> Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.
I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging. It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.
The article doesn't use the term I've heard of to describe this, which is "data gap".
Take something like a query for "Is the Earth Flat?". There's not a continual stream of videos, posts, and comments about how round the earth is (it's just taken as a given). So Google naturally floats content that says "The Earth is Flat" to the top.
This plays out in all sorts of odd and horrific ways. There was a local political contest where one candidate accused the other of some literal nonsense (it was something like they were a demon or smelled like sulfur). This rumor was making the rounds on Facebook, etc and if you Google'd their name and "sulfer" you'd find some whacked out post about how some lady stood behind them at a coffee shop and thought they smelled and that they were satan's lovechild.
What is that candidate to do? Put up their own competing post saying "I don't smell like sulfur?"
Google-related, but I'd submit that YouTube is one of the prime culprits. Kids like stuff like video games. Video game recommendations devolve into chud territory in two hops - fascist in three or four.
I wonder how much of this is due to marketing. I know for example PragerU heavily advertises on Youtube. Is there a way for an advertiser on youtube to get better recommendation placements?
Dunno why you're downvoted; to me it's a reasonable question. What I don't know--and why I am profoundly concerned about such recommendation algorithms--is if there's any way for non-Googlers to ever check that.
I'm not. I am implying that it is conservative and advertises a lot. If you can get from videogames to PragerU in a couple clicks I wouldn't be surprised if you could get from PragerU to facist stuff in a couple clicks.
And if it's possible to get from almost anywhere in youtube into conservative propaganda territory in 1-2 clicks, then from there I think the recommendation system can (without ads) probably get you to the fascist stuff, since the recommendation system wants to give you more right wing politics and maybe can't differentiate very well within that space
OK, but fascism also isn't conservative or right-wing.
Benito Mussolini: “If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”
Benito Mussolini: “Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
Benito Mussolini: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
Benito Mussolini: "It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity."
That sort of government-oriented thinking sure isn't conservative or right-wing.
While deification of the government is not conservative, deification of the state most definitely is conservative. We've been dealing with this for decades. Have you noticed the way that conservatives drape themselves in the flag to assert some kind of innate kinship with the state? Do you remember conservatives' "America: love it or leave it", aimed at anti-war (i.e., generally left or left-leaning) Vietnam protestors?
Fascism arises from racial supremacism and a desire to re-acquire a period of purported historical greatness. This is definitionally "of the right wing" and it is incidentally why it is in many ways very compatible with conservatism; it uses their language. They have shellcodes into conservatives' brains.
Frankly, assertions of "non-right-wing fascism" to the otherwise are mostly seeded by bad actors to muddy the waters and to whatabout about leftists. (EDIT: and this is really dumb--the left in the United States, the UK, etc. are happy to give you actual sticks to beat them about the head with, why is there a need for these fake ones?)
I don't think PragerU is fascist. I was thinking you can get from video games to PragerU in two hops like the parent comment mentioned. Maybe two hops from there you can get to fascist stuff
Keep in mind a lot of fascist stuff tries to brand itself as " a search for "inconvenient truths" and usually doesn't outright say "yes I want to support a white ethnostate and murder minorities by doing X/Y/Z".
PragerU is exactly what I was thinking of, yes; it's firmly chud stuff. Everybody's favorite cool skull, Shaun, has a pretty good breakdown of the nonsense they throw out there:
From there, you definitely can get to actual fascists, whose channels I won't shout out here. And, because YouTube fits to a very small set of data points, one misclick onto PragerU may very well fit you for a whole lot of shit.
I watched that whole thing... and honestly, he's just as guilty of the straw-man arguments and fallacies he's accusing pragerU of. He's also removed what little context those videos had and thus they make even less sense then if you saw the full context.
> He's also removed what little context those videos had
He does specifically say at the beginning of his videos that you should go and watch the ones he's quoting to make sure he's not taking them unfairly out of context.
