There is a great diary up now from Lefty Coaster, which refers to a survey challenging the notion that “Bernie Bros” are more aggressive or bullying than other candidates. I’ve been exploring this topic from various directions as well:
1: Bernie denounces bullying of any form, and has made it clear that such behavior is not welcome in his campaign. (I’ve often seen it claimed that Bernie has not denounced bullying behavior).
“Harassment of all forms is unacceptable to me, and we urge supporters of all campaigns not to engage in bullying or ugly personal attacks,” Sanders, a front-runner in the Democratic primary race, said. “Our campaign is building a multi-generational, multi-racial movement of love, compassion, and justice. We can certainly disagree on issues, but we must do it in a respectful manner.”
thehill.com/…
“Anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement. We don’t want them.”
www.reuters.com/...
There was an additional quote in this same interview which I’ll refer to shortly.
We have over 10.6 million people on Twitter, and 99.9% of them are decent human beings,” Sanders said at the Nevada debate. “If there are a few people who make ugly remarks, who attack trade union leaders, I disown those people.”
www.independent.co.uk/…
Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned "bullying and harassment of any kind" Saturday in an email urging people representing his 2020 campaign in the media to act respectfully.
"Let us do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents - talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances," Sanders wrote. "I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space."
The email, which a source provided to CNN Sunday, came less than a week after
Sanders officially announced his candidacy for president. The letter dissuades supporters from using personal attacks on Sanders' behalf, saying that the campaign message and rhetoric needs to be the opposite of President Donald Trump's.
edition.cnn.com/…
There is more.
If you are a Bernie supporter, and someone claims that Bernie has not denounced bullying, or called for respectful discourse, you can confidently reply that this claim is debunked.
2: Bernie does not control anyone.
He is responsible to make his position clear, and he has hiring / firing authority over people employed by his campaign.
But he does not have control over a random supporter in Flint who is desperate to have free health care. He does not have control over a random student in New York desperate for relief with her student debt. He does not have control over a random activist in Los Angeles who is angry about the effect of corporate money in politics. And he sure doesn’t have control over random twitter accounts.
The point is made that Joe Biden is not responsible for Hunter’s behavior, and this point is correct. But if Joe Biden has no responsibility for his own son’s behavior, why does Bernie have responsibility for the behavior of people he’s never met?
3: In 2016, the behavior of Bernie’s supporters was actually ranked as less aggressive than that of Hillary supporters.
After the 2016 campaign, the Online Harassment Data organization surveyed over 1,000 respondents on how aggressive the various campaigns’ supporters had been. Trump’s supporters ranked most aggressive. Hillary’s supporters ranked 2nd. Ted Cruz’ supporters ranked 3rd. Bernie’s supporters ranked 4th, with 5th place coming to supporters of John Kasich.
Hillary supporters were ranked as doubly aggressive compared with Sanders supporters.
onlineharassmentdata.org/…
I have not seen a report yet for 2019 or 2020 to date. But even in 2016, the narrative was that the Bernie Bros were the most aggressive supporters, while the only data I’ve seen that did a full analysis showed the opposite.
4: In 2020, the Hillary Rosen — Nina Turner episode highlighted how supporter aggression can come from any direction and beyond candidates’ control.
As most probably already know, Hillary Rosen (white) had challenged whether Nina Turner (black) had the “standing” to refer to a speech made by MLK. Rosen’s subsequent apology used the term “angry black women.”
"On air thurs I said my colleague @ninaturner didn’t have standing to use MLK Jr. That was wrong. I am sorry for saying those words," Rosen wrote in a now-deleted tweet. "Pls no need to defend me and attack angry black women. They have standing. I always need to listen more than I talk. We rise together."
While the episode and the apology itself have been widely discussed, please note this comment from Rosen:
"I’m horrified that anyone would think i would call Nina Turner 'an angry black woman' I would NEVER!! After the TV hit last night, I was getting tons of ugly messages to keep fighting her using that phrase. I was trying to tell people to STOP. Cause I KNEW I needed to apologize," Rosen tweeted.
Bolding mine. Rosen was getting “tons of ugly messages to keep fighting her using that phrase.”
Here’s Rebecca Nagle on Warren supporters:
I do not blame Rosen (or Biden or any other candidate) for the “tons of ugly messages” she was receiving urging her to continue using the offensive language and staying on the attack. I do not blame Warren for any of her supporters’ bullying Native Women. I also do not believe Bernie should be blamed for any behavior which he has denounced and over which he has no control.
