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As weve noted, there were a lot of conspiracy theories about how things went so completely wrong during the Iowa caucuses, with bogus claims that, for instance, members of the DNC afraid of a Sanders victory or other liberal organizations were somehow behind the mess. But NBC News reports that it wasnt other Democrats that exacerbated the clusterfuck on Monday night, but trolls from 4Chan, aka the worst place on the internet.

Now, as weve explained, the caucuses took place at over 1,600 precincts throughout Iowa and when the results were done, the precinct captains had to get the results to the state. This was supposed to be done via an app, but the app failed and so the captains were left having to call into the hotline a hotline which was clogged by troll calls, thanks to 4Chan.

According to NBC:

Users on a politics-focused section of the fringe 4chan message board repeatedly posted the phone number for the Iowa Democratic Party, which was found by a simple Google search, both as screenshots and in plain text, alongside instructions.

The 4Chan trolls used this to clog the phone lines and thus cause massive delays in the reporting of the caucus results. And of course, when reported emerged of Trump supporters calling in and disrupting the reporting of results, 4Chan users gloated: Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines, a user posted.

4Chan, for those that are lucky enough not to know, is an internet haven for misogyny, hatred, and general trolling thats produced some of the worst online trends and messes of the last decade. Theyre most famous for orchestrating the systematic harassment of female game developers and critics known as gamergate.

The fact that these horrible people would want to disrupt the Iowa caucuses for funsies and support Trump should surprise no one familiar with 4Chan and the Alt-Right movement that they were in part responsible for. Many writers have drawn a direct line from GamerGate to the Alt-Right to Trump. These are the same sort of men who came up with ideas like involuntary celibacy. They are racist, angry, sexist, disaffected, and radicalized.

The impact of this prank is not just inconvenience. It fans the flames of a fundamental distrust for establishments and, in this case, for the Democratic party. The Caucuses are stupid but this makes it all so much worse. And that, like so many wedges, causes incredible harm that the right and other hostile forces like Russia will mine and manipulate. People like the users of 4Chan already have defiled and broken American democracy, this is just them peeing on its grave.

Thanks to the mess in Iowa, one that was exacerbated by these jerks, but not solely caused by them, DNC chair Tom Perez has called for a recanvass (basically a recount) of the Iowa caucus results. The results were inconsistent and confusing for many, and the mathematical formula used in the caucuses tended to give candidates an outsize amount of delegates in relation to the actual people that caucuses for them.

What can we do? Other than this recanvass not much. There is, I guess, some good news: Iowa is only one state with a few delegates and were heading into primaries that will at least use votes so things will, we pray, run smoother in New Hampshire. Then again

(via: NBC News)

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Of Course 4chan Trolls Were a Factor in the Iowa Caucus Disaster - The Mary Sue

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.

Here is the original post:
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