suggest to you about the psychology of the alt-right?

I think it says that their sense of the world gone to hell was actually influenced by their own immersion in the forms of culture that they eventually saw as degenerate and ruined. But if they spent more time in the mainstream culture and in society in general, perhaps they wouldnt have this sense that everything is degenerate and Western civilization is in ruins.

You use the phrase Tumblr left to describe the part of the online left that has made a religion of demonstrating its wokeness. Whats your criticism of this corner of the web?

I think that you cannot take the left out of the picture and make any sense of what's going on, because particularly in these very online younger forms of politics, there was a battle of the subcultures going on online and then it spilled over into campus stuff as that generation of teenagers went to college.

People on the left were annoyed with me because they thought I portrayed a very small subculture on the left as representative of the left in general, but I dont think thats the case. I had to describe the online left accurately as I saw it, and the right was in an absolute state of panic about the fact that they were seeing all of these things happening on college campuses: speakers being shut down, platforms being denied, large groups of people ganging up on dissident voices.

What have your critics on the left got wrong?

I think parts of the left have conflated my attempt to criticize this identity-based internet subculture with all of identity politics, and that's simply not true. Identity politics gave us the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, and so on. It would be absurd to conflate that entire radical history with this small internet subculture.

What I criticized wasnt identity politics in general but a specific version of identity politics that was about performative wokeness, and in particular the reason I didn't like it was because it was very inclined to censor and it was very inclined to gang up on people. I hate that, and I think it deserves to be criticized.

You touch on an argument to which Im increasingly sympathetic, which is that the intellectual culture on the left has become embarrassingly narrow and reactionary in its own way.

I think youre right, and you can see this in the free speech debate. People who are very emotionally heightened about this cannot see why you would want to invite a bad person like Milo Yiannopoulos onto a college campus, because they think why would you bring in someone who's going to say hateful things and make minorities feel intimidated and so on.

But in shutting down its political enemies, the left has also shut down its own internal dissenters, who have always made the left intellectually vibrant. These are the people who keep the ideology from becoming fossilized because they force everyone to constantly rethink things, and these are the very voices that have been shut down. No one on the left wants to discuss taboo subjects anymore. Everyone is shut down for the tiniest of transgressions and anyone who is off message is attacked, and thats a climate in which ideas die.

The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself

We seem to have reached something like peak alt-right, but in the book you suggest that the movement may not have staying power. Why?

Subcultures come and go, and the thing we now call the alt-right probably will go away. Scandals will come up. The movement will splinter into various groups. There will be infighting. But the central ideas they have put on the table will have to be dealt with, and it is very difficult to deal with them when you have such an intellectually stifling culture.

Whatever we call the alt-right now may go away, but something with a different style and the same central ideas will reemerge in its place.

To be perfectly honest, Im not confident our current political culture is capable of challenging these ideas as forcefully as we need them to be challenged.

The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself. Theres this assumption that our ideas are brilliant and beyond question and anyone who questions them can be dismissed as sexist or racist or whatever. Well, thats not good enough, and the taboos have been broken.

Its not enough to say what you are against. We have to specifically say what we are for and defend it. Were in an age of enormous cynicism, and theres a complete absence of any kind of hopeful, inspiring vision of the future. This is the real problem, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

View original post here:
If you want to know how the alt-right upended American politics, read Kill All Normies - Vox

Pixabay.com

Were it not for the 2016 presidential election, I would have thought alt-right was a computer keyboard command. Thanks to the current political climate, I have become acquainted with a group, an ideology, a way of viewing the world that send chills down my spine.

The term alt-right was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, who achieved media prominence after Trump was elected when he held a national conference during which he claimed that Trumps presidency created an opening for greater acceptance of alt-right ideologies.

As with much that I find highly distasteful, I would like to ignore the alt-right. But I do so at my countrys peril. Not long after the 2016 election, I received an email from a Catholic college student who had read my column expressing concern over Steve Bannons appointment as a special adviser to the president. Since then, weve exchanged email regularly, and I attribute my growing concern about the alt-right movement to this young mans heightened awareness of it, especially as it has infiltrated social media, college campuses, and as it has been given a degree of acceptance by some people in power.

If youre like me and newly aware of the alt-right, I provide you this short description of this movement:

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that white identity is under attack by multicultural forces using political correctness and social justice to undermine white people and their civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew establishment conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value. (Excerpted from the Southern Poverty Law Centers website.)