5: Back to Bernie supporters: how to tell actual supporters from trolls?
Adding the other part from Bernie’s interview mentioned in point 1 above:
And I’m not so sure, to be honest with you, that they are necessarily part of our movement.”
We’re all familiar by now with:
* Russian bots and troll factories
* Other countries’ bots and troll factories
* Republican trolls & disinformation efforts
* 4-chan style trolls
Of all the anonymous nastiness on the internet, why should only online bullies claiming to be supporters of Bernie Sanders be trusted that they are exactly who they claim to be?
And challenging the veracity of anonymous trolls is hardly gaslighting.
I’m a Bernie supporter. I’m friends with many Bernie supporters. I’ve never known a single one to engage in any form of online bullying. I’ve been on dkos since 2004, and in over 15 years here I’ve never once been flagged. Never warned. And I cant stand bullying of any form. And as bullying does not match my impression of the candidate himself or the supporters I know, I’m interested in exploring the disconnect..
Russian trolls & other foreign trolls
Russians played an obvious role in ‘16, and one could logically assume that they have not only continued these efforts but have improved in their sophistication.
Why would Russian trolls want to pose as Sanders supporters in order to stir things up? Most likely simply to sow discord among us. Hardly a new strategy.
As Sun Tzu put it over 2,000 years ago (granted there is debate over authorship and timing):
The Strategy Of Sowing Discord
Undermine your enemy's ability to fight by secretly causing discord between him and his friends, allies..
But is there any evidence that foreign trolls have been deployed in relation to Sanders and his supporters? Looking at 2017:
Last June, John Mattes started noticing something coursing like a virus through the Facebook page he helped administer for Bernie Sanders fans in San Diego. People with no apparent ties to California were friending the page and sharing links from unfamiliar sites full of anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda.
Mattes, 66, had been a television reporter and Senate investigator in previous lives. He put his expertise in unmasking fraudsters to work. At first, he suspected that the sites were created by the old Clinton haters from the ‘90s ― what Hillary Clinton had dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
But when Mattes started tracking down the sites’ domain registrations, the trail led to Macedonia and Albania...
By late October, Mattes said he’d traced 40 percent of the domain registrations for the fake news sites he saw popping up on pro-Sanders pages back to Eastern Europe. Others appeared to be based in Panama and the U.S., or were untraceable. He wondered, “Am I the only person that sees all this crap floating through these Bernie pages?”
He wasn’t. Bernie supporters across the country had been noticing dubious websites and posters linked back to Eastern Europe long before Mattes did ― and even before The Washington Post reported in mid-June that Russian government hackers had stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee. They had been warning each other that something weird was going on, posting troll alerts and compiling lists of fake news sites.
There is enough real news to fight over, they thought, without arguing over anti-Hillary conspiracy theories from Macedonia.
www.huffpost.com/…
When it has been demonstrated that Russian and other foreign trolls have been stirring shit up, why would we assume that they have stopped?
And beyond just stirring shit up, there are various foreign countries with the resources who might want to sabotage Sanders’ candidacy. In Saudi Arabia, for example, MBS has a troll farm employing hundreds of trolls (and Sanders has been a consistent critic of MBS, contrasting with Trump who considers him a “friend.”) I only mention MBS & Saudi, because when you’re bold enough to personally hack the phone of Jeff Bezos, who the fuck knows what else your trolls are doing?
www.theguardian.com/…
Domestic trolls
Anyone else remember the good old days when it was dkos against freerepublic and littlegreenfootballs? Even in 2004, we had a helluva time figuring out who was a “kossack” and who was a “freeper”.
The original Trusted User system of ratings and hide-ratings anticipated (correctly) that we would be flooded by concern trolls and false flag trolls from freerepublic, and outsourced (correctly) much of the discovery & filtering responsibility to the kossacks themselves. And sure enough, the same zombies and sockpuppets hide-rated for suspicious content would turn out to be freepers calling us all libtards back on their home turf.
It’s hardly a secret that behavior of surrogates and supporters affects public image, gotv efforts, media engagement, and relationships between the candidates themselves.
If you were an alt-right troll, what could be more fun than tossing smokebombs at the friendship between Sanders and Warren?
IMO right-wing trolling likely constitutes much more of the disinformation than foreign attacks. Twitter has assured that they are better able to identify and shut down foreign activity or organized trolling (though when they have a spy in their own ranks working for MBS, one questions the thoroughness of their protocols), but it simply makes more sense that local trolls would be better at the false flag troll game vs. more generic shit-stirring activities from overseas.
