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Read the major U.S. newspapers, or explicitly left-wing publications, and you will easily find stories about attacks by whites on blacksnot to mention instances of casual harassment. Nor need one journey very far into the depths of alt-right websites to find compilations of violence perpetrated on whites by blacks. Both sets of outlets, writes Wilfred Reilly, create an impression that America is living in a time of heightened racial tensionsan impression utterly belied by the facts. Indeed, Asian Americans are the only racial group more likely to be attacked by a member of a different race than by one of their own.

But then there is the case of the Jews, who are, in Reillys words, another small, successful group who are subjected to interracial attacks with disproportionate frequencyand these are not limited to the most publicized incidents:

New York City police have cited at least eight anti-Semitic incidents between December 13 and December 31 of the past year. In one case, an African-American woman, Tiffany Harriswho was arraigned on December 28 for slapping and cursing at three ultra-Orthodox women in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heightswas charged again, on December 30, for punching a Jewish woman in the face in front of her two young children. Notably, Harris was released from custody without paying bail in either case, courtesy of bail reform laws championed by current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

New York does not appear to be an extreme outlier. It would be virtually impossible to determine how many attacks against Jews have been subsumed into the white category of interracial crime statistics and thus estimate the percentage of all crime directed specifically at them. It definitely can be said, however, that American Jewswho, with an estimated population of 6,829,000, represent 1.7 percent of the total U.S. populationwere the targets of at least 11.7 percent of all U.S. hate crimes (835 out of 7,120) and almost 60 percent of hate crimes motivated by the victims religion (835 out of 1,419) in 2018.

By contrast, American Muslims, with a population very similar in size to that of Jews, reported only 188 total hate crimes in 2018, while blacks experienced slightly more than twice as many hate crimes as those against Jews (1,943) despite having a population more than six times as large. As with Asian Americans, Jews are attacked by members of multiple ethnic groups.

[In short], the presentation of interracial crime by the center-left mainstream media dominant in the United States is more than a bit dishonest. . . . More broadly, entire storylines that characterize American criminal justice, such as the epidemic of diverse and minority-generated violence against Asian Americans and Jews, are frequently missing from the national headlines.

The rest is here:
The Truth about Attacks on Jews, and the Widespread Falsehoods about Crime and Race - Mosaic

Trigger warning. I exist, I love Trump, tells me a girl standing in front of an overtly fake image of the 2016 US election victory results with the grainy statement try to impeach this. The young girl is wearing a Trump sweatshirt while laughing and making cute funny faces, like in one of those old-days Snapchat videos with flower crowns.

Similarly to what has just recently happened in Great Britain, the approaching presidential elections in the US have produced a new flood of more or less truthful messages on TikTok, where it has become very common to encounter pro-Trump and alt-right posts. Political content on social media is already an established reality, constituting the most lucrative aspect of political communication.

Starting with Obamathe first social-media Presidentand moving on to Trump, the online communication of politics has experienced a nuanced evolution, finding in targeted messages its privileged weapon for consensus. While Trump himself still sticks to more traditional channels, TikTok has recently attracted a small number of politicians from across the world, who stiffly try to adapt and modulate their own agenda according to these new semantic codes, sharing videos of them drinking fruit juice (dont ask), doing awkward little dances or shaking hands with law enforcement to music. They are not afraid of making a fool of themselves as long as the public reacts.

Although it may seem like a natural evolution within the life cycles of every new social platform, I believe this may represent a particular alarming phenomenon. TikTok is especially popular among teenagersabout 60 per cent of users are between 16 and 24 years old, but an important segment is even youngera significant pool of emerging eligible voters who are still developing their political identity and are particularly reactive to visual and emotional messages. The decision to address this specific audience should not be considered fortuitous or naive, as it responds to a broader strategy carried on by the far-right for years, aimed at breeding a new generation of voters and militants.

As other major social platforms slowly initiated removing accounts promoting violence and hate speech, a considerable number of these users migrated to TikTok, bringing with them a highly defined and recognizable visual language that has found great success among the youngest users of the app. Most of the content referable to the alt-right is actually being produced by them. Often contextualised as jokes, the posts stand out for the aggressiveness of their message, generally xenophobic and reactionary.

