"... to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking.
For instance, before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu politicians told the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis. During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people. Before the Bosnian genocide, Serbs were warned to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat that was planning a genocide against them.
'I was stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case,' Ms. Benesch told me.... 'It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.'... Fear speech is much less studied than hate speech.... The 'nontoxic and argumentative nature' of fear speech prompts more engagement than hate speech...."
Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content." She'd also like us, the users of social media, to notice fear speech and to challenge it ourselves, to provide our own counterspeech — "not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counternarrative for people watching on the sidelines."
That's a big part of what I try to do with this blog.
Posts
51 comments:
Social media “fact checks” are already politicized and heavily influenced by the government or its proxies. Twitter’s crowd sourced community notes appears to be a less biased alternative for fact-checking and providing context.
Now do 'threat to our democracy' and 'climate crisis'.
"What Angwin recommends for social media companies to do more fact-checking"
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
A handmade tale. A rape culture. Toxic masculinity. An insurrection. Trans/homophobia. Grooming in schools, churches, scouts, etc. Social media, mainstream media, movies, books, government speech, and professional projects all speak of a looming threat.
Advocates are warning that the rise in bills targeting trans youth could worsen the mental health of an already vulnerable population, and could "come at the literal cost of lives."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/transgender-rights-legislation-surge-youth-mental-health/
CRT is another kind of fear speech: not that they're about to exterminate you, but that they're keeping you down and are always going to keep you down. Unless you react by pulling them down.
It's hardly a new or wholly American thing. Lots of places have it without the academic veneer we have. Look at the recent history of Zimbabwe or South Africa.
A timely topic. Here is a good example of "fear speech":
"Video of patrons standing for "The Star-Spangled Banner" inside a California eatery sent progressives into a tailspin online, including the person behind the TikTok post who captioned the incident "the most dangerous situation I've ever been in.'"
"Algorithm" = surreptitiously partially censor officially disapproved speech by limiting its reach. (I also don't like algorithms promoting speech, it's all the the imposition of an unequal playing field instead of allowing ideas to rise or fall organically based on free competition.)
"Context" and "fact checking" = refuse to meet speakers of disapproved speech as equals, instead of responding to their speech as an equal, respond as an authority, those who express disapproved speech have the official disapproval of their speech artificially elevated to prominence in responses. Again, such things should be organic with participants competing equally and openly. (This is why Twitter's revamped community notes system, while imperfect, is much improved from the prior system.)
What is advocated in the link is NOT what the professor does, with her blog, or in general. Despite her occasional failings in some disputes over speech, she does not reject the basic equality of individuals and groups when it comes to speech. As so many do these days.
This is a great explanation for how you frame "cruel neutrality" and "civility bullshit" posts to puncture overblown or manipulative narratives that are intended to stoke division and weaken the bonds of trust in our society.
Keep on doing your thing Professor!
You mean like, "MAGA Republicans want to destroy democracy and put society back to the 1950's?"
Stuff like that?
Except that social media is the genocidal leader. Its nature is to reward clickbait, which means that instigating fear and reinforcing tribalism are the most successful content.
It could be one of the reasons we dread a Trump/Biden rematch. Each side will spin up the "our country is on the brink of ruination by the other side" rhetoric. The constant social media-generated angst is exhausting.
The main strategy of the Left and the democratic Party is fear speech. Why? Because it works, especially on certain demographics. Why is why every two years we hear exactly the same message from the Left:
"The Republicans are going to put Black people back into the fields, gays into the closet and women into the kitchen."
Sounds to me like the Executive Director of the “Dangerous Speech Project” is using fear of a looming threat.
By her logic, there would be a LOT of context around all global warming fear mongering. But I don’t think she would let that happen.
This is anti-fear bullshit.
She’s just pushing her own brand of fear.
The Great Replacement theory is huge fear inducing speech, repeated by those like Tucker Carlson and other right wing propagandists and then internalized by some right wing Americans.
The Great Replacement Theory
Thanks go to Althouse and other social media outlets that are brave enough to counter propaganda and fear mongering.
"add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts""
Great. Let's do it. Starting with every false fear-inducing prog post about "climate change."
>Ann Althouse said...
Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content."<
Julia Angwin's "idea" is not an original concept from her, of course. "Fact-checking" and "right-think" correction is already being overdone and it amounts to nothing more than left-wing propaganda - and incipient censorship by the Left. That this is so is well-known to conservative commenters since it has for some years now been used widely by the mass media and by social media sites, exclusively against conservative speech, to promote the leftist narrative. Leftist writers (and bloggers) and New York Times readers, being not subjected to it, could probably be excused for not being aware of the existence and pervasiveness of it extant, and for being impressed by Angwin's supposed innovativeness.
Were the kulaks entitled to engage in fear speech against the Bolsheviks?....Some genocides are more genocidal than others. In Kotkin's bio of Stalin he notes that some four to eight million peasants starved during the collectivization process. I don't know if the peasants engaged in any hate speech against the Bolsheviks.....During the French Revolution over 250,000 peasants in the Vendee region were killed outright. Their crime: they believed that they should be ruled by an anointed king and that they needed sacraments administered by Vatican approved clergy in order to gain admission to heaven. The Jacobins felt that the best way to handle such backward thinking was to murder the people who had such backward thoughts.....The mass murders in the Vendee region and the mass starvations during the collectivization process are mentioned in history books, but they don't seem to very much attract the imagination of artists and intellectuals. I can't recall ever reading a novel or seeing a movie that dramatized these crimes.
'Fact checking'?
What bullshit. They always mean 'censoring speech we don't like.'
There is no such thing as 'hate speech.'
"Fear speech is much less studied than hate speech"
One party is pretty good about this,
"They're [Republicans] gonna take away your Social Security"
"They're [Republicans] gonna put y'all back in chains"
So basically, they're saying that the people they are out to get are out to get you.
Too bad we can't devise a system of . . . enlightenment of the young that would provide a baseline of knowledge about the world, staffed by well-paid and respected experts in important subjects.
We could call them 'schools.'
I know. Psycho talk, right?
And during the great COVID19 panic, petty tyrants told people that anyone who dissented and disobeyed would kill them.
During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people.
I’d like to see proof of this assertion. Nazi propagandists missed no opportunities to spread lies about the Jews, but this is a new, and thoroughly implausible, one.
the blood libel of the 1619 project which has claimed 1000s of innocent lives, the skydragon fraud which has exacerbated suicides all of those are toxic speech,
“During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people.”
I don’t believe this is true. Nazi antisemitism(fear) had been espoused by propagandists for years before WWII. During the Holocaust, usually described as happening between 1941-1945, there was no need for propagandists to stoke fear of annihilation by Jews.
If you have an example of Nazi propaganda, from 1941 to 1945, declaring the Jews were planning to annihilate Germany please post a link. I have yet to fine anything.
Hutu hunted Tutsi hunted Hutu in generational turn.
Obama's Kenya elite were/are in competition with Kenyan deplorables.
Same thing in south Africa, here Mandela's Xhosa were at war with Zulu, then transnational forces invaded with regime change and native collateral damage in a bid for social progress fomented by allegations of a progressive threat.
Yes, "Fact Checking" is so important, especially when the facts are correct but not in the Narrative.
"They're gonna put y'all back in chains!"
"Let me tell you about this ultra MAGA agenda. It's extreme, as most MAGA things are."
"In our bones, we know democracy is at risk."
Ahem.
Not surprisingly, the fear speech deemed problematic is all on the right. While leftists regularly denounce conservatives using extreme terms that verge on calls for eradication, this is apparently not a problem as long as the speaker is on the left. Perhaps Althouse could focus also on problematic speech coming from the left. Or is it always just freedom of speech when done by the left, and insurrection when done by the right?
I suppose the counterpoint to the Biden quotes I highlighted (and we all know that between our illustrious president and our very serious Democrat lawmakers and leaders, there are uncountable numbers more) would be "Republicans keep saying that we're coming for the children - how ridiculous!"
The difference is that there are actual and abundant examples of leftist ideologues coming for the children. But examples of Republicans seeking to re-enslave black people? Nope. (Examples of Democrats policing their electoral plantation, and rhetorical lynchings of those who escape? Yup.)