Fringe right-wing sites and trolls have spread false information about Warren’s Native American heritage and amplified misinformation about allegations of inappropriate touching by Biden, according to Padraic Ryan, head of news intelligence at Storyful, a firm that tracks social media disinformation.
“Elizabeth Warren has been the target of a great many of smears and hoaxes and so on, many relating to her claim of Native American ancestry,” Ryan told The Hill, noting that trolls seeking to inflame tensions have also targeted Sanders.
Earlier this year, groups of posters on platforms including 4chan and 8chan helped spread the claim that Warren had a blackface doll in her kitchen, which turned out to be a vase. Storyful found that the misinformation originated on 4chan, and was then amplified by certain conservative websites, ultimately migrating onto major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
thehill.com/...
What about other domestic opponents?
Might David Brock be behind some of this? Why not? He’s done it before.
As head of the Correct The Record Super PAC for Hillary Clinton, David Brock has launched something called Barrier Breakers — an online mob of paid trolls designed to attack any and every person who says one cross word about Hillary Clinton on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or elsewhere.
www.nydailynews.com/…
And as far as surrogates and supporters go, it’s hard to find one more malevolent than Brock. As many will recall, he was the original “right-wing hit man” who wrote a whole book smearing Anita Hill and helping bring us all the legacy of Clarence Thomas. And since his “conversion” to the left, he has spent as much energy attacking Bernie as attacking his supposed enemies on the right.
Brock, known for his silver pompadour and penchant for high drama, is a controversial figure among Democratic operatives. Nurtured in the netherworld of the far right, Brock was a foot soldier in what Hillary Clinton famously dubbed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” before converting. (He earned his stripes by slurring Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”)
After recanting and changing sides, Brock nevertheless prides himself on being as ruthless and amoral as the operatives on the right, though his act doesn’t fly as well in Democratic circles. During the Democratic primary, Brock declared that “black lives don’t matter to Bernie Sanders” and called on the septuagenarian Sanders to release his medical records in order to cast aspersions on his health.
www.thenation.com/…
Here’s Brock back in April 2019:
There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,” said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.”
www.nytimes.com/…
Mr. Brock… said “the Bernie question comes up in every fund-raising meeting I do.” ...
The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz. The gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center-left wing of the party..
same New York Times article as above
So when you’re a self-respecting right-wing hit man, and your archrival has a following which is loyal and enthusiastic, and you have a battle-hardened troll farm at your disposal, it’s hardly a stretch to think that Brock could be behind some of the trolling.
But Democrats would never stoop to false flag trolling?
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
www.nytimes.com/...
The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely.
Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted.
In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret effort to be unmasked. In a political bank shot made in the last two weeks of the campaign, they thought associating Mr. Moore with calls for a statewide alcohol ban would hurt him with moderate, business-oriented Republicans and assist the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won the special election by a hair-thin margin.
www.nytimes.com/…
So what percent of online bullying is done by actual Bernie supporters?
Good question. And a better approach than assuming that there are no trolls in the mix and that Bernie is responsible for what 4-chan trolls do in their spare time.
There are certainly online bullies supporting Sanders. (I don’t think anyone debates this?)
But unfortunately the wider internet does not have the same ratings / trusted user system that dkos has, so it’s hard to know who @heresanotheremoji777 is and what is his intention. And though I’ve been looking for data or evidence that would indicate actual Bernie supporters are more abusive than political supporters in general, I’ve found nothing to support this claim.
Moving forward:
* Online bullying is terrible. Anyone who does it should be called out for it. If I am ever in a thread on any platform anywhere on the internet, I will do my part to denounce such behavior, and if the person claims to be a Bernie supporter, I will note that he is helping no-one but Trump.
* Bernie has pled for common decency and mutual respect. He has denounced bullying. If there are further steps anyone recommends, please note in the comments. I hardly have any contact with the campaign, but I’ll post to his campaign inbox as a suggestion.
* I personally do not know any Bernie supporters who behave this way. I have not come into contact myself with Bernie supporters exhibiting this behavior online. I come into plenty of contact with Trump supporters and trolls who stir shit up.
* In a world where Democrats set up false flag accounts posing as Alabama Baptists; in a world where Macedonians spread inflammatory fake news; in a world where the Republican hit-man who smeared Anita Hill set up an online troll farm and hates Bernie Sanders; and in a world where a Saudi Arabian prince uses his personal phone to hack the phone of Jeff Bezos… we all have the right to be skeptical of what we see online.
