Understanding the Qanon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information
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Post-Truth Protest: How 4Chan Cooked Up...Zagate Bullshit | Tuters
5/5/2019 Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit | Tuters | M/C Journal M/C JOURNAL Home > Vol 21, No 3 (2018) > Tuters ARTICLE TOOLS HOME Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit PRINT THIS ARTICLE Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, Daniel Bach CURRENT ISSUE INDEXING METADATA HOW TO CITE ITEM UPCOMING ISSUES Introduction FINDING REFERENCES ARCHIVES On 4 December 2016, a man entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor armed with an AR15 assault rifle in an attempt to save the victims of an alleged satanic pedophilia ring run by EMAIL THIS ARTICLE CONTRIBUTORS prominent members of the Democratic Party. While the story had already been discredited (LOGIN REQUIRED) (LaCapria), at the time of the incident, nearly half of Trump voters were found to give a ABOUT M/C JOURNAL measure of credence to the same rumors that had apparently inspired the gunman (Frankovic). EMAIL THE AUTHOR Was we will discuss here, the bizarre conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate" had in fact (LOGIN REQUIRED) USER HOME originated a month earlier on 4chan/pol/, a message forum whose very raison d’être is to protest against “political correctness” of the liberal establishment, and which had recently ABOUT THE AUTHORS JOURNAL CONTENT become a hub for “loose coordination” amongst members the insurgent US ‘altright’ movement Marc Tuters SEARCH (Hawley 48). Over a period of 25 hours beginning on 3 November 2016, contributors to the /pol/ forum combed through a cache of private emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign https://oilab.eu manager John Podesta, obtained by Russian hackers (FranceschiBicchierai) and leaked by University of Amsterdam SEARCH SCOPE Julian Assange (Wikileaks). -
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Proceedings of the Fifteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021) A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network Max Aliapoulios1, Emmi Bevensee2, Jeremy Blackburn3, Barry Bradlyn4, Emiliano De Cristofaro5, Gianluca Stringhini6, Savvas Zannettou7 1New York University, 2SMAT, 3Binghamton University, 4University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 5University College London, 6Boston University, 7Max Planck Institute for Informatics [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract feasible in technical terms to create a new social media plat- Parler is as an “alternative” social network promoting itself form, but marketing the platform towards specific polarized as a service that allows to “speak freely and express yourself communities is an extremely successful strategy to bootstrap openly, without fear of being deplatformed for your views.” a user base. In other words, there is a subset of users on Twit- Because of this promise, the platform become popular among ter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., that will happily migrate to a new users who were suspended on mainstream social networks platform, especially if it advertises moderation policies that for violating their terms of service, as well as those fearing do not restrict the growth and spread of political polariza- censorship. In particular, the service was endorsed by several tion, conspiracy theories, extremist ideology, hateful and vi- conservative public figures, encouraging people to migrate olent speech, and mis- and dis-information. from traditional social networks. After the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Parler has been progressively de- Parler. -
Hosting the 'Holohoax': a Snapshot of Holocaust Denial Across Social Media
COVID-19 disinformation briefingISD Briefing No.2 HostingFar-right the m ‘Holohoax’obilisation 10th9th August April 2020 2020 COVIDHosting-19 the disinformation ‘Holohoax’: A Snapshotbriefing of Holocaust no. 2 Denial Across Social Media Far-rightJakob Guhl mobilisation & Jacob Davey This is the second in a series of briefings from ISD’s Digital Research Unit on the information ecosystem around coronavirus (COVID-19). These briefings expose how Executivetechnology platformsSummary are being used to promote disinformation, hate, extremism and authoritarianism in the context of COVID-19. It is based on ISD’s mixture of natural Overviewlanguage processing, network analysis and ethnographic online research. This briefing Holocaustfocuses denialon the has way long far-right been one groups of the most and insidious individuals conspiracy are mobilising theories targeting around Jewish COVID-19 in communities,the with US. its The extremist first proponents briefing drawnin the from series across can the be ideological found on spectrum, ISD’s website. from extreme right-wing to hard left to Islamist. Research has shown that digital platforms have only served to amplify and mainstream this warped strain of thinking inTop recent Lines years.1 Far-rightThis briefing groups paper andprovides individuals a snapshot are of Holocaust denialAntisemitic content acrossspeech major and social ideas media are beingplatforms. opportunisticallyBy analysing the term using ‘holohoax’, the ongoingwhich is commonly usedadapted by Holocaust to incorporate deniers, -
