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One of the most dizzying effects of the current culture war is the way language is quickly co-opted and subverted toward directly opposed purposes. Witness, for example, the fate of fake news. In the days following the election there was a rightful investigation into the ways Facebooks algorithms created self-reinforcing echo chambers of fictional stories passed around as news. The furor over this, though, was quickly claimed by the Trump administration, which repurposed the term fake news to describe any factual reporting that was inconvenient for them.

This is an old trend online: The same has been done repeatedly over the years, as alt-right trolls repurpose the language of progressivestrigger warning, safe space, and so ontoward their misogynistic, white-nationalist ends. Just last week, while still nursing his grievous head injury, alt-right frontispiece Richard Spencer used the phrase triggered to troll Aziz Ansari, after which he spent the remainder of the evening getting dunked on by everybody with a Twitter account. Its hard to troll while the whole world is still cackling at you for getting sucker-punched.

Anyway, this new Chrome extension flips that exact language back around again, rendering the internet into a safe space for MAGA kids. Called Alt-Space, it scans pages for terms that might trigger a troll into shitpostingLGBTQA, social justice, reproductive rights, climate change, etc.and issues a warning after the page is loaded, allowing the sensitive troll to decide whether or not to engage with the questionable content. Choose to proceed on and read the page, or click go elsewhere to be well, sent elsewhere. (Its a Rick Astley video.)

It is not the most trenchant piece of cultural critique, and its hard to say how many times you can reclaim a terms meaning before youve watered it down to nothing. On the other hand, we do need these terms to mean something. A delineation like fake news was once useful to identify a category of deliberate misinformation, but when applied to CNN or The New York Times it turns into a maddening exercise in semantics. At this point it feels almost trite to talk about, but if that term is gone, how else will we describe alternative facts?

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Screenshot: Alt-Space - A.V. Club

A website offering a hefty reward for the identity of a man who punched a US alt-right leader has been suspended from Twitter.

WeSearchr, a crowdfunding site relating to alt-right interests, is offering US$4,500 for the identity of a man who struck controversial white nationalist Richard Spencer at a protest rally on inauguration day.

Twitter has not given any reason for the suspension or communicated with us at all in any way, WeSearchr Co-Founder Pax Dickinson said in an email to RT.

We have suspicions about why we were suspended but Twitter has refused to tell us the reason or issue any statement on this at all, said Dickinson. Theres no sign of it being reversed, but only because there has been NO communication from Twitter at all.

READ MORE: Alt-right leader sucker punched by masked man during DC protest rally (VIDEO)

Prior to its Twitter suspension, WeSearchr had raised a few thousand dollars towards a bounty to identify the person who punched Spencer whom the site identifies as a conservative, pro-Trump activist.

Speaking to RT, Dickinson alleged the Twitter ban happened after left-wing anarchists complained to the social network.

Twitter, however, defended its decision to suspend the account in a recent statement to We Are Change saying violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct and multiple account abuse were prohibited on its site.

RT reached out to Twitter but have yet to receive a response.

WeSearchr Co-Founder Charles Johnson was banned from Twitter in 2015 after asking for donations to help take out DeRay McKesson, a civil rights activist who had been protesting police shootings in Baltimore and Ferguson.

Johnson defended his actions, saying Twitter didnt have a problem with people using their service to coordinate riots but they did have a problem with his kind of journalism.

Originally posted here:

Twitter suspends 'alt-right' WeSearchr on back of dubious bounty ... - RT

On election night at Donald Trump's victory party, a jubilant Milo Yiannopoulos paraded through the press section with a beer in one hand, an ice cream bar in the other, and a videographer in tow. Turning to face the camera, he declared that Breitbart News is an influential, now-mainstream publication.

It was an odd boast about a website described in August by former chairman Stephen K. Bannon as the platform for the alt-right a site whose influence grew out of a proud and aggressive rejection of the mainstream. Yiannopoulos probably just meant that Breitbart's many critics will have a hard time dismissing the site after Trump's win. Yet Breitbart has, in fact, looked increasingly mainstream since Election Day.

Besides Bannon, now a senior White House adviser, two other Breitbart staffers will reportedly jointhe Trump administration in precisely the kind of incestuous merging of media, journalism and politics that former Breitbart editor Larry O'Connor has said the site is supposedly against.

Meanwhile, Breitbart has made several recent hires from decidedly mainstream news outlets: John Carney from the Wall Street Journal, Sam Chi from RealClearPolitics and Kristina Wong from the Hill. Their mainstreamitis is bound to infect the Breitbart newsroom.

And Yiannopoulos, Breitbart's best-known writer and provocateur, appears to be toning things down as he works on a book for which he reportedly received a $250,000 advance. Yiannopoulos bragged to the Hollywood Reporter in December that he met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions.

I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building, but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money, he said.

Simon & Schuster offered a very different account of the meeting in a letter sent Monday toother authors in the publisher's stable, some of whom had protestedthe decision to sign Yiannopoulos, who was permanently banned from Twitterin the summer. According to Simon & Schuster chief executive Carolyn Reidy, Yiannopoulos actually said that he was interested in writing a book that would be a substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech.

Reidy added thatSimon & Schuster will not publish hate speech and that Yiannopoulos will have to adhere to the publisher's standards.The book's title, Dangerous, is a censored version of Yiannopoulos's self-applied moniker, dangerous f----t.

This book, Yiannopoulos told the Hollywood Reporter, is the moment Milo goes mainstream.

There's that word again. Yiannopoulos and Breitbart are, of course, free to capitalize on their support of Trump's successful campaign and to try to broaden their audience. But if they want to go mainstream, they risk alienating readers who were drawn to the website because it seemed to be by and for outsiders.

This is the same conundrum that confronts indie bands and craft beer makers get too popular, and you might lose your street cred.

I asked Breitbart's Washington editor, Matt Boyle, whether he is concerned about maintaining the site's rebellious brand. He didn't respond.

If Boyle and his colleagues aren't thinking about the ramifications of all this mainstreaming, they should be. The hard-right readers who view it as their platform might use a different term: selling out.

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How Breitbart could lose its alt-right street cred - Washington Post