Digital strategists say the popularity of Trump videos reflects the way TikToks algorithm works by rewarding content that generates strong reactions and great engagement. The popularity of specific content could then also respond to a need for visibility. The production and sharing of these posts occurs within a very heterogeneous but demographically consistent audience, who is generally starting to form its own opinion on complex and delicate issues.

Nevertheless, this kind of content is framed in a familiar and entertaining formatconsuming political messages alongside cringe-worthy choreographies. The platforms infrastructure actively promotes random collaboration among users by means of duets, creating a meme-chain in which each message can get endlessly reworked and distorted. As pointed by Joshua Citarella, catchy aesthetics can transmit ideas that make you laugh first and radicalise later. In the flow of hectic and erratic content, a message can get lost in a glimpse, as well as make inroads for increasingly targeted messages.

Over the last year, TikTok has become the go-to app for political activism for gen Z. The spike of political videos has been observed as an important part of the development of the platform, which has represented for a long time a safe space for many marginalised groups and subcultures. A new ecosystem in which they began building new linguistic and identity tools.

Going back to the analysis of Citarella, as digital cultural nichification produces highly polarised communities, most gen Zers are first exposed to right-wing propaganda as children, building over time a type of meme-literacy that lacks equally strong alternative references. Getting caught in this rabbit hole filled with MAGA hats, smiling girls-next-door telling women to go back to the kitchen and stock up on rifles, one may have the alarming impression that gen Z is progressively embracing conservative values.

In times of declining wealth, climate crisis and increasingly unsettling working and living conditions, irony then becomes a political strategy. Nevertheless, it is hard to distinguish how much awareness and conviction lies behind these posts, or if it just is an endless and shallow identity play.

The internet cannot be neutral and will never beand this is part of its potential and power. In October, TikTok stated the decision to ban paid political ads on the platforms, in line with its mission to inspire creativity and build joy. However, censorship and de-platforming have been proved not to be effective long-term solutions to the spread of hate speech, misinformation and propaganda. The nature of the platform has some unexpressed potential that is not ours to develop or foster. Political content is organically being produced and shared by many different users, often in an original and positive way. Dear boomers, millennials or whatever, lets go back to our Twitter rant and leave TikTok alone.

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Why are conservative values winning over gen Zers on TikTok? - Screen Shot

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Years ago, the birth of a meme was cause for celebration. So when Matt Furies character Pepe first became famous online, it seemed like a good thing. The easygoing cartoon frog was a shorthand for relatable satisfaction or sadness, particularly on the chaotic message board 4chan. And when a friend urged Furie to crack down on copycat Pepes, he didnt see the need. This was, after all, the age where everything was a remix.

But the new documentary Feels Good Man, directed by Arthur Jones, explains the fallout of his decision. In the years that follow, Furie watches his creation get co-opted by white supremacists. He spends months in legal battles with conspiracy theorists and bigots. He agrees to destroy thousands of dollars of Pepe merchandise, afraid it will be worn by neo-Nazis. He pleads with the Anti-Defamation League to remove Pepe from its hate symbol database, then leaves its offices defeated. Its heartbreaking to watch. To a few viewers, that heartbreak will be the point because some of Pepes biggest fans love to watch people suffer.

Feels Good Man is about the rise, fall, and slow recuperation of Pepe the Frog. But its also about the death of a more playful but far too exploitable era of internet culture and about the birth of whatever comes next.

The overall Pepe saga is fairly well-known, but Feels Good Man explores it through a combination of individual biography and cultural analysis. The film is built around Furie and spends a lot of time discussing his comic Boys Club, where Pepe originated. Its artistically ambitious, including some very effective animated segments featuring Pepe and other Furie characters. But it also draws from a range of other sources, including journalists, fellow artists, and a 4chan micro-celebrity.

Pepes story starts in the mid-00s, when artist Matt Furie began posting his comic Boys Club to MySpace. The canonical Pepe was a guileless slacker who hung out with three other anthropomorphic animals, all loosely inspired by Furie and his friends. (Furie also just loves drawing frogs, the film notes.) But the characters simple design meant that you could adapt him for basically any art style or topic. As one internet analyst explains, there are lots of clusters of memes across the internet and there tends to be a Pepe variant in every one.

