For the Left, right-wing meme-makers and trolls are now an existential threat.
A recent piece by Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press demonstrates the paranoia the establishment media is all-too happy to stoke, depicting the growing communities of energetic and young right-wingers as public safety threats whose growth correlates to recent mass shootings.
In her article, Seitz paints a dark, horror-film portrait of an internet culture that, she argues, is a breeding ground for violence.
“The social media posts are of a distinct type,” Seitz writes. “They hint darkly that the CIA or the FBI are behind mass shootings. They traffic in racist, sexist and homophobic tropes. They revel in the prospect of a ‘white boy summer.’”
“White nationalists and supremacists, on accounts often run by young men, are building thriving, macho communities across social media platforms like Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, evading detection with coded hashtags and innuendo.”
For Seitz, the issue isn’t just that these social media influencers are “riling up thousands of followers on divisive issues including abortion, guns, immigration and LGBTQ rights.” For her, as it is for many on the left, the internet’s anti-establishment Right is a danger to national security.
“The Department of Homeland Security warned Tuesday that such skewed framing of the subjects could drive extremists to violently attack public places across the U.S. in the coming months,” she wrote.
Seitz adds, “These type of threats and racist ideology have become so commonplace on social media that it’s nearly impossible for law enforcement to separate internet ramblings from dangerous, potentially violent people, Michael German, who infiltrated white supremacy groups as an FBI agent, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.”
Hidden in that statement is an implication that should concern not only anyone on the right, but anyone interested in preserving free political discourse in America. If it’s “nearly impossible,” as German contends and Seitz writes, to separate the mere social-media posts from the violent actions of supposed “right-wing” criminals, then the logical conclusion they likely want us to come to is that all right-wing speech must be treated as criminal activity and thus suppressed and persecuted.
For German, the key is to begin with “monitoring” such speech. After all, the first step for the government to control and censor what you’re saying is for the government to keep tabs on everything you’re saying.
“It seems intuitive that effective social media monitoring might provide clues to help law enforcement prevent attacks,” German said, per AP. “After all, the white supremacist attackers in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and El Paso all gained access to materials online and expressed their hateful, violent intentions on social media.”
The article notes that “DHS and the FBI are also working with state and local agencies to raise awareness about the increased threat around the U.S. in the coming months.”
But it isn’t only law enforcement that has their eye on the right-wing social-media sphere. Seitz explains how the Big Tech companies themselves are trying to crack down on speech:
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta banned praise and support for white nationalist and separatists movements in 2019 on company platforms, but the social media shift to subtlety makes it difficult to moderate the posts. Meta says it has more than 350 experts, with backgrounds from national security to radicalization research, dedicated to ridding the site of such hateful speech.
“We know these groups are determined to find new ways to try to evade our policies, and that’s why we invest in people and technology and work with outside experts to constantly update and improve our enforcement efforts,” David Tessler, the head of dangerous organizations and individuals policy for Meta, said in a statement.
Of course, one of the problems is that experience has long shown us that anyone the Left doesn’t like, no matter what their political ideology may be, gets branded a white nationalist or supremacist. In leftists’ world, everything from the Second Amendment to low taxes to wanting to audit the Federal Reserve is just a different shade of white supremacy.
One doesn’t have to wonder where the Left is going with this rhetoric; they’re making it clear as day.
Writes Seitz:
U.S. extremists are mimicking the social media strategy used by the Islamic State group, which turned to subtle language and images across Telegram, Facebook and YouTube a decade ago to evade the industry-wide crackdown of the terrorist group’s online presence, said Mia Bloom, a communications professor at Georgia State University.
“They’re trying to recruit,” said Bloom, who has researched social media use for both Islamic State terrorists and far-right extremists. “We’re starting to see some of the same patterns with ISIS and the far-right. The coded speech, the ways to evade AI. The groups were appealing to a younger and younger crowd.”
If America’s political Right is equivalent to ISIS or al-Qaeda, then they naturally deserve to be suppressed, censored, arrested, and killed just like those terrorist groups, right?
Ultimately, that’s where all this is headed.
