This thoughts were inspired by https://lemmy.ml/post/26866136 (Warning: go straight to the human curated translation in the comments.)
TL;DR Think-tanks with unlimited resources use different techniques to game social media algorithms. They are consistently pushing towards racist pseudoscience and Nazism. EU has the legal frameworks to stop targeted advertisement and hate speech, and the time to do is now. The consequences if it doesn't are dire.
1
There are just to many think-tanks. It was only recently that the Heritage Foundation made news, but it was too late, wasn't it? Heritage has been around for many years, playing the field of fringe religious communities, and field-testing its policies overseas.
What most people fail to realize is that Heritage is a drop of an ocean of think-tanks, which are a mostly invisible power of political influence. And this raises the question, how the fuck are these foundations so well-funded, seemingly having unlimited resources. Well, who the fuck can even have this type of unlimited resources?
Many think-tanks have been active for decades in climate skepticism, and this provides perhaps the more familiar mind map to understand their operation. They are funding intellectuals, politicians, journalists. They organize seminars, publish books, make podcasts, all from behind the curtains. They have huge lists with public relation contacts.
Keywords and talking points from think-tanks find their way to every medium of mass communication in the Western world. This is not even a modern problem. This used to be a problem twenty years ago. Think-tanks have more tools and more powers today.
Let's not forget christian fundamentalists. This is a momentary interjection, to remind you that those were fringe creeps that stalked women outside abortion centers, held their own little cultish events. The fundamentalist modus operandi influenced to a degree the TERF movements, with impromptu entryist demos about bathroom bans. And then there were the Nazis, always lurking around, and waiting to usurp spaces and communities, such as video games and anonymous networks.
All three of them were fringe, marginalized weirdoes, until recently. What the fuck changed?
2
We stand on a time point where we realize that the grim reality of our global politics has been influenced by an invisible, powerful player with zero oversight: Think tanks.
We can't understand how the deceptively grassroots facade of fringe movements came to the mainstream. We are witnessing a power takeover by Gamergater 4-chan flavor Nazi incels, nutjob christian nationalists, and oil companies.
Some knew that think tanks were shifting the goalposts of public discourse. Aaron Schwartz had realized and wrote a couple articles about it: By scraping and analyzing climate change journal articles he came about to the conclusion that think tanks also manufacture consent about affirmative action and racial determinism.
People who say that Aaron would be a free-speech absolutist if alive are not only utterly oblivious about his progressive politics (he worked with Elizabeth Warren), but also with regard to “free-speech” being a modern Nazi dogwhistle for “race realism”, ie racism. The same race science promoted by such figures as Chris Rufo and Peter Bogoshian, who turned out to be funded by Danish white supremacist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.
In case you don't remember, Chris Rufo's first successful propaganda project for the Republicans was a “critical race theory” outrage. This campaign revolved around motivating angry mobs of white people against the idea that “all whites are racist”.
Rufo boasted that he had "changed the meaning of the term" completely, and projected on CRT "everything Americans hate". He set out to repeat the successful experiment with "gender ideology", shifting the meaning of "transgender" to sexualizing children or exposing children to "pornography". Only willful ignorance or outright nazism can prevent seeing the Nazi undertones of this blatant propaganda at this point.
3
It is an old Nazi trick to claim to be the victim of racism against whites. But the issue here is quantity, not quality. The critical race theory became huge, and it was one of the major pillars of Ron DeSantis early politics in Florida. It was also a test-case for the outbreak of “template legislation” we now witness with anti-trans bills.
It is easy to put the blame on public figures like Elon Musk, but it is also a premise to let him be the fall guy, the “excessive tormentor”, a scapegoat that will justify the system.
I tend to believe, no matter how much I despise Musk and deplore everything he stands for, that he is a fine example of the orchestrated Nazi radicalization process that happens online, with the funding of think-tanks, and the power of social media algorithms.
Musk probably fell into the rabbit hole by some anti-trans entry point, while obsessively scrolling during COVID, or even while possibly plausibly “researching” about his trans daughter. Can't we assume the same happened with Rowling? Katherine Cross makes an argument that Rowling's radicalization happened entirely within Twitter.
What we see with Musk, we see with thousands of white males online. It is the algorithms-gamed-by-think-tanks that have this effect. They might also have targeted billionaires to endorse their “cause”, in the first place. For obvious reasons, made now more obvious by chain-saw brandishing racists.
Starting out with being politically incorrect edgelords only to move on to adopting “national socialism” as a legitimate political ideology. Or starting out as Jordan Peterson fanboy incels, and by way of “evolutionary psychology” pseudoscience, delve deeper into “masculinist” criticism of “matriarchy”.
4
Virtually every asshole you hate in the present day has big think-tanks bucks backing them, their tours, their books, their podcasts, their interviews. And a huge network of media outlets that provide visibility and legitimacy. It was not long ago when a right-wing commentator explained how this works: a nazi will tweet something, Elon Musk will quote, Carlson Tucker will report, Fox will amplify it, and Joe Rogan will bring in some one to provide a “reasonable”, if not “unorthodox”, or “politically incorrect” account of it.
In a matter of hours, millions of people will have adopted, well, Nazi takes, as absolute facts of nature.
