The Oxygen of Amplification Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online
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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). -
Culture Wars' Reloaded: Trump, Anti-Political Correctness and the Right's 'Free Speech' Hypocrisy
The 'Culture Wars' Reloaded: Trump, Anti-Political Correctness and the Right's 'Free Speech' Hypocrisy Dr. Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada Abstract This article explores how Donald Trump capitalized on the right's decades-long, carefully choreographed and well-financed campaign against political correctness in relation to the broader strategy of 'cultural conservatism.' It provides an historical overview of various iterations of this campaign, discusses the mainstream media's complicity in promulgating conservative talking points about higher education at the height of the 1990s 'culture wars,' examines the reconfigured anti- PC/pro-free speech crusade of recent years, its contemporary currency in the Trump era and the implications for academia and educational policy. Keywords: political correctness, culture wars, free speech, cultural conservatism, critical pedagogy Introduction More than two years after Donald Trump's ascendancy to the White House, post-mortems of the 2016 American election continue to explore the factors that propelled him to office. Some have pointed to the spread of right-wing populism in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis that culminated in Brexit in Europe and Trump's victory (Kagarlitsky, 2017; Tufts & Thomas, 2017) while Fuchs (2018) lays bare the deleterious role of social media in facilitating the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Other 69 | P a g e The 'Culture Wars' Reloaded: Trump, Anti-Political Correctness and the Right's 'Free Speech' Hypocrisy explanations refer to deep-rooted misogyny that worked against Hillary Clinton (Wilz, 2016), a backlash against Barack Obama, sedimented racism and the demonization of diversity as a public good (Major, Blodorn and Blascovich, 2016; Shafer, 2017). -
The Alt-Right Comes to Power by JA Smith
USApp – American Politics and Policy Blog: Long Read Book Review: Deplorable Me: The Alt-Right Comes to Power by J.A. Smith Page 1 of 6 Long Read Book Review: Deplorable Me: The Alt- Right Comes to Power by J.A. Smith J.A Smith reflects on two recent books that help us to take stock of the election of President Donald Trump as part of the wider rise of the ‘alt-right’, questioning furthermore how the left today might contend with the emergence of those at one time termed ‘a basket of deplorables’. Deplorable Me: The Alt-Right Comes to Power Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency. Joshua Green. Penguin. 2017. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Angela Nagle. Zero Books. 2017. Find these books: In September last year, Hillary Clinton identified within Donald Trump’s support base a ‘basket of deplorables’, a milieu comprising Trump’s newly appointed campaign executive, the far-right Breitbart News’s Steve Bannon, and the numerous more or less ‘alt right’ celebrity bloggers, men’s rights activists, white supremacists, video-gaming YouTubers and message board-based trolling networks that operated in Breitbart’s orbit. This was a political misstep on a par with putting one’s opponent’s name in a campaign slogan, since those less au fait with this subculture could hear only contempt towards anyone sympathetic to Trump; while those within it wore Clinton’s condemnation as a badge of honour. Bannon himself was insouciant: ‘we polled the race stuff and it doesn’t matter […] It doesn’t move anyone who isn’t already in her camp’. -
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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. -
Who Supports Donald J. Trump?: a Narrative- Based Analysis of His Supporters and of the Candidate Himself Mitchell A
University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas Summer Research Summer 2016 Who Supports Donald J. Trump?: A narrative- based analysis of his supporters and of the candidate himself Mitchell A. Carlson 7886304 University of Puget Sound, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research Part of the American Politics Commons, and the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Carlson, Mitchell A. 7886304, "Who Supports Donald J. Trump?: A narrative-based analysis of his supporters and of the candidate himself" (2016). Summer Research. Paper 271. http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research/271 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in Summer Research by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Mitchell Carlson Professor Robin Dale Jacobson 8/24/16 Who Supports Donald J. Trump? A narrative-based analysis of his supporters and of the candidate himself Introduction: The Voice of the People? “My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her.” I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: ‘I’m with you—the American people.’ I am your voice.” So said Donald J. Trump, Republican presidential nominee and billionaire real estate mogul, in his speech echoing Richard Nixon’s own convention speech centered on law-and-order in 1968.1 2 Introduced by his daughter Ivanka, Trump claimed at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio that he—and he alone—is the voice of the people. -