Anything resembling the jackbooted "ultra MAGA" of their fever dreams? The worst thing you get is some harrumphing about "they'd better not come for me, I'll take those bastards down, hand to God!" (Serious Democrat suggestions, and as we've seen, suggestions that have been accepted on, that speech that fails to toe their line be preemptively blocked - censored, that is - and, as suggested by some, even criminalized? Check.)
Democracy at risk thanks to the actions uniquely of Republicans? Show me. Try. (It's easy to find examples of Democrat-led actions that threaten our long-standing and often Constitutionally prescribed democratic norms, OTOH - start with changes in state electoral regulations in states where such regulations are required to come from and go through the state legislature emanating instead from the bench, from the DA's office, etc.)
Like the incessant white supremacy fear mongering from Garland’s DOJ. MAGA white nationalists terrorizing the American people! Stamp out and eradicate redundant whiteness!
And what is the official message of the left? Democrats and all their supporting groups?
Easy.
If you're not white- the whites are out to exploit you- or worse.
Prove me wrong.
She neglects that in all these cases there was already a fertile bed in which to grow these inflammatory messages -- either (1) prior historic rhetoric against the targeted group (Jews) or (2) prior history of armed conflict (during WW2 Croatians allied with the Nazis against Serb nationalists) or (3) elite/nonelite dynamic (Tutsi/Hutu).
What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts,"
YouTube was doing that to posts by Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying questioning aspects of the COVID response.
What do they know and how dare they question the official narrative?
If you do not recognize the names, Google them. You will enjoy what old fashioned liberals have had to say about many things.
For the benefit of backwards hicks like Inga, here's what I was taught at my elite high school, 2 Ivy League universities, and the U of Calif: liberal white women are Nazi adjacent. Whites who live in racist places like Waukesha (Inga fears and despises POCs) only have anything because of white privilege that allowed them to steal from POCs. They but especially their Hitlerjugend kids and grandkids need to pay reparations forever: the damage that shitpiles like her have inflicted on people of color cannot be quantified. They might be good tax slaves or, if necessary, cannon fodder, but above all they're violent stupid racists and require constant surveillance in case they get out of line.
And Inga can't wait to vote for the party that will implement it. I pity flyover mediocrities like her family but Inga absolutely hates them. HATES THEM.
Worry more about "right wing hate speech," Inga. That's the job for 87-IQ bubble-dwellers like you. Outer-party garbage--eg, the Michigan Reichstaatsanwalt--will be there to police your dumb grandkids.
By the time that Nazi Germany found itself on the defensive propaganda themes had shifted, and the supposed Jewish-Bolshevik-Capitalist Conspiracy now aimed--using the tools of American and Russian lives--at the extermination of the German people, not merely their pollution and corruption by inferior blood, though that was a standard always.
I can find some references later, I think.
The Great Replacement Theory
Ethnic Springs? Planned Parenthood (i.e. human rites), planned parent/hood (i.e. shared responsibility), etc. in a war of the worlds (i.e. Venus/Mars/Uranus vs Earth).
I, for one, look forward to the new laws agains fear speach, and fear crimes. Then we can take the next logical steps and finally outlaw wrongthink entirely. /s
Also, use of /s will in the future be evidence of a thoughtcrime, retroactively.
The resident dullard says:
The Great Replacement theory is huge fear inducing speech, repeated by those like Tucker Carlson and other right wing propagandists and then internalized by some right wing Americans.
Aside from the fact that it is the only reasonable explanation for the policies of the Brandon regime, it is not a "right wing" issue.
If the dullard is interested in another opinion on the left, she might read this.
From a more intelligent and informed person of the left.
Mr. Carlson and I spent most of our careers not in alignment on anything; for decades, our places were adversarial on the public chess board. He had assumed that I was the caricature of a shrieking, irrational left-wing feminist—a view for which he has had the good grace publicly to apologize—and I, for my part, was ready to accept that he must be the boorish, sexist, racist, homophobic frat boy that the progressive news outlets I read, relentlessly insisted that he was. I almost never watched his show, so my preconceptions could flourish uncorrected.
That said, I did find it odd that everyone around me in the “liberal elite” media hated him so violently—the way they hated President Trump; but that when I pressed for concrete reasons why, they could not provide them.