What Is Gab? a Bastion of Free Speech Or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber? Savvas Zannettou Barry Bradlyn Emiliano De Cristofaro Cyprus University of Technology Princeton Center for Theoretical Science University College London [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Haewoon Kwak Michael Sirivianos Gianluca Stringhini Qatar Computing Research Institute Cyprus University of Technology University College London & Hamad Bin Khalifa University [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Jeremy Blackburn University of Alabama at Birmingham [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2018. What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?. In WWW at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about ’18 Companion: The 2018 Web Conference Companion, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558. recent research has shown that they influence how false informa- 3191531 tion reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web’s information ecosystem. 1 INTRODUCTION In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created The Web’s information ecosystem is composed of multiple com- as an alternative to Twitter. -
How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics
GETTY CORUM IMAGES/SAMUEL How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics By Simon Clark July 2020 WWW.AMERICANPROGRESS.ORG How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics By Simon Clark July 2020 Contents 1 Introduction and summary 4 Tracing the origins of white supremacist ideas 13 How did this start, and how can it end? 16 Conclusion 17 About the author and acknowledgments 18 Endnotes Introduction and summary The United States is living through a moment of profound and positive change in attitudes toward race, with a large majority of citizens1 coming to grips with the deeply embedded historical legacy of racist structures and ideas. The recent protests and public reaction to George Floyd’s murder are a testament to many individu- als’ deep commitment to renewing the founding ideals of the republic. But there is another, more dangerous, side to this debate—one that seeks to rehabilitate toxic political notions of racial superiority, stokes fear of immigrants and minorities to inflame grievances for political ends, and attempts to build a notion of an embat- tled white majority which has to defend its power by any means necessary. These notions, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups, have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion, with poi- sonous results. For a starting point, one must look no further than President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy and chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller. In December 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch published a cache of more than 900 emails2 Miller wrote to his contacts at Breitbart News before the 2016 presidential election. -
Riots: a Comparative Study of Twitter and Parler
111 Capitol (Pat)riots: A comparative study of Twitter and Parler HITKUL, IIIT - Delhi, India AVINASH PRABHU∗, DIPANWITA GUHATHAKURTA∗, JIVITESH JAIN∗, MALLIKA SUBRA- MANIAN∗, MANVITH REDDY∗, SHRADHA SEHGAL∗, and TANVI KARANDIKAR∗, IIIT - Hy- derabad, India AMOGH GULATI∗ and UDIT ARORA∗, IIIT - Delhi, India RAJIV RATN SHAH, IIIT - Delhi, India PONNURANGAM KUMARAGURU, IIIT - Delhi, India On 6 January 2021, a mob of right-wing conservatives stormed the USA Capitol Hill interrupting the session of congress certifying 2020 Presidential election results. Immediately after the start of the event, posts related to the riots started to trend on social media. A social media platform which stood out was a free speech endorsing social media platform Parler; it is being claimed as the platform on which the riots were planned and talked about. Our report presents a contrast between the trending content on Parler and Twitter around the time of riots. We collected data from both platforms based on the trending hashtags and draw comparisons based on what are the topics being talked about, who are the people active on the platforms and how organic is the content generated on the two platforms. While the content trending on Twitter had strong resentments towards the event and called for action against rioters and inciters, Parler content had a strong conservative narrative echoing the ideas of voter fraud similar to the attacking mob. We also find a disproportionately high manipulation of traffic on Parler when compared to Twitter. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Social Computing, Data Mining, Social Media Analysis, Capitol Riots, Parler, Twitter 1 INTRODUCTION Misinformation of the United States of America’s presidential election results being fraudulent has been spreading across the world since the elections in November 2020.1 Public protests and legal cases were taking place across the states against the allegation of voter fraud and manhandling of mail-in ballots.2 This movement took a violent height when a mob attacked the Capitol Hill building to stop certification of Mr. -
Building Resilience & Confronting Risk In