Of interest to Catholics, some who describe themselves as alt-right support Catholic traditionalism, defined as a return to Catholicism before the reforms of Vatican II. But even more important for all Christians is to be aware of the racism, nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism expressed by many who identify as part of this movement. Their anti-immigrant stance is also in direct opposition to our Catholic emphasis on welcoming and supporting immigrants.

While many readers of this column are not likely to be exposed to the despicable actions of Internet trolls, we cannot bury our heads in the sand. People are being victimized and divisions are growing more pronounced as a result of the undercurrent of hatred, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry which has grown more intenseand seemingly more acceptableover the last two years.

President Trumps recent controversial re-tweet of a doctored video of him beating up CNN was revealed to be originally created by a Reddit user who had posted many racist, anti-Semitic, and white nationalist sentiments. This Trump tweet not only suggests violence against the media, but gives a level of respectability to those who traffic in despicable slurs.

Many who voted for President Trump are quick to refute the suggestion that they are racists, nationalists, or xenophobes. And I take them at their word. They had other reasons to choose this candidate. However, its incumbent on those who supported a Trump presidency for pro-life and other reasons to unite and renounce the racism, hate crimes, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, and anti-immigrant rhetoric that has found its way into the American lexicon.

This is not about politics. Our Catholic faith is not aligned with any one political party. Indeed, the teachings of the Catholic Church transcend political affiliation. I do not presume to argue that Catholic teaching is more fully represented on one or the other side of the aisle. I believe, however, that our common beliefs will help us transcend our political differences. And we can best find common ground when we agree to the basic principle that all people are created in Gods image and have intrinsic value.

The universal Church is founded upon multi-culturalism and our respect for all races, genders, and creeds. We must resist white nationalism, whether it is generated from the underworld of the Internet, within speeches by prominent leaders, or through government policies directed at vulnerable populations. The Alt-right will not go away unless all of us stand up against hatred that is based upon race, religion, and gender. We must defend our country against those who espouse ideologies contrary to our most deeply held beliefs as Christians and Americans.

Special to Patheos fromMary Hood Hart.

Here is the original post:
What Should Catholics Think of the Alt-Right? - Patheos (blog)

Not surprisingly, the paper found that "Computational propaganda flourished during the 2016 US Presidential Election." Tell us Americans that and we'll remind you that bears make fecal deposits in the woods. We know, we knew, we saw it coming a mile away (but had no idea how to stop it). The same was true during the 2016 UK Brexit referendum, where political bots played a strategic role in shaping Twitter conversations and keeping pro-Brexit hashtags dominant.

The paper noted these incidents, and a few more. It found that automated posting accounts, combined with fake news and troll armies and harassment campaigns, have re-imagined the art and practice of authoritarian soft power in the 21st century.

The researchers wrote that Facebook plays a critical role in grooming young minds with political ideology because companies "such as Facebook, are effectively monopoly platforms for public life."

Add Facebook advertising to the computational propaganda mix, and you've got a mind-blowing toolset for emotionally manipulating people -- without their knowledge -- into believing, saying, and fighting for whatever you want.

The Oxford paper concluded that "Computational propaganda is now one of the most powerful tools against democracy."

One thing we've learned in the past few years is that the core messages of political propaganda on social media are driven by humans. Their job is to cover up for people in power, motivate and empower harassment, and make us too discouraged to do anything about their wrongdoings. In case you're wondering, the people at the bottom of the propaganda chain know exactly what they're doing.

Some love their jobs, others do not. In 2015, one of Russia's professional trolls went to press detailing her role in making people think the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was at the hands of his own friends, rather than by government hitmen, as is widely suspected. "I was so upset that I almost gave myself away," Lyudmila Savchuk said to press.

The paid pro-government trolls work in rooms of 20; it was reported in 2015 that their numbers are in the thousands, making posts and comments all day, every day. Upon leaving, Savchuk said her goal of going to press with documentation, including video, was to get it closed down," she told The Telegraph. "These people are using propaganda to destroy objectivity and make people doubt the motives of any civil protest. Worst of all, they're doing it by pretending to be us, the citizens of Russia."

Another ex-propaganda troll, Marat Burkkhard, was assigned to spreading racist memes about public figures like President Obama. It's enough to make one wonder more about America's rise in open racism online. "The most unpleasant was when we had to humiliate Obama, comparing him with a monkey, using words like darkie, insulting the president of a big country," he said.