(A Thousand Points Of) Light on Biased Language
Shedding (a Thousand Points of) Light on Biased Language Tae Yano Philip Resnik School of Computer Science Department of Linguistics and UMIACS Carnegie Mellon University University of Maryland Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA College Park, MD 20742, USA [email protected] [email protected] Noah A. Smith School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA [email protected] Abstract To what extent a sentence or clause is biased (none, • somewhat, very); This paper considers the linguistic indicators of bias in political text. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk The nature of the bias (very liberal, moderately lib- • judgments about sentences from American political eral, moderately conservative, very conservative, bi- blogs, asking annotators to indicate whether a sen- ased but not sure which direction); and tence showed bias, and if so, in which political di- rection and through which word tokens. We also Which words in the sentence give away the author’s asked annotators questions about their own political • views. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the bias, similar to “rationale” annotations in Zaidan et data, exploring how different groups perceive bias in al. (2007). different blogs, and showing some lexical indicators strongly associated with perceived bias. For example, a participant might identify a moderate liberal bias in this sentence, 1 Introduction Without Sestak’s challenge, we would have Bias and framing are central topics in the study of com- Specter, comfortably ensconced as a Democrat munications, media, and political discourse (Scheufele, in name only. 1999; Entman, 2007), but they have received relatively adding checkmarks on the underlined words. -
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives $6.95
CANADIAN CENTRE FOR POLICY ALTERNATIVES MAY/JUNE 2018 $6.95 Contributors Ricardo Acuña is Director of Alex Himelfarb is a former Randy Robinson is a the Parkland Institute and federal government freelance researcher, sits on the CCPA’s Member’s executive with the Privy educator and political Council. Council, Treasury Board, and commentator based in Vol. 25, No. 1 numerous other departments, Toronto. Alyssa O’Dell is Media and ISSN 1198-497X and currently chairs or serves Public Relations Officer at the Luke Savage writes and Canada Post Publication 40009942 on various voluntary boards. CCPA. blogs about politics, labour, He chairs the advisory board The Monitor is published six times philosophy and political a year by the Canadian Centre for Marc Edge is a professor of of the CCPA-Ontario. culture. Policy Alternatives. media and communication Elaine Hughes is an at University Canada West Edgardo Sepulveda is an The opinions expressed in the environmental activist in in Vancouver. His last book, independent consulting Monitor are those of the authors several non-profit groups and do not necessarily reflect The News We Deserve: The economist with more than including the Council of the views of the CCPA. Transformation of Canada’s two decades of utility Canadians, where she chairs Media Landscape, was (telecommunications) policy Please send feedback to the Quill Plains (Wynyard), published by New Star Books and regulatory experience. [email protected]. Saskatchewan chapter. in 2016. He writes about electricity, Editor: Stuart Trew Syed Hussan is Co-ordinator inequality and other Senior Designer: Tim Scarth Matt Elliott is a city columnist of the Migrant Workers economic policy issues at Layout: Susan Purtell and blogger with Metro Editorial Board: Peter Bleyer, Alliance for Change. -
The Second Tea Party-Freedomworks Survey Report
FreedomWorks Supporters: 2012 Campaign Activity, 2016 Preferences, and the Future of the Republican Party Ronald B. Rapoport and Meredith G. Dost Department of Government College of William and Mary September 11, 2013 ©Ronald B. Rapoport Introduction Since our first survey of FreedomWorks subscribers in December 2011, a lot has happened: the 2012 Republican nomination contests, the 2012 presidential and Congressional elections, continuing debates over the budget, Obamacare, and immigration, and the creation of a Republican Party Growth and Opportunity Project (GOP). In all of these, the Tea Party has played an important role. Tea Party-backed candidates won Republican nominations in contested primaries in Arizona, Indiana, Texas and Missouri, and two of the four won elections. Even though Romney was not a Tea Party favorite (see the first report), the movement pushed him and other Republican Congressional/Senatorial candidates (e.g., Orin Hatch) to engage the Tea Party agenda even when they had not done so before. In this report, we will focus on the role of FreedomWorks subscribers in the 2012 nomination and general election campaigns. We’ll also discuss their role in—and view of—the Republican Party as we move forward to 2014 and 2016. This is the first of multiple reports on the March-June 2013 survey, which re-interviewed 2,613 FreedomWorks subscribers who also filled out the December 2011 survey. Key findings: Rallying around Romney (pp. 3-4) Between the 2011 and 2013 surveys, Romney’s evaluations went up significantly from 2:1 positive to 4:1 positive surveys. By the end of the nomination process Romney and Santorum had become the two top nomination choices but neither received over a quarter of the sample’s support. -