Targeting gamers is neo-fascism's bread and butter strategy since they proved the concept with "GamerGate." I remember seeing all that stupid GG nonsense and having no idea I was watching the beginning of a massively successful propaganda offensive.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, it's completely correct. Andrew Auernheimer (weev) says:
> the man is talking down to gamergate which is by far the single biggest siren bringing people into the folds of white nationalism. More people have been converted in the past year by things like images of Anita Sarkeesian being rendered as a happy merchant than were in the three before it.
"Targeting" and "strategy" imply that there's some Grand Alt-Right Congress directing some organized movement. That doesn't need to exist: it's worth recalling that the people who follow the whole GamerGate thing are, themselves, generally interested in video games. It's not unexpected for overlap and recommendations to go both ways.
There was no Grand Congress but there was a loose confederation of ideologues who saw GG and saw a major opportunity to radicalize young people. I don't know how organic GG itself was. It didn't look organic but then again it's hard to tell.
Really? I haven't seen any fascist video on YouTube. Yes, there are lots of right-wing videos. Fascist? I don't believe there are that many on YouTube, unless you define fascist as anything anti-left.
Its critical aspects include inherent beliefs of racial superiority and the need to "recapture" a great society lost. And there are plenty on YouTube with large followings. Though some have been banned since. Chud Supreme Carl, "Sargon of Akkad", comes to mind as an example, and one I'm willing to namedrop because 1) he has been banned, and 2) dear Carl is now running for the European Parliament as a member of literal-fascist Ukip.
I'm sorry, but you don't get to do that! `fascism` already has an established meaning. Please make up a new word for what you believe `fascism` means.
Going by the dictionary definition:
> 1. a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
This is the exact opposite of Carl's beliefs and agenda.
EDIT: how can we have any discussion about anything if everyone gets to define words to mean whatever they want to mean?
> I'm sorry, but you don't get to do that! `fascism` already has an established meaning. Please make up a new word for what you believe `fascism` means
I see your point, but honestly, that's not how language work. Changes in meaning over time are not so uncommon, and "fascist" has been used in a loose sense for years (at least in Italian), but looking at Wikipedia this holds for English too.
Your dictionary editor gets to do that. That narrow definition you quote did not come out of thin air. Or maybe it did.
I’ve never heard of ‘fascisti’ - that’s just Italian for “fascists”, not an Organization.
There is a lot more nuance to what the word came to mean that is impossible to capture in one or two paragraphs. The Wikipedia page is already a great improvement over that, recommend that as a source instead, collectively reviewed by hundreds of editors.
Well, a lot of people seem to have accepted that it's racist to oppose discriminating based on race in college admissions... This would not be the first time in recent memory that a word came to be used for exactly the opposite meaning.
I'd love to hear from someone who thinks that that isn't a definition in use today, or that affirmative action wouldn't have been considered prima facie racist a century ago, no matter the races.
> how can we have any discussion about anything if everyone gets to define words to mean whatever they want to mean?
Redefining terms has been common on reddit for years now but it is gaining ground here quite steadily. It's pretty disheartening that the mods seem fine with this, perhaps they see it as an ends justifies the means type of thing.
But from "Sargon's" perspective, UKIP isn't fascist - it's the party attempting to remove the UK from the growing, minimally accountable supreme bureaucracy known as the EU.
It's always better to understand your enemies before you start to insult them. Otherwise your insults just increase polarization, because while people who agree with you will find them obviously true... People on the other side will find them objectively false. And we don't need more polarization nowadays.
> inherent beliefs of racial superiority
IMO painting all belief in racial differences as racist/fascist (which is what this tends to devolve into) is a great way to ignore actual problems. Problems like medicines being tested on populations of primarily white men and women not always working for african americans or other groups... And of course this is an area where one side is politically correct (no differences below the skin) and another is factually correct (different ethnic groups have significant differences in susceptibility to disease, athletic performance, etc).
Oh that's stupid! We (non racist people) know that black people are black and white people are white (biological differences), we just don't think it's in any way a reason to treat them differently.
