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?
This is not an issue that will go away, and it must be fought head on. The problem is more and more people live their lives online, and we will especially lose younger, millennial voters to the Alt-Right’s propaganda. It’ll be impossible for the younger generations to trust Democrats and liberals when they are bombarded with fake news stories on Facebook, “black people” on Twitter telling them they love Republicans and Trump, funny anti-Democratic memes on Reddit, and highly curated emails showing how evil Democrats allegedly are behind the scenes via leaked Wikileaks emails.
One last point, nowhere online is “safe.” The online war is dirty, and I PROMISE you that there are many from the Alt-Right on this site right now trying to create disagreement amongst ourselves. And sometimes it’s not easy to spot. You think it’s just someone trying to tell you that Trump is great? No, sometimes there will be literally 10 Alt-Right people in a thread, some pretending to be liberals, others not as liberal, and they will fight amongst themselves only to derail the conversation and make it look like we are fighting amongst ourselves. I have known people who work in the social media industry where their job is to plant themselves on multiple forums across the internet and control hundreds of accounts to push various agendas. Comments you see on Amazon, CNN, Reddit and, yes, even here are fake to push an agenda.
So, with that, I urge you all, please do NOT ignore the Alt-Right’s online war!