Pepe was becoming part of the language of the internet. Inevitably, though, that led the frog to some dark places especially in the hands of nihilistic online trolls. 4chan users celebrated mass shootings with his image. When mainstream female celebrities started sharing Pepes, the deeply misogynist site tried to reclaim him with offensive Nazi variations, which were quickly adopted by actual Nazis. A Trump-themed Pepe was retweeted by Trump himself, boosting the candidates support among some of the worst people on the web.

And as Pepes image changed, Furie tried to regain control of his creation. He launched a campaign to draw positive Pepes, canonically killed the character off out of sheer frustration, and began filing suits against right-wing figures who sold Pepe merchandise, including Infowars founder Alex Jones and the author of a xenophobic childrens book. The film follows all of it along with a few tangential topics like Pepecash, a cryptocurrency based around rare Pepe trading cards.

Its hard to imagine a more perfect microcosm of recent internet history than Furies frog. Pepe is the Altamont of memes: a symbol of a countercultures latent flaws curdling into something hideous. In the mid-00s and early 10s, social media helped new artists broadcast their work. 4chan exported lolcats and Rickrolling and the loosely anti-authoritarian Anonymous movement. The internets enemies were government or corporate censors and other stodgy gatekeepers.

But the dark side was always there, too. I used to believe that the internet used to be fun, wrote Whitney Phillips, author of a canonical book on trolling, in an essay last year. The fun just required ignoring all the ugliness. There was a lot I blinked at and ignored then, a lot I made excuses for then, a lot I laughed at then that simply wasnt funny. In some places, nihilism won. 4chans Anonymous movement was supplanted by the anti-feminist Gamergate campaign, the misogynist incel ideology, and the white nationalist alt-right. And the constant creative remixing of ubiquitous memes like Pepe turned them into collateral damage.

Even so, Furie comes off in Feels Good Man as a thoughtful (if confessedly naive) avatar of a genuinely more optimistic online era. While that earns him derision from some of the documentarys participants, including one 4chan user and a Republican strategist, the filmmakers emphasize the cool stuff that has come out of Pepes internet fandom and the charm of his original incarnation in Boys Club.

The filmmakers never suggest that we can go back to that world. Even so, Feels Good Man ends on a note of hope: in 2019, Pepe evolves into something completely new and becomes a symbol of protest in Hong Kong. Its still a serious political use of the meme but he represents good instead of evil.

Many documentaries become less interesting the more you already know about the subject. But Feels Good Man presents a heavily covered story in a thoughtful and vivid way. Even its standard talking-head segments are peppered with compelling absurdities: a self-described chaos magician laying out how memes become reality, a 4channer proudly guiding viewers through his dingy bedrooms utter squalor.

And if you have spent a long time immersed in online culture and media, Feels Good Man has a unique and uncomfortable appeal. The film never demonizes the internet or even lays out an explicit ideological statement. But its still a subtle, cutting rebuke of an old strain of internet idealism the kind that unconditionally celebrated the weird chaos of a cultural petri dish, until it started breeding monsters.

Feels bittersweet, man.

Feels Good Man is seeking distribution, but its perfect for a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon.

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Pepe the Frog died, and part of the internet died with him - The Verge

One would think we all would have had enough of fake news by now, but to hear some purveyors tell it, the need for it has grown along with the fake news, and making more of it is urgent if we are to save America and the world.

You have heard about fake news disseminated by the right, the alt-right, the Russians and supporters of President Donald Trump. This includes the contention that it was the Democrats who colluded with the Russians in 2016 to throw the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, as well as the story, embraced by Trump, that Ukraine was in cahoots with Democrats to hurt him. That these seem to be pure projection does not keep them from serving as life rafts for those who want to protect the president at all costs.

Facebook, where many Americans get their news, has been turned into one vector for that sort of conspiratorial bushwa, which used to take longer to enter peoples heads and affected fewer souls. Naturally, it and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have been blamed by Democrats from Clinton to Bernie Sanders.

But if you thought this is the kind of malarkey to reach for a Joe Biden word we should expect from modern Republicans only, take a look at a Bloomberg news article from Nov. 25, The Lefts Plan to Slip Vote-Swaying News Into Facebook Feeds.

