Yes, actually. Extremely mad.
It’s heartening to see that many are revving up to fight hard against Trump and the Republicans within the political system. It’s important we do that on so many political fronts over the next several years.
However, one front that’s being ignored by many on our side is the internet at large. If you’re not paying attention, you have no idea how big of a footprint the Alt-Right has online, and they’re very good at spreading misinformation. The Alt-Right pushes their agenda online in 4 main ways:
1 — Create and push easily shareable fake news content that misinforms the masses and the media.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg insists fake news isn’t what tilted the election, but let’s not pretend it didn’t help. From an article on Buzzfeed:
Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.
The top shared fake news story? It was that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump.
2 — Create and push easily shareable and “funny” memes to damage liberal ideas and individuals. These do well with millennials and younger demographics.
Palmer Luckey, a co-founder of the Oculus Rift who now works at Facebook, bankrolled a group called Nimble America. What was Nimble America’s purpose? I’ll let them explain with a quote from an article on The Daily Beast:
“We (Nimble America) conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it’s time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not.”
Nimble America helped create and spread anti-Hillary memes throughout the campaign, and they were shared with millions of people across Reddit and social media.
3 — Create thousands of fake accounts to create conflict among liberals on social media, forums and comment sections on popular news and media sites. These fake accounts also make them seem more sizable than they are.
A story that came out just today from Engadget states:
The Daily Stormer, an alt-right website that regularly features racist, sexist and anti-semitic content, claims it has nearly 1,000 "fake black person" Twitter accounts that it plans to use in a "big," upcoming harassment campaign.
Many of you may have heard that Twitter has launched new tools to help against harassment. Since the Alt-Right is mainly about harassment, they didn’t take this change well. They’re not only focused on Twitter. The Daily Stormer states:
"We will introduce new ways of trolling, including IRL trolling, snailmail trolling, telephone trolling, hoaxes, shoe company endorsements, etc...”
4 — Hack information from our side and feed it out of context to the people and the media.
I don’t think I need to rehash all the Wikileaks drama, do I?
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