"I wrote it, I had to." Saying he quit for his own sanity, he added, "if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul." He also noted that in his particular propaganda factory, his office seemed split 50-50 in how everyone felt about what they were doing: half were racist patriots, and the rest were just in it for the money.

That was all before the US election, and what became known as Trump team's super-obvious social media influence campaigns.

The new golden age of propaganda began much earlier than Brexit or 2016's American presidential disaster. Last year, Leo Benedictus revealed that troll political armies could be had for the right price in a range of countries that included Russia, Israel, Ukraine, UK, North Korea, South Korea, and Turkey. He wrote, "Long before Donald Trump met Twitter, Russia was famous for its troll factories outside Russia, anyway." He explained:

Okay, so we get that troll armies and their bots do propaganda stuff to make politicians look bad. But what happens when they go after regular people? Or, like in the US now, end up with an entire resistance movement?

We get a clear picture by looking at what Russia's government did to its resistance during the country's 2011-2012 elections for president and Duma (its lower house of parliament). Just a couple of months before this week's Oxford paper came out, a more instructive study on social media propaganda was published, called Communication power struggles on social media: A case study of the 201112 Russian protests.

When people started to mobilize and place calls to action on social media and blogs, Putin's patriotic hackers DDoS'd every site possible, including LiveJournal, where the government was already running its posting and commenting campaigns. Those they couldn't disable with traffic overload, like Twitter, they attacked with other means.

How? By manipulating people's perceptions and emotions about the resistance, according to the paper. "Our analysis suggests that, in particular, the Russian government successfully used Twitter to affect perceptions of the oppositional movement's success and legitimacy," the researchers wrote.

This included "diminishing and discrediting the resistance," (like insisting on low turnout numbers for protests) but also by "exaggerating, enthusing, and claiming broad public support" for pro-government ... well, everything. They also elevated -- through creating an appearance of popularity -- certain players to be spokespeople for the propaganda topics of the day.

Finally, they created a culture of fear that encouraged people to self-censor.

The researchers noted how support began on Twitter for anti-corruption and anti-Putin resistance in December 2011, but that widespread delegitimization for the movement (as well as belittling), and visibility of pro-Putin messages shifted that conversation by January 2012. In addition, "Critical voices were discredited and political elites were represented as legitimate."

The Russian regime's anti-resistance messaging made it seem "indisputable that Putin enjoyed broad support among Russians," and so "the protest movement began to dissolve quickly." The paper said:

Our analysis highlights that the growing feeling of futility and disillusionment affecting the oppositional movement more broadly was clearly reflected on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. With the political discourse on Twitter beginning to noticeably shift in favor of the Putin supporters, oppositionally minded people on Twitter may have started to slide into a so-called "spiral of silence".

They perceived their political view to be in a shrinking minority, finding insufficient resonance in the discourse on Twitter, and gradually stopped to speak up, turning rather inward in growing self-doubts and disillusion.

They also distributed their messages well, reaching tons of people -- which is social media advertising's core promise, we should note. I think now we're starting to see exactly why Facebook's emotional manipulation activities are a threat to democracy in line with the Oxford study's conclusion about computational propaganda.

In the 2011 example, the Russian government, with all its resources, was far more effective at influencing people on Twitter than those who dared question the people in power.

In conclusion, the researchers wrote:

In the end, no matter how much "real" support Putin had, our analysis of the political discourse suggests that the perceived support had a real effect on the opposition and general public on Twitter. This shows that regardless of the promises that new digital technologies hold in terms of empowerment of marginalized or weaker (political) actors, these technologies are still part of the overall system of powerin particular, uneven resource distributionsand may therefore still be utilized by governments in their favor.

In other words, our study empirically confirms that indeed "whoever has enough money, including political leaders, will have a better chance of operating the switch in its favour.

It looks like a blueprint for what's happening on American Twitter day and night right now. Though compared to Russia's successful 2011 resistance suppression, Trump's trolls and botmasters are pretty bad at winning hearts and minds. Maybe that's partly why social media propaganda is looking likely to get folded into the Mueller probe.

In any case, the new golden age of propaganda is here. The companies whose structures it thrives on, in all its hideousness and viciousness, are loath to change their business models to stop it. The illness is not our fault, though that's what they hope to convince us of, in this, our new futuristic system of oppression.

Just don't let the fact that it looks like Idiocracy make you take it any less seriously.

Image: OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP/Getty Images (Lyudmila Savchuk)

See more here:
How hateful alt-right trolls hijacked your timeline - Engadget - Engadget