(same thing with men and women ;)
Being for or against affirmative action and quotas is kind of orthogonal to being a racist, though? There are certainly racists who support affirmative action, and obviously ones who don't. (for instance, people who think that there is a difference in mean IQ between races, but thinks that affirmative action to compensate would increase societal stability) Similarly, there are people who believe all racial differences are skin deep / stop at the neck who support affirmative action and ones who do not. (For instance, people who think that affirmative action is counterproductive and will lead to racism)
There might be a correlation there, but let's not pretend that only two corners of that matrix are populated.
I'm not an advocacy for affirmative action and quotas, but I think they were made to "counteract" social discrimination based on race and sex, and not race and sex differences themselves.
I think I might say that in an imaginary society without racism and sexism, I would be against affirmative action and quotas! (well there wouldn't be need for them...)
> we just don't think it's in any way a reason to treat them differently
This is blatantly false. At least different skin color can lead to different treatment in face makeup and portrait photography. Not to mention all sorts of different needs from men and women. Your belief of biological differences should have no impact on social implication cannot be more wrong.
You think UKIP is fascist? Wikipedia defines that with the phrase "...dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition...". Many powerful politically inclined groups are forcibly silencing their opponents these days, but UKIP is not among them.
On political topics, Wikipedia is extremely untrustworthy. Paid political workers are writing things like that. Lots of definitions have been changing over the past decade or two. Fascism and also Nazi would not normally have included "right-wing" in the definition in the prior century.
I suppose UKIP not wanting to submit to their EU bureaucrat overlords makes them radical, right-wing, authoritarian, ultranationalists. Can't someone just finally be sick and tired of all the consequences of EU globalism without being labeled a racist? Sigh... I guess someone has to live for decades in one of the areas worst affected by globalism in order to grasp what has been squandered. For most people, they're not paying the price, so they don't see the problem.
Can you post any evidence to support your claim? An example of evidence would be the definition of the word "fascist" you are using including a link to the authoritative source, and then some sort of verifiably authentic statement from UKIP that demonstrates their beliefs are truly and properly described as "fascist".
You can of course define it however you want but that doesn't mean your definition is correct or even close to the actual definition.
You see, according to your and Danskin's definition roughly 20% (and it's growing since more political parties are adopting the same politics) of the swedish population are fascist based on last years election where the Sweden Democrats (labeled as racists and fascists in the mainstream media) became the 2nd largest political party.
The problem here is that the left is tilting so far left that even centrists are being labeled as far-right these days.
Right, which means if someone in some other site linked to one of those videos and I clicked on it out of curiosity (or - more recently in my case - to pick it apart in yet another online argument), guess what kind of videos are going to spam my recommendations for months on end?
No, that's not how their algorithm works. I can't find the link now, but a former employee said that their algorithm is designed to keep you engaged with the site, and that typically involves directing you to more and more extreme versions of the previous videos. For example, if you were to watch a video about mainstream rock and continually follow YouTube's recommendations at the end of the videos, you'd end up at videos about death metal, or other niche genres. It does the same thing with politics; you can start out watching a Bernie Sanders video and end up at videos promoting full on socialism, or watch a video about increasing border security and end up at videos about immigrants ruining the country.
If a lot of people into video games and history watch X, it will recommend X to you. And it turns out that the community of active, engaged video games folk have a lot of chuds who are all over alt-right-to-fascist video content.
I saw a similar thing with a religious apologist, they had a very specific claim ready to throw out out to me on a specific supposed "prophecy", and later googling that I got page after page of religious propaganda. They'd targeted that particular thing, rather than trying to take over more general listings for "prophecy in the bible", so that only articles that agreed with them showed up.
It took some creative googling to eventually get to an actual academic historical paper on the subject, which then of course immediately blew what they claimed out of the water.
> It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children
I'm not sure there's much of a difference. I'm very grateful for my high school librarian who ingrained into our minds the importance of data verification. She seemed to recognize the potential for user manipulation in a very real way. I feel like that's something that a majority of my acquaintances lack.
