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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

The multiplying effect of media has been suspected for a while. But now the New Statesman [newstatesman.com] has taken a stand.
[For those of you who do not know, due to fake news and the general epistemological decline of society, the Statesmen are the American version of the Kingsmen, a secret society the gets into fights. Or maybe that is just a movie.]
Actual article and argument as is said to be follows:

Oh yes, they were riled. They went to their bedrooms, put on their headphones and whinged into the camera, and not just for five minutes. When it comes to defending their right to spew racism and misogyny on YouTube, the American far right cannot express themselves in chunks of time shorter than an hour.

What got them riled was a report from the research institute Data & Society entitled Alternative Influence, which used network analysis to show how modern fascism is spread inside a wider echo chamber of risqué controversialism, pulp academia and staged controversy on the YouTube platform.

The report shows not just that - as in the offline world - fascism thrives within a wider culture of reactionary ideas, but that YouTube has been designed to facilitate this happening.

“The platform, and its parent company, have allowed racist, misogynist, and harassing content to remain online – and in many cases, to generate advertising revenue – as long as it does not explicitly include slurs,” writes the report’s author Rebecca Lewis. “YouTube also profits directly from features like Super Chat which often incentivizes ‘shocking’ content.”

Well, that is why I go to facebook! Only, it is not! I mostly go for the puppy pics. Who could resist?

Hannah Arendt, in her discussion of the rise of Nazism in Germany, devoted a long passage to the importance of the division between fanatics and sympathisers, a division consciously fostered by the use of “front” organisations. For most people their first contact with Hitler’s party came not via uniformed street action, or a banner-toting rally, but through a cultural or economic group populated by non-fanatics. Arendt wrote:

“The sympathisers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a non-totalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognisable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”

Hannah Arendt knew whereof she spoke. She was a student of Heidegger, registered Nazi party member, on the list of prohibited persons until the sixties. As Azuma said in her journal [soylentnews.org], it can happen here.

This poses a range of challenges to liberal societies and to the left. Recent academic studies of alt-right sympathisers show that they are, indeed, divided into people prepared to glorify their own violence and those uneasy about it; rabid authoritarians completely sold on destroying democracy, and a wider group suffering from cultural insecurity. The political challenge is to defeat both, but in the process the task of preventing the evolution of the authoritarian conservative into the fascist is important.

I can think of no better way of doing this than excising the entire alt-right from YouTube. Hate speech is, in many countries illegal; incitement to rape and violence is a crime, so why does the world’s third biggest company, staffed largely by liberals, feminists and rationalists, want to make money by providing an echo chamber?

Some students of the alt-right argue that, by censoring them, we feed their narrative of paranoia. That is a danger. But YouTube is not a civil society in miniature: it is a business, and has business ethics and a reputation to maintain. It has already kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off the platform; it would be very easy to remove not just the open fascists but any of the useful idiot brigade who knowingly platform them and drive customers to their books and lectures.

Manson has much more to say, and the full article is recommended to all Soylentils, even jmorris, though it may hurt him.

Original Submission