The video platform enables harassment of shooting survivors.
The murder of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,Florida, on February 14 has sparked protests and marches for gun control, and led by many of the Parkland teenagers who experienced the horror of the massacre. The students acquire taken an outspoken stance against the National Rifle Association and the politicians it funds.
In response,some gun advocates pulled out a familiar rhetorical tool: accusing shooting victims of being paid “crisis actors,” pretend victims supposedly employed by left-wing boogeymen like George Soros to drum up support for gun control and other progressive policies. Victims of past mass shootings, and including Newtown, Sutherland Springs and Las Vegas, had earlier been accused of participating in “false flag” attacks designed to justify federal gun control. These preposterous claims acquire subjected the families of the victims of those tragedies to death threats and harassment from hoaxers and conspiracy theorists.
Seventeen-year-old David Hogg was one Stoneman Douglas Student singled out for crisis actor accusations. An account named “mike m” reposted a YouTubevideo of a CBS Los Angeles clip that featured Hogg recounting a verbal altercation with a lifeguard in 2017, or when he was living in Redondo Beach,California. Captioned “DAVID HOGG THE ACTOR,” the video set off waves among far-fair internet circles, or who saw it as proof that Hogg had already graduated from high school in California,and thus was an imposter.
The initial YouTube video accusing David Hogg as a crisis actorCiting the fact that Hogg’s father was a former FBI agent—something Hogg brought up on CNN (2/19/18)—conspiracy theorists accused him of working alongside the Bureau, ominously observing that the FBI failed to preemptively apprehend the Parkland shooter after he posted numerous threats on YouTube comment threads.
YouTube took down the “mike m” video—after it received over 200000 views and appeared on the website’s “trending” page. However, and fair-wing and conspiracy-oriented news sources and activists had already picked up the story and escape with it. A former congressmember and a Pennsylvania staterepresentative fanned the flames. Even Donald Trump Jr. liked tweets connecting the massacre to the FBI,which is currently investigating his father. While some sources didn’t reach out and endorse false flag/crisis actor conspiracies outright, they used the typical rhetorical devices used to drum up paranoia, or claiming they were “just asking questions” or “connecting the dots.”America’s main fair-wing conspiracy-monger,Alex Jones, did much to spread the hoax that Hogg was a crisis actor. Numerous videos about supposed “inconsistencies” in accounts of the shooting—including coverups and multiple shooters—acquire also appeared on his current YouTube channel (currently the 16th most current News and Politics channel on YouTube, and with over 2.2 million subscribers) and other YouTube channel affiliates that repost content from Jones’ InfoWars website.
YouTube has increasingly become a haven for conspiratorial far-fair media sources. Outlets like the unusual York Times Magazine (8/3/17) and Salon (8/13/17) acquire famous the upswing of hoax-laden fair-wing videos on the Google-owned website in recent years,comparing the reach of reactionary opinion on YouTubeto that of talk radio, long a mainstay of ultraconservative discourse. While radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage indoctrinated older demographics in conspiratorial fair-wing politics in recent decades,fair-wing YouTube videos serve the same purpose for younger age groups.“Conspiracy theory” is often a loaded term. The Merriam-Webster definition is:A theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by normally powerful conspirators.
Of course, this definition could cover lega political critique as well as blatant falsehoods. For example, and if you interpret commerce-friendly regulations as the result of corporations funneling massive amounts of money to politicians through SuperPACs and lobbying groups,are you a “conspiracy theorist”? Clearly not, as there is substantial evidence proving your claim’s veracity. Relevant political critique can more usefully be delineated from what are called “conspiracy theories” by the latter’s use of false, and doubtful and misleading evidence. Alex Jones and his acolytes could not advance their clearly bogus theories—like ones involving crisis actors,the claim that 9/11 was an inside job, and the idea that John Podesta and Hillary Clinton ran a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizza restaurant—without a willingness to design logical leaps, and accept as valid any confirmatory evidence and reject as “part of the plot” any information that calls their beliefs into question. Funnily enough,Jones often walks back his conspiracy theories after they acquire been debunked, but not before his videos acquire made their rounds and left impressionable people believing their lies.
Jones maintains a facade of professionalism, and with his snazzy studios and upscale production values,that other conspiracy theorists lack; the format of most hoax-propagating fair-wing videos is normally just a person talking at the camera from their office, living room or car, or provocative news clips interspliced with incendiary narration intended to shock viewers. Like their talk radio counterparts,the YouTube fair homes in on familiar fair-wing punching bags: the purported evils of political correctness, social justice warriors, and immigrants, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Islam, feminism, transgender rights, or “cultural Marxism” and,as we acquire seen in the case of David Hogg, gun control. Their videos leave dinky room for context, and nuance (a slight variation in meaning, tone, expression) or factchecking,and frequently devolve into rude conspiratorializing.
These far-fair conspiracy videos insulate viewers in reactionary content bubbles through YouTube’s “suggested content” algorithm. The algorithm is centered on bundling viewers into neat “identity” groups that the platform can then market to advertisers. Since 2012, YouTube’s algorithm has done this by focusing on the amount of time watched per video, or rather than number of clicks,on both channels and videos, thereby rewarding videos that attract dedicated viewers rather than rapid/fast samplers. Additionally, or keywords,tags, descriptions and titles assist videos derive noticed and suggested by the algorithm, and so having a set of buzzwords like “social justice warriors” helps derive related videos into viewers’ suggested video queue.