BUILDING RESILIENCE & CONFRONTING RISK IN THE COVID-19 ERA A PARENTS & CAREGIVERS GUIDE TO ONLINE RADICALIZATION POLARIZATION AND EXTREMISM RESEARCH AND INNOVATION LAB (PERIL) PERIL brings the resources and expertise of the university sector to bear CONTENTS on the problem of growing youth polarization and extremist radicalization, through scalable research, intervention, and public education ideas to PARENT & CAREGIVER GUIDE 3 reduce rising polarization and hate. WHAT IS ONLINE RADICALIZATION? WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? 4 SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER NEW RISKS IN THE COVID-19 ERA 5 The SPLC seeks to be a catalyst for racial justice in the South and RECOGNIZING WARNING SIGNS 6 beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVERS 7 supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the ENGAGE AND EMPOWER 9 human rights of all people. RESPONDING TO HATE 11 HOW TO GET HELP 12 APPENDIX: STAYING ALERT TO SITES, PLATFORMS AND APPS FREQUENTLY EXPLOITED BY EXTREMISTS 17 ENDNOTES 19 CREDITS 20 ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLAUDIA WHITAKER PARENT & CAREGIVER GUIDE Who is this guide for? We wrote this guide with a wide Whether you live with a young person, or work virtually range of caregivers in mind. with youth, radicalization to extremism is something we all should be concerned about. Extremists looking Caregivers living with children and young adults. This to recruit and convert children are predatory. Like all includes parents, grandparents, foster parents, extended forms of child exploitation, extremist recruitment drives families, and residential counselors who are the a wedge between young people and the adults they would guardians and caregivers of children and youth living typically trust. -
It's About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek
SMSXXX10.1177/2056305116672484Social Media + SocietyBraithwaite 672484research-article2016 SI: Making Digital Cultures Social Media + Society October-December 2016: 1 –10 It’s About Ethics in Games Journalism? © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity DOI: 10.1177/2056305116672484 sms.sagepub.com Andrea Braithwaite Abstract #Gamergate is an online movement ostensibly dedicated to reforming ethics in video games journalism. In practice, it is characterized by viciously sexual and sexist attacks on women in and around gaming communities. #Gamergate is also a site for articulating “Gamergater” as a form of geek masculinity. #Gamergate discussions across social media platforms illustrate how Gamergaters produce and reproduce this gendered identity. Gamergaters perceive themselves as crusaders, under siege from critics they pejoratively refer to as SJWs (social justice warriors). By leveraging social media for concern-trolling about gaming as an innocuous masculine pastime, Gamergaters situate the heterosexual White male as both the typical gamer and the real victim of #Gamergate. #Gamergate is a specific and virulent online node in broader discussions of privilege, difference, and identity politics. Gamergaters are an instructive example of how social media operate as vectors for public discourses about gender, sexual identity, and equality, as well as safe spaces for aggressive and violent misogyny. Keywords Gamergate, gaming cultures, geek masculinity, online harassment, social media At the end of August 2014, many online gaming communities situate themselves as the “real” victims, oppressed by calls erupted into vicious arguments—ostensibly about ethics in for diversity and at risk of losing “their” games to more video game journalism, but more pointedly about gender, inclusive ones. -
Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis) Use On
Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis)Use on Social Media∗ Savvas Zannettou?, Jeremy Blackburnz, Emiliano De Cristofaroy, Michael Sirivianos?, Gianluca Stringhiniy ?Cyprus University of Technology, yUniversity College London, zUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham [email protected], [email protected], fe.decristofaro,[email protected], [email protected] Abstract In this context, an important role is played by services like the Wayback Machine (archive.org), which proactively Web archiving services play an increasingly important role archives large portions of the Web, allowing users to search in today’s information ecosystem, by ensuring the continuing and retrieve the history of more than 300 billion pages. At the availability of information, or by deliberately caching content same time, on-demand archiving services like archive.is have that might get deleted or removed. Among these, the Way- also become popular: users can take a snapshot of a Web page back Machine has been proactively archiving, since 2001, ver- by entering its URL, which the system crawls and archives, re- sions of a large number of Web pages, while newer services turning a permanent short URL serving as a time capsule that like archive.is allow users to create on-demand snapshots of can be shared across the Web. specific Web pages, which serve as time capsules that can be shared across the Web. In this paper, we present a large-scale Archiving services serve a variety of purposes beyond ad- analysis of Web archiving services and their use on social me- dressing link rot. Platforms like archive.is are reportedly used dia, shedding light on the actors involved in this ecosystem, to preserve controversial blogs and tweets that the author may the content that gets archived, and how it is shared. -