In this case, it is the Democrats more than the left per se, unless you subscribe to the belief that they are synonymous. Here, it is principally Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old D.C.-based Democratic strategist who is rolling out fake local news sites.

Belying her years, McGowan already served as the digital producer for President Barack Obamas 2012 re-election campaign, then directed digital advertising in 2016 for Priorities USA Action, the biggest Democratic Super PAC. In 2017, she launched the digital firm Acronym, a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit, with Michael Dubin, the wealthy founder of Dollar Shave Club. Together, they have raised tens of millions of dollars for digital ad campaigns supporting Democrats.

Now, and quite openly, McGowan has taken $25 million in donations from wealthy liberals to create a for-profit media company, Courier Newsroom, which has created what it calls digital newspapers, with reporters and editors, in key swing states such as Virginias The Dogwood and Arizonas The Copper Courier in order to deliver the facts favorable to Democrats.

In late December, Courier launched UpNorthNews in Wisconsin Wisconsins new digital newspaper with none of the lazy false equivalency that plagues so much of todays media, its editor said.

McGowan then pays to place the articles on Facebook the way a bona fide media company might. For McGowan, says Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green, emulating the homespun, hyperlocal style of the fast-vanishing small-town newspaper is important for building familiarity and trust.

If you are in the least concerned about fake news, this is a terrible idea. If it were a sci-fi movie, this would be the scene where the disgruntled scientist pours his mind-control drug into the reservoir; you know it is not going to end well you are just waiting to see how poorly.

On Dec. 5, Denver officials held a sustainability summit. Just before the meeting got underway, the Colorado branch of the Sunrise Movement, which says it is fighting climate change, distributed a fake communique on Denver city letterhead to attendees and on Twitter, apologizing that Suncor, the Canadian energy company, was a summit sponsor, and declaring a climate emergency. Michele Weindling, a coordinator with Sunrise Colorado, told Colorado Public Radio that fighting to address climate change was more important than disinformation.

And that is how you poison yourself.

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Our view: Democrats join the fake news biz - The Journal

Jin relects on the impact that Youtube had on her in her childhoood and in her life now

I. Worn green leather, soggy black floors. The majority of my time spent on a public school bus commuting to school everyday, was spent watching YouTube.

In one of the academic middle school summer camps my mom put me in, a couple guys in our class were always huddled around a laptop, laughing about ninjas and green balls.

After a couple days of being confused, I decided to join them.

To my surprise, I saw an Asian American guy on their screen. Granted, he seemed kind of insane, but he was funny, and after getting into his videos, he made my admittedly unenjoyable camp experience much brighter than before.

After that summer, the second generation iPod Touch I got secondhand from a cousin became so much more than a music player.

Through YouTube, I found more Asian Americans who did things I thought Asian Americans werent supposed to do: short-form comedy (Nigahiga), confronting stereotypes (KevJumba) or performing music (Sam Tsui).

I also found introverts who could express themselves online by doing silly things, whether it be choose your own adventure videos (WheazyWaiter) or making Doctor Who-inspired rock (Charlieissocoollike).

One guy in my grade even started his own lets play channel, where he provided commentary while playing Minecraft.

And when girls in eighth-grade algebra started making the Vulcan salute in the hallways, I knew that they were Nerdfighters like me.

That is, part of a global community that sprung up around the VlogBrothers channel (one of the brothers being John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars) that strives to combat mediocrity and negativity (world suck) through education, fundraising for humanitarian causes and other collaborative events.

So even though Id spent most of my bus rides looking down at my iPod, sitting on those green leather seats, I never really felt alone.

II. Three things in September of 2015: Martin Shkreli admitted to raising the price of Daraprim by 5,000 percent, two shows (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) began airing to low ratings, and I started my exchange year in Germany.

By the time Id entered high school, my YouTube feed started to expand beyond people in their rooms talking to a camera.

The VlogBrothers had started their Crash Course series, breaking down subjects from psychology to literature. Video essayists allowed me to learn about things beyond my school curriculum.

After watching the film Snowpiercer, I learned how Bong Joon-ho expressed permanent choice visually through Every Frame a Painting, and how he embodied the artist as a historian through the channel Nerdwriter1.

YouTube became a place for me to not only connect with introverts who did silly things, but a place to learn about current events and the world.

