Something interesting, troubling, and important is happening. This weekend there’s an NBC special about online disinformation campaigns and recruitment pipelines for right-wing radicalism. On one level it’s good; the media has historically ignored the complexity of the problem.
There’s a pretty serious problem, though: This isn’t a new, emergent issue. The roots go back to the earliest days of the social web, and the specific networks they’re covering in Sunday’s special predate Trump.
A handful of Black women — writers, scholars, artists, thinkers — were at ground zero for the rise of those disinformation and radicalization networks before anyone else took the issue seriously. 2013, 2014, 2015… long before mainstream reporters knew a chan from a flan.
It’s not an exclusive list, but @Blackamazon? @so_treu? @sassycrass? @Karnythia? I was just online enough to notice ~weird stuff~ spilling onto Twitter in that era, and discovered they were doing the work of untangling “lulz-driven” disinfo campaigns that predated today’s Q shit.
They wrote explainers, they mobilized of realtime bot-spotting networks, they wrote articles, explained exactly what was happening, got brigaded and harassed and threatened… and they kept waving flags and warning people: “Marginalized communities are just the training ground.”
And here we are. The networks have metastasized into nightmare shit straight out of cyberpunk dystopia. They’ve recruited your uncle and your grandmother and your failson cousin and they’ve built lucrative, militarized cults. They’re a nontrivial component of resurgent fascism.
I’m not just angry because those women have been doing the research and the documentation and warning everyone from @jack to @chrislhayes for years, and I’m not just angry because mainstream journalism isn’t centering their experience and input as the story finally “”“breaks”“”
I’m angry because one of the reasons this cluster of smart as fuck extremely online writers and researchers and thinkers was at ground zero was because they were already shitlisted by cliquey swaths of Obama-era white liberal digital media.
They called bullshit when one of the golden boys of hip-white-guy-feminism turned out to be a predator — and launched really significant critiques of the race-and-class gatekeeping in some of the most popular digital media outlets of the time who shielded him.
4chan didn’t come up with the idea of exploiting racial fault lines in hashtag-feminism to power and protect harassment; Schwyzer did the R&D for them, they just ran with it. And it worked because the black women sounding alarms were inconvenient.
And then we got #endfathersday and #yourslipishowing and christ almighty g*mergate, which you still can’t mention by name six years later because it became the model for mass-monetized hatemobbing that Q only refined.
And those same women are still writing and researching and pitching and interviewing because they’re smart as fuck and they have work to do. Writing them out of the story of what is happening right now isn’t failure to cite — it’s a refusal to engage with what’s goign on.
That deep, consistent thread of exploiting pre-existing fault lines of racism, mysogyny, and xyonophoia is still baked into campaigns of disinfo and recruitment. No coverage can untangle it without pulling off the painful scabs and looking at how the shit snowball started.
It will keep happening. It will keep growing. It will keep turning your loved ones and your coworkers into hate machines. It will keep putting literal 4chan cultists into Congress. It will keep destroying lives for lulz and patreon subs and the dream of ethnostate.
So yeah, tune in Sunday.
Read @Karnythia’s books. Back @so_treu and @sassycrass’s work on Patreon. Hire the ever-loving fuck out of @Blackamazon for your thinktank, because she’ll turn your busted systems inside out.
And demand that our journalists stop pretending the story started when Hillary lost.
Okay, one more shot. The next time you hear the White House spokesbot of the week whinging about “cancel culture” to deflect critique of the day’s latest atrocity?
Take a long hard moment and remember that didn’t start as a right-wing talking point. hand-wringing about “Toxic Callout Culture” started as a way to frame black feminist critiques of all that shit upthread as “mean” and “unforgiving.”
The radical right isn’t full of geniuses. They pick up whatever tools are at hand, and they’re happy to use 'em.
We need to ask why those tools keep working.