Filed: New York County Clerk 08/24/2020 12:45 Pm Index No
FILED: NEW YORK COUNTY CLERK 08/24/2020 12:45 PM INDEX NO. 451685/2020 NYSCEF DOC. NO. 11 RECEIVED NYSCEF: 08/24/2020 SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF NEW YORK PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW Index No. _____________ YORK, by LETITIA JAMES, Attorney General of the State of New Motion Sequence _______ York, (REDACTED) Petitioner, -against- THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION, INC.; DJT HOLDINGS LLC; DJT HOLDINGS MANAGING MEMBER LLC; SEVEN SPRINGS LLC; ERIC TRUMP; CHARLES MARTABANO; MORGAN, LEWIS & BOCKIUS, LLP; and SHERI DILLON, Respondents. MEMORANDUM OF LAW IN SUPPORT OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S SPECIAL PROCEEDING AND APPLICATION TO COMPEL RESPONDENTS TO COMPLY WITH INVESTIGATORY SUBPOENAS LETITIA JAMES Attorney General of the State of New York 28 Liberty Street New York, NY 10005 1 of 68 FILED: NEW YORK COUNTY CLERK 08/24/2020 12:45 PM INDEX NO. 451685/2020 NYSCEF DOC. NO. 11 RECEIVED NYSCEF: 08/24/2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ......................................................................................................... iii PRELIMINARY STATEMENT .....................................................................................................1 BACKGROUND .............................................................................................................................4 I. The Attorney General’s authority under Executive Law § 63(12). .....................................4 II. The Attorney General’s investigation. .................................................................................5 A. Mr. -
Understanding the Qanon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information
The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information Max Aliapoulios*;y, Antonis Papasavva∗;z, Cameron Ballardy, Emiliano De Cristofaroz, Gianluca Stringhini, Savvas Zannettou◦, and Jeremy Blackburn∓ yNew York University, zUniversity College London, Boston University, ◦Max Planck Institute for Informatics, ∓Binghamton University [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] — iDRAMA, https://idrama.science — Abstract administration of a vaccine [54]. Some of these theories can threaten democracy itself [46, 50]; e.g., Pizzagate emerged The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) during the 2016 US Presidential elections and claimed that blood-thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring [51]. in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic “drops” of A specific example of the negative consequences social me- information from an anonymous insider calling themself Q, dia can have is the QAnon conspiracy theory. It originated on adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump the Politically Incorrect Board (/pol/) of the anonymous im- is leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon ageboard 4chan via a series of posts from a user going by the has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents nickname Q. Claiming to be a US government official, Q de- have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the Jan- scribed a vast conspiracy of actors who have infiltrated the US uary 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. -
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. -
Suffolk University/USA Today National July 2015
Suffolk University/USA Today National July 2015 Region: (N=1,000) n % Northeast ---------------------------------------------------------- 207 20.70 South --------------------------------------------------------------- 354 35.40 Midwest ------------------------------------------------------------ 227 22.70 West ---------------------------------------------------------------- 212 21.20 Hello, my name is __________ and I am conducting a survey for Suffolk University/USA Today and I would like to get your opinions on some issues of the day. Would you like to spend seven minutes to help us out? {ASK FOR YOUNGEST IN HOUSEHOLD} 1. Gender (N=1,000) n % Male ---------------------------------------------------------------- 484 48.40 Female ------------------------------------------------------------- 516 51.60 2. How likely are you to vote in the election for President in 2016 --very likely, somewhat likely, 50- 50 or not likely? (N=1,000) n % Very likely --------------------------------------------------------- 928 92.80 Somewhat likely ------------------------------------------------- 48 4.80 50-50 ---------------------------------------------------------------- 24 2.40 3. Do you think of yourself as a Democrat, Republican, or Independent? {IF INDEPENDENT, “Which party would you lean toward/feel closest to”} (N=1,000) n % Democrat ---------------------------------------------------------- 369 36.90 Republican -------------------------------------------------------- 313 31.30 Independent ------------------------------------------------------ 279