Don't forget what politically incorrect originally, and inherently means: Racist. Don't let slip that Nazism was primarily a racist movement, as it construed Jews as a “race”. Don't forget that Nazi-funded Peter Bogoshian was among the earliest contemporary commentators to accuse “liberal universities” of imposing a “religious-like orthodoxy” against “minority conservative opinions”. Well, it ...kinda was about race?
It was about fucking racism. As Aaron Schwartz had pointed out, right wing think tanks move the goal posts. Two decades ago the anthropologist concensus that there is only one human race went down without any objections. “Race realism” was hand-down considered debunked pseudoscience. Now we have these people in government who want to breakdown on universities with figurative chain-saws, in order to “save civilization”. (They mean white supremacy, duh.)
5
You may have noticed that these people are also seething climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-vegan, and huge transphobic bigots? These are all orchestrated campaigns, gaming the social media algorithms with solid funding and coordination. You know how it is constantly reported that social media push right wing bias?
Well, we can't know if it is the algorithms themselves, or think tanks are paying huge numbers of agents to feint engagement, or they use bots, or make sponsorship deals with social media companies. They might as well employ all those tactics together. We know that the think tank talking points were there in 2016, and 2018, and 2021, and they were never properly moderated. Especially the targeting and vilification of queer people was stunning, reflecting genuine Christian Nationalist doublespeak, eg conflating homosexuality with “pornography”.
Think tanks embraced gamers-cum-incels-cum-nazis, christian nationalists, TERFs, and gamed the algorithms, pushing the most backward, unscientific, and hateful vitriol, and leading to the ongoing, racist-theocratic “cultural revolution”, that if not strangled in its cradle right now, will set the West back not 50 but two- or -three hundred years back, and lead humanity to atrocities and barbarism we were raised to believe was only a disturbing chapter of history books.
They are already pushing for making being trans illegal, by way of "identity fraud" or "sex offense". We all know that if they say they make it a capital offense nobody will even be surprised. The US Bible Belt might be a lost cause for human rights. But for Europe there is still time.
6
Europe is at a critical crossroads, to enforce and extend its Digital Markets and AI-Acts. Behavioral advertising technology applied to political propaganda is a terror, and leads to terror. It leaves voters and consumers, heck, it leaves whole societies helpless in an asymmetrical war of consent manufacturing, which leads to real violence, as Charlottevile has shown, as the rise in anti-trans hate-crime has shown, as the Southport riots in England have shown. Don't be fooled by the coverage: these riots were orchestrated by the far right very deliberately, and were influenced by racist think-tanks like New Culture Forum.
Europe still has time to take action. The Nazis made a fatal mistake: Concealing their true colors got them so far, they got the US government. But they were so wildly enthusiastic about it they dropped the act. Now Europe knows that it is, once again, fighting Nazis. And, in sharp contrast with the US, where Nazism is an abstract idea, Europeans know that humanity and civilization is at stake because of this repelling, murderous, sick-to-the-bone racist ideology.
Appendix 1
We have talked about this recently.
Here is why Big Social platforms can't be protected by free speech laws.
- Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
- Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
- Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
- Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
- Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
- Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
- Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.
I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech.
This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off.
Even harder than the EU did.
Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function.
Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises
Appendix 2
I don't think hate-speech is free-speech. I think that hate-speech is slander against whole groups of people on the basis of protected, immutable traits. By protecting hate-speech, democracies provide its worst enemies the tools they need to dismantle democracy (Joseph fucking Goebbels said that).
As for moderation in Meta/X, here are the thoughts from a recent discussion:
Nazism is explicitly deemed unworthy of respect in some legal systems, like Germany or the UK. MAGAs, white supremacists, and alt-righters are objectively too close to nazism, therefore their opinions are unworthy of respect to start with.
There is also the paradox of intolerance. If you let these people in, to respect their opinion, they will take over and deprive people of the right to live. They don’t play by tolerant society’s rules, so they they don’t get tolerated.
The value is having a society that is tolerant of diversity of opinion.
Here is the opinion of the scientific consensus on transgender people, which is have been so for years, if not decades.
We have been harassed, bullied, doxxed, and banned for bringing those up in all major social media platforms. TERFs, white supremacists, misogynists, racists, have always gotten away in these platforms with punching down on leftists, African and Caribbean reparations activists, feminists, and queer people. They were protected by equally bigoted moderators under the guise of entitlement to their opinion, at the same time that all these other opinions are bashed and framed as “overstepping”.
This is in line with what the EFF and Techdirt, which are both vocal First Amendment absolutists, have already said that what X and Facebook do now is in fact amplifying hate speech and effectively suppressing the free speech of gender and sexual minorities.
And this has been the situation for years, take for example the online harassment of feminists .
It is a deeply systemic bias, due to centrist indoctrination in broader society, that it is the leftist and inclusive spaces that are called out for lack of diversity for responding to harassment and bigotry, when the voices and lives of people are simply dominated and evacuated in major platforms without an iota of moderation and responsiveness to punch-down harassment.
Let alone that in the light of the most recent developments, which consolidates the above tendencies, makes the timing of the tolerance argument even more ironic and dishonest.
