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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Free speech, and all that, but a report at The New Republic [newrepublic.com] suggests some speech is violence.

What a harassment campaign reveals about a darling journal of the intellectual dark web.

On May 15, a man named Eoin Lenihan posted a Twitter thread [archive.is] that promised to reveal the results of a bombshell new study. Presenting himself as an “online extremism researcher,” he invoked two of the right wing’s favorite bogeymen—antifa and “the media”—and claimed he could prove that one was in bed with the other. The right-wing media sat up and took notice—and then things quickly got out of hand.

More.

In one close-up graph, those 15 accounts were highlighted in green. Mine was one of them.

This “discovery” inspired a smugly delighted reaction from various right-wing outlets like Breitbart, RedState, RT, and Human Events, which licked their lips and posted alarmist articles about Lenihan’s “findings” and his subsequent Twitter suspension. Perhaps that was to be expected. Of particular interest, though, was that Quillette, a magazine that has been dubbed the voice of the so-called intellectual dark web, also joined the pile-on. Others have pointed out that Quillette, which strives to be a serious journal of opinion, is merely another reactionary outlet on the right. But its embrace of Lenihan, a discredited far-right troll who formerly operated an account under the name “Progdad” that was suspended by Twitter in 2018, shows that it is reactionary to the point of recklessness endangerment.

Then things get nasty.

The day after it was published, the article made its way to notorious white supremacist forum Stormfront, and I soon found out what was meant by “further study.”

A few weeks after Lenihan had his big day out at Quillette, I got a message from a friend warning me about a weird video that had just popped up on YouTube. As the Columbia Journalism Review describes, the video showed “imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the reporters mentioned by Lenihan under the heading ‘Sunset the Media.’” My face was there, next to those of a dozen other writers, activists, and friends.

A quick dig around confirmed that the user who’d made it was a fan of Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi cell that’s been responsible for at least five murders. A quote from virulent American neo-Nazi James Mason, the author of racist manifesto Siege (which is something of a spiritual text for Atomwaffen), ended the clip.

And so?

As it happens, I was one of the lucky ones. The people Lenihan singled out in his thread and in the article got the lion’s share of the harassment. Here’s the thing, ultimately: This study was never meant to start a conversation about journalistic integrity, or ethics, or anything of the sort. It was meant to target leftist journalists, and this is exactly what the right-wing propaganda machine, including Quillette, enabled it to do on a broader scale.

Yeah, good people on both sides, only, not.

Original Submission