Twitter's new "community notes" added to Tweets, has the temerity to add fact checks to leftist bullshit too. It is glorious to see after the crap of old Twitter blocking.
No wonder we are seeing all the new Tesla & SpaceX hate
Payback is a bitch & her stripper name is Karma
Sometimes the people that want to silence you/me need to be reminded of one simple fact. My right to free speech does not depend on anyone's approval but my own. My opinions are my own right or wrong. This right exists by the simple virtue of just being born. It is not a right granted by the state. Any state.
You don't like what I say?
Tough. Come up with a better argument.
Piss off Chuck.
"Why is why every two years we hear exactly the same message from the Left:
The Republicans are going to put Black people back into the fields, gays into the closet and women into the kitchen."
Well, the right has already taken steps to keep women barefoot and pregnant...on pain of imprisonment.
"Well, the right has already taken steps to keep women barefoot and pregnant...on pain of imprisonment."
Quite the misogynist aren't you.
Well, Narr, we had internment camps for German immigrants in America during WWI. I didn't learn that fact until I renovated a house in one of them and learned the story of the place. And I read a lot of history.
Fact-checkers are mostly rackets. They are explicitly partisan censors of inconvenient facts. The absolute worst? Poynter Institute and Annenberg Public Policy's FactCheck.org at U. Penn.
Elinor Burkett, a reasonable liberal, has written some of my favorite books challenging dominant media narratives, and few have ever heard of her. In contrast, her former writing partner, who manufactures lies weekly, is an esteemed editor at the NYTimes.
The Dangerous Speech Project is a dark-money funded, radically leftist organization. Take a look at their website.
Their communications director studied "intersectional feminism and film at Hampshire College." I couldn't even make that one up.
They claim that, to stay honest, they will only be funded by foundations like OSI (Soros), Tides (Soros), U.S. Institute for Peace (Soros), the dark-money Arabella Advisors through the billion dollar New Venture Fund, which directly sponsors them (both Soros). Why not just say they're being funded by a bunch of dark money organizations started by Soros and his operatives like Lee Bodner and peers like Hansjorg Wyss, funneled anonymously to nonprofits through Arabella in order to avoid 990 disclosure? Legal Insurrection has some good information on Wyss.
They have a whole page with directions for regulating speech or reporting speech that "makes you feel unsafe or unwelcome" when addressing them or participating in their activities, events, or online (see Code of Conduct).
These people are literally manufacturing leftist-regulated censorship. None of this is really about "dangerous speech."
"'Well, the right has already taken steps to keep women barefoot and pregnant...on pain of imprisonment.'
"Quite the misogynist aren't you."
???????
You must have mistaken me for someone who supports the right's clampdown on legal abortion. READING FOR COMPREHENSION is a thing. Try it.
Tina, the same in WWII, including internment of American citizens of German and Italian descent. In WWII, we even strongarmed and bribed countries in South and Central America to appropriate German, Italian, and Japanese businesses and send their nationals to the US.
Of course you know as well as I that even a critical history of US governments at war won't spend much time on that wrinkle.
I'd settle for public school students knowing when WWI was and how it defined the next many decades.
Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content." She'd also like us, the users of social media, to notice fear speech and to challenge it ourselves, to provide our own counterspeech — "not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counternarrative for people watching on the sidelines."
Let me know when she's ready to attack all the Left's fear speech
You know:
"You can have a live trans-girl or a dead cis-boy"
"The Republicans are trying to keep you all in chains"
Everything the Dems have to say about the GOP "taking away your abortion rights"
"Don't say gay!!11!"
"Republican Legislators are killing trans people!"
Shit, if you get rid of "fear speech", the Left could never say anything
Robert Cook said...
Well, the right has already taken steps to keep women barefoot and pregnant...on pain of imprisonment.
You are such a lunatic
Please do point us to the GOP laws making women barefoot. I'm really curious
And I must say I wasn't aware of any GOP back laws forcing women to have sex. Could you point us to those too?
or, for that matter, GOP laws prohibiting women from buying the Pill. In fact, last I checked the GOP was pushing to make the Pill over the counter, no doctor's permission needed, but that the Democrats were fighting that tooth and nail.
So yes, when it comes to dishonest "fear speech", no one does it like the Left does it
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