The remote segments from Conan OBriens TBS show take his audience on hilarious, informative and humanizing adventures around the globe. Taking AP U.S. History had made me more politically curious, and Id started watching John Oliver and Jon Stewart on YouTube to learn about current events before Id left for Germany.

And while I was there, it was watching shows like The Daily Show and The Late Show through YouTube that connected me to life back home.

Though the content I consumed was taking a more serious turn, the function of YouTube had remained the same: It was a way to brighten my day, whether that came from a kid in her room doing impressions or a full-budget production making light of Shkreli.

III. The Daily Show format political satire in the guise of a regular talk show has been adopted by comedians worldwide.

If you like international studies or enjoy political comedy, watching these programs (which often have subtitles) on YouTube are a great way to laugh and learn about comparative politics.

For example, the Heute-Show (Today Show) helped me process the election of a far-right party in Germany, Al-Bernameg (The Show) introduced me to the very real problems of former Egyptian President Morsi and Zondag met Lubachs (Sunday with Lubach) comedic appeal to Trump through an introduction of the Netherlands started a wave of parodies by daily shows worldwide.

I spent the summer before my sophomore year in college in Taiwan.

When I asked local friends if any Taiwanese daily shows had appeared yet, they told me no but that a young biologist-turned-comedian was interested in starting one.

That summer, The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng launched on YouTube.

It was rough: The American comedic style that Brian used wasnt landing well with Taiwanese audiences, and as an independent production consisting of fresh college graduates, you could tell that everything wasnt as polished as it could be.

Last week, after three seasons of The Night Night Show, Brian closed his curtains. His production had evolved from a small internet community of young Taiwanese viewers who enjoyed American late night, to a household name and a key platform for all three major candidates of the Taiwanese presidential election.

I watched the last episode while sitting in Bamboo Cafe. Some guy whod looked over my shoulder approached me and said, Are you Taiwanese? Dont cry. Hell start something again soon.

IV. As part of the YouTube generation, YouTube has played a huge role in my upbringing.

Im honestly in awe of the fact that I can send videos to friends at Hopkins and around the world so easily.

Nowadays, my YouTube feed is no longer filled with prank videos, game commentary or people doing silly things.

Late night still takes up a large part of my recommendations. I watch a lot of foreign news channels (from the German Tagesschau or Japanese NHK) to process American politics through foreign eyes.

The video essayists I watch are more theatrical and politically pointed: Baltimore-based ContraPoints, for example, has reportedly deradicalized members of the alt-right.

I also try my best to consume both right- and left-wing commentators on YouTube. YouTube has become a place for me to get information, rather than pure entertainment.

Those who dont understand the YouTube phenomenon often criticize the parasocial relationship between YouTubers and their audience; They criticize that independent YouTubers abuse the trust their (often young, impressionable) viewers have in them to sell products or promote harmful behaviors.

Many also cite YouTubes algorithm as a rabbit hole for political radicalization.

YouTube, its creators and certainly its audiences are far from perfect.

But YouTube can still be a great place to brighten peoples days, to learn about the world and people different from oneself, and to gain access to a community of people you might not find in your local area.

As much as YouTube can radicalize, YouTube can also de-radicalize.

YouTubers are also mandated to tell audiences if theyre being sponsored, harmful behavior is usually called out by other YouTubers and most people seem to outgrow the content they consumed in the past.

My community of middle school YouTube fans are all working hard at great colleges across the country.

YouTubers move on too. KevJumba became a monk; Nigahiga invited Andrew Yang on his podcast; and Every Frame a Painting ended their channel. YouTube has become a much larger community than it was 10 years ago.

I remember when one million subscribers was a huge milestone, and everyone in the mill-sub-club knew and collaborated with each other. Nowadays, I struggle to connect with (or even identify) the popular YouTubers of today.

Before Charlieissocoollike left YouTube to become a screenwriter, he made a song in 2012 called No Time to Reply.

The song epitomizes the feelings many subscribers had written to him and ends by saying, I think that Im done / Youre not just for me now / But Ive had fun.

Though his channel is no longer active, the middle-schooler within me who found a friend in his introversion and love for Doctor Who still hopes that hell come back someday.

Continued here:
My unique upbringing in the Youtube Generation - Johns Hopkins News-Letter