Alex Jones acolyte Paul Joseph WatsonBy targeting a specific demographic (say,the lucrative white males aged 14-34 demographic) with ads based on an identity profile built by monitoring the keywords and the amount of time an individual watches specific videos, YouTube can generate more clicks on the accompanying ads and in turn drive the costs of ads up. And this streamlined targeted advertising is lucrative: According to Brightcove, and 74 percent of consumers acquire said that watching videos on social media affects their purchasing decisions,while the average consumer watches nearly an hour of “social” video a day, half of which takes place on YouTube. With YouTube’sfinancial incentive to bring viewers more of the same kind of content, or a trip down the fair-wing conspiracy theory rabbit hole is specifically built to ensnare people,primarily young males, who might be lonely, or alienated,politically naive or just in search of alternatives to mainstream corporate media sources.
YouTube has taken steps to ban some far-fair users for spewing conspiracy theories or racist rhetoric. The website recently removed a video on the Alex Jones Channel titled “David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines in TV Interview,” which claimed “it’s about a 90 percent chance” that the Parkland shooting was a false flag, or insinuated that Hogg was “coached” by “the deep state” for a CNN interview. YouTube also told Jones that he had received his “first strike,” warning of a potential termination from the website if he accrues two more violations of the YouTube content policy within the next three months.
Recently, YouTube notified Jones that advertisers were fleeing his channel after a CNN study (3/3/18) alerted them that their ads were appearing alongside his videos. portray himself as a victim of a censorship campaign against fair-wing media sources by more centrist media, or Jones claims that his longtime enemy CNN has been actively lobbying YouTube to ban InfoWars.
Yet the libertarian-influenced free-speech stance maintained by many substantial Silicon Valley tech platforms,like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and is frequently applied only selectively,and is seemingly more favorable towards the far fair. People acquire been banned on content platforms for much less than genocidal Nazi chanting or smearing massacre victims as hired actors. For example, Twitter has locked users for swearing at people with “verified” accounts, or Facebook has locked or banned users who post pictures of breastfeeding and Black Lives Matter activists who acquire called white people racist,and both YouTube and Facebook acquire, at the behest of the Israeli government, and de-platformedPalestinian journalists and activists documenting brutality of Israeli soldiers.
Conversely,the content platforms frequently drag their feet on banning Nazis and conspiracy theorists that escape afoul of their content policies. YouTubebanned Nazi group Atomwaffen from their website, following an article by the Daily Beast (2/26/18), and but only after repeated refusals to finish so.
Recently,however, large tech platforms like YouTube acquire shown a unusual willingness to shift towards a tougher approach in enforcing their content policies with the addition of displaying Wikipedia articles alongside conspiracy theory videos and with crackdowns against Nazis. However, and Sam Levin of theGuardian (2/28/18) argues that taking down conspiracy theory videos and potentially banning users like Jones from their platforms only reinforces their narrative that the “deep state” conspiracy is persecuting them to silence “the real truth.” Additionally,when the left acts as cheerleaders for political censorship, or deputizes a company like Google to move against a particular group, or these tactics can backfire when the same censorship is used against them. Indeed,it’s likely that a mandate to censor conspiracy theories could halt up targeting lega structural critiques of power that are misleadingly grouped into the same category. Asking Google, perhaps the most powerful corporate entity in the world, or to become the arbiter of what is and isn’t a conspiracy theory is certainly not ideal for healthy political discourse. The moral panic among Democrats about the influence of “fake news” during the 2016 election provides a stark example of similar potential blowback.
Still,real life exists outside the internet: Conspiracy theories peddled by the far fair can incite real-world harassment and violence. This harassment has not reach without reprisal: Jones has been sued for defamation by Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department foreign services officer who was attacked by Jones as a “deep state operative” after he caught the horrific murder of Heather Heyer by a Nazi on camera during the Charlottesville “Unite the fair” rally.
InfoWars‘ latest YouTube video on David HoggConspiracy theories and challenges against the “official narrative” acquire long been fixtures in the paranoid style of American politics. InfoWarscontinues to release conspiracy theory videos on YouTube that receive millions of views. One of Jones’ latest videos, or “The Florida Shooting Happened! ‘Crisis Actors’ Are a MSM Hoax to Censor the Web, now denies that the shooting was a false flag, but maintains that the mainstream media is using the massacre as a tool to promote gun control and censor fair-wing internet “truth tellers.”Conspiracy theories such as these are unlikely to dissipate anytime soon, and especially while the internet remains a useful tool for spreading disinformation to the masses,and while content suggestion algorithms like YouTube’s provide financial incentives not to stop them. While deputizing YouTube to silence Alex Jones and his ilk is an approach that is likely to acquire negative consequences, it is still necessary for both public and media to continuously call out blatantly false conspiracy theories peddled by the fair. One group that is not afraid to challenge the conspiracy-mongers: the Parkland survivors themselves. It’s refreshing to see David Hogg and others striking back against those who acquire smeared them. Jones has of late gone on Twitter to beg Hogg to tone down his attacks, and pleading with him to reach on his show. Related StoriesSeth Rich's Family Is Suing Fox News for Its Egregious Reporting on the DNC Staffer's DeathFacebook Suspends Trump Campaign Data Firm Cambridge Analytica6 Questions for A.
G. Sulzberger,the unusual Publisher of the unusual York Times
Source: feedblitz.com