Before Google search got personalized it was great for fact checking, but today it seems to re-enforce your existing views. There's value in both approaches, but it depends on context. At some point I'm sure that context will be resolved, but I'm afraid the fallout from the existing state of things will be severe.
But how does one respect the intellect and agency of one's peers when one feels the public can be "damaged" merely by the local maxima of YouTube or Facebook's recommendation systems?
It's like YouTube showed me too many spiritual videos, and now I give all my money to Scientology.
To me it is simply the truth that we as a population is affected by ads or propaganda. Every single person might tell themselves "those ads dont affect me", but that is obviously not the truth. It does not mean that I lose respect for anyone. We, as humans, are simply flawed. And our society should help us make the best of our flawed selves.
Is this a rhetorical question? A lot of (most?) adults aren't immune to this sort of manipulation, let alone kids. See: Fox News, cults in general, and so on.
It's not just about bad information, or opinion stated as fact, or whatever. Whether it is designed to indoctrinate and radicalize, or whether it "simply" evolved that way as a meme (in the Dawkins sense, probably clumsily applied), that's how it works. These people haven't just been taught incorrect facts, but whole distinctive patterns of speech and thought that serve to reinforce their own commitment and induce it in others.
It's an arms race, and in an emotionally vulnerable state I doubt even the sharpest kids (or, again, adults) are fully armored against it.
It sounds like a joke, but this content is purposefully created and disseminated for the purpose of "going viral," so that it can spread itself. It's created by people who either have only consumed like content and want to spread their virus ("my personal opinion based on internet reasearch is that...") or people who actually create this stuff on purpose to push the agenda of their employ.
The Dawkins meme analogy is brilliant, we just hadn't really seen it used as a weapon until pretty recently.
Memes have been a core part of political strategy for decades. Human beings have never thought fundamentally based on facts, and they likely never will. All parties do it to varying degrees, but it's very difficult to see it when it lines up with your personal ideology.
I guess one part of it is that alt-right sources pre-inoculate readers against potential sources of truth, by calling them liars.
For instance, Snopes is often held up as a good place to go to debunk things. Except one of the things you learn early on from even moderate right-wing sources is that Snopes is apparently massively left-wing-biased, and since they've been wrong or biased on a couple of things, it means their entire worldview is suspect. And of course you can't trust any of the lying mainstream media.
So at that point you hit up Google and - surprise - the only sources of truth remaining are right-wing sites, and left-wing blogs trying to discredit them; but the left-wing blogs have a very obvious political bias, and they're just written by some guy in a basement, so of course they're lying too. So you're left with only writing that confirms what you suspected in the first place.
I guess the only way out of that is to be smart enough to notice the internal inconsistencies or plot holes, or that some of the facts that are being asserted simply cannot be true - and then principled enough to care about that. Both of those are probably quite high hurdles for a casual news-reader.
Certainly in less extreme circumstances, when I have occasionally checked moderate right-wing sites to fact-check my own left-wing news sources, I have found it very hard to trust that those sites might be correct, and that my favourite news site might be mistaken. And I don't do that anywhere near as often as I should do.
In part I would say it is because facts is very rarely as clean as we would want so the norm is to mix opinion and facts in a way to create a easy to understand narrative. In addition information tend to be simplified by making things more extreme, like turning "a few" to "all" and "sometimes" to "always".
The article brings up several topics which education did not give the boy enough tools or information to properly investigate. The relation between religion and violence. The relation between religion and usury laws. Wealth statistics and distribution and the extreme amount of different way it can be presented based on different narratives. Gun laws in relation with crime statistics. Human rights and how/why there exist sex differences in the law covering rights and responsibilities for women and men during and after a pregnancy.
Those are quite complex topics and the issue as I see it is not that he was unable to determine which sources from Google is right or wrong, but that society is presenting them as easy facts with right and wrong narratives.
I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging. It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.