Archons (Commanders) [NOTICE: They Are NOT Anlien Parasites], and Then, in a Mirror Image of the Great Emanations of the Pleroma, Hundreds of Lesser Angels
A R C H O N S HIDDEN RULERS THROUGH THE AGES A R C H O N S HIDDEN RULERS THROUGH THE AGES WATCH THIS IMPORTANT VIDEO UFOs, Aliens, and the Question of Contact MUST-SEE THE OCCULT REASON FOR PSYCHOPATHY Organic Portals: Aliens and Psychopaths KNOWLEDGE THROUGH GNOSIS Boris Mouravieff - GNOSIS IN THE BEGINNING ...1 The Gnostic core belief was a strong dualism: that the world of matter was deadening and inferior to a remote nonphysical home, to which an interior divine spark in most humans aspired to return after death. This led them to an absorption with the Jewish creation myths in Genesis, which they obsessively reinterpreted to formulate allegorical explanations of how humans ended up trapped in the world of matter. The basic Gnostic story, which varied in details from teacher to teacher, was this: In the beginning there was an unknowable, immaterial, and invisible God, sometimes called the Father of All and sometimes by other names. “He” was neither male nor female, and was composed of an implicitly finite amount of a living nonphysical substance. Surrounding this God was a great empty region called the Pleroma (the fullness). Beyond the Pleroma lay empty space. The God acted to fill the Pleroma through a series of emanations, a squeezing off of small portions of his/its nonphysical energetic divine material. In most accounts there are thirty emanations in fifteen complementary pairs, each getting slightly less of the divine material and therefore being slightly weaker. The emanations are called Aeons (eternities) and are mostly named personifications in Greek of abstract ideas. -
Dear Secretary Salazar: I Strongly
Dear Secretary Salazar: I strongly oppose the Bush administration's illegal and illogical regulations under Section 4(d) and Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, which reduce protections to polar bears and create an exemption for greenhouse gas emissions. I request that you revoke these regulations immediately, within the 60-day window provided by Congress for their removal. The Endangered Species Act has a proven track record of success at reducing all threats to species, and it makes absolutely no sense, scientifically or legally, to exempt greenhouse gas emissions -- the number-one threat to the polar bear -- from this successful system. I urge you to take this critically important step in restoring scientific integrity at the Department of Interior by rescinding both of Bush's illegal regulations reducing protections to polar bears. Sarah Bergman, Tucson, AZ James Shannon, Fairfield Bay, AR Keri Dixon, Tucson, AZ Ben Blanding, Lynnwood, WA Bill Haskins, Sacramento, CA Sher Surratt, Middleburg Hts, OH Kassie Siegel, Joshua Tree, CA Sigrid Schraube, Schoeneck Susan Arnot, San Francisco, CA Stephanie Mitchell, Los Angeles, CA Sarah Taylor, NY, NY Simona Bixler, Apo Ae, AE Stephan Flint, Moscow, ID Steve Fardys, Los Angeles, CA Shelbi Kepler, Temecula, CA Kim Crawford, NJ Mary Trujillo, Alhambra, CA Diane Jarosy, Letchworth Garden City,Herts Shari Carpenter, Fallbrook, CA Sheila Kilpatrick, Virginia Beach, VA Kierã¡N Suckling, Tucson, AZ Steve Atkins, Bath Sharon Fleisher, Huntington Station, NY Hans Morgenstern, Miami, FL Shawn Alma, -
The Qanon Conspiracy
THE QANON CONSPIRACY: Destroying Families, Dividing Communities, Undermining Democracy THE QANON CONSPIRACY: PRESENTED BY Destroying Families, Dividing Communities, Undermining Democracy NETWORK CONTAGION RESEARCH INSTITUTE POLARIZATION AND EXTREMISM RESEARCH POWERED BY (NCRI) INNOVATION LAB (PERIL) Alex Goldenberg Brian Hughes Lead Intelligence Analyst, The Network Contagion Research Institute Caleb Cain Congressman Denver Riggleman Meili Criezis Jason Baumgartner Kesa White The Network Contagion Research Institute Cynthia Miller-Idriss Lea Marchl Alexander Reid-Ross Joel Finkelstein Director, The Network Contagion Research Institute Senior Research Fellow, Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience, Rutgers University SPECIAL THANKS TO THE PERIL QANON ADVISORY BOARD Jaclyn Fox Sarah Hightower Douglas Rushkoff Linda Schegel THE QANON CONSPIRACY ● A CONTAGION AND IDEOLOGY REPORT FOREWORD “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by the majority.” –Booker T. Washington As a GOP Congressman, I have been uniquely positioned to experience a tumultuous two years on Capitol Hill. I voted to end the longest government shut down in history, was on the floor during impeachment, read the Mueller Report, governed during the COVID-19 pandemic, officiated a same-sex wedding (first sitting GOP congressman to do so), and eventually became the only Republican Congressman to speak out on the floor against the encroaching and insidious digital virus of conspiracy theories related to QAnon. Certainly, I can list the various theories that nest under the QAnon banner. Democrats participate in a deep state cabal as Satan worshiping pedophiles and harvesting adrenochrome from children. President-Elect Joe Biden ordered the killing of Seal Team 6.