13 ms·

After the QAnon Ban, Who's Next?

18 points by AndrewBissell 6y ago

Proven 6y ago
Taibbi is good. Leftists probably seriously dislike him now. He would have been cancelled for this if he worked for a centrist or left-leaning media... QAnon groups have been moving to Gab. Good for Gab, good for them and good for everyone else in the US who wants to be able to exercise their constitutional rights.
1cvmask 6y ago
Censorship (including deplatforming, algorithmic deranking, cutting off payments, jailing and of course killing journalists) is the norm for voices that are not deemed worthy of hearing and predates social media and internet platforms. Modern censorship examples on social media: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/facebook-palestine-censorship-anti-semitism-guidelines https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/facebook-palestine-censor... Attempts of censorship of famous celebrities: https://www.lowkickmma.com/joe-rogan-reacts-to-spotify-employees-trying-to-censor-him/ https://www.lowkickmma.com/joe-rogan-reacts-to-spotify-emplo... And jail time (censorship by other means) approved by the US Supreme court in 1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2776_(1917_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2776_(1917_film... Independant American journalist allegedly on Obama’s kill list (censorship by other means): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-... Australian journalist allegedly on Obama’s poisoning/kill/kidnap list: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-kill-Julian-Assange-make-look-like-accident.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-...
- gedy 6y ago
  I think one point that gets lost is that over the past 50 or so years, the left leaning, counter culture would lean on and shout "Freedom of SPEECH" when they were trying to make statements that were not mainstream/accepted by society. It just feels duplicitous/revengeful for them to now do the same after winning the culture wars and say "oh that's the way it is, censorship is the norm".
  - smohare 6y ago
    Suggesting calls for social equality are somehow analogous to concerted disinformation campaigns strikes me as exceedingly intellectually dishonest.
    - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
      There have never been disinformation campaigns in the name of social equality? Hmm, I'm skeptical, not least because I've seen a few, albeit on really controversial issues.
    - gedy 6y ago
      Not all of these issues were about "social equality", and not referring to qanon stuff exclusively.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    Giant Silicon Valley corporations like Facebook and Twitter are not "The Left".
Daishiman 6y ago
You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. But out of all the dramatically more contentious issues in censorship, QAnon is a no-brainer compared to so many other more delicate topics. Kind of bored of these QAnon hot takes. They're truly out there in their level of insanity and outrageous denial of consensus reality. There's so many others tiptoeing gray zones; those would be much more interesting to cover.
- mas3god 6y ago
  Its russiagate for the right
troughway 6y ago
Can someone give us a rundown on who QAnon is/what they stand for? Is this a White Supremacist? Group? Individual?
- krapp 6y ago
  QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory. It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal. The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested. No part of the theory is based on fact. Although preceded by similar viral conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, the theory proper began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by "Q", who was presumably a single American individual. It is now likely 'Q' has become a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon. (...) QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", the title of his 1964 essay on religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. QAnon's vocabulary echoes Christian tropes—"The Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgement Day) and "The Great Awakening"—evoking the reputed historical religious Great Awakenings of the early 18th century to the late 20th century. According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil." Some QAnon supporters say the forthcoming reckoning will be a "reverse rapture": not only the end of the world as we know it, but a new beginning, with salvation and utopia on earth for the survivors. (...) The Washington Post and The Forward magazine have called QAnon's targeting of Jewish figures like George Soros and the Rothschilds "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article in August 2018 asserted: "some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories". The Anti-Defamation League reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism. The Czarist hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has intersected with the QAnon conspiracy theories, with Republican QAnon fan Mary Ann Mendoza retweeting a Twitter thread about the Rothschild family, Satanic High Priestesses, and American presidents saying that "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion Is Not A Fabrication. And, It Certainly Is Not Anti-Semitic To Point Out This Fact." Mendoza, who sits on the advisory board of Women for Trump and was scheduled to speak at the 2020 Republican convention until news came out of her Twitter activity, later denied knowing the content of the thread, although anti-Semitic references appeared in the first few tweets. Similarly, Trump has denied knowing anything about QAnon except that QAnon fans like him and "love our country." By 2020, QAnon followers were advancing a theory that Hollywood elites were engaging in "adrenochrome harvesting," in which adrenaline is extracted from children's blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. Adrenochrome harvesting is rooted in antisemitic myths of blood libel dating to the Middle Ages that Jews murder Christian children for their blood for use in religious rituals. QAnon believers have also promoted a centuries-old antisemitic trope about an international banking conspiracy orchestrated by the Rothschild family. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has described QAnon as a "Nazi group rebranded", and its theories as a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
silexia 6y ago
Keep in mind this is not a government ban, but a private business saying we don't want your lies and garbage here. Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook?
- krapp 6y ago
  >Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook? I don't know. It's weird how this was a non-issue until around 2016, when all of a sudden it became an existential threat to free speech and civilization itself. It's almost as if there's a tacit agenda behind the presentation of concern for free speech in the general case, with the goal of normalizing extremist right-wing speech in parallel with its increasing adoption and normalization within a specific mainstream American political party.
- gdulli 6y ago
  > Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook? In this case, the two are linked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong "The restaurant is the center of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which has been discredited by a wide variety of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. One Pizzagate activist fired a gun in the restaurant in 2016, and another started a fire in it in 2019."
  - aleister_777 6y ago
    Pizzagate dropped in 2016. The shooting happened in Dec 2016. Q's first post wasn't until Oct 2017. Two things are being conflated here.
- atom_arranger 6y ago
  It would be more like a restaurant banning people for talking about things they did not like.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
luminadiffusion 6y ago
This article missed the entire point. Here’s the problem: Free speech rights are intended to protect speech. They are not intended to protect propaganda. Nor would we want them to. Propaganda is relatively easy to identify and is not speech. Take Trump, for example. He does not lie in an attempt to convince you of the truth of his perspective. He lies to show you who has power in the situation. He knows that you know that his excuses are shallow and dumb - that’s the whole point. He is asserting that he can create his own reality and say whatever he wants and you cannot stop him. The majority of his supporters do the same thing. When they repeat his lies, they are not attempting to convince you of their truth. They are showing you their allegiance. This is similar with QAnon and a myriad of other right wing groups. After repeating their lies over and over, their supporters begin to get confused about what is actually real. They originally bought in to the scheme to be part of the group, but the scheme took and and they lost their grasp on any truth. There is no truth once this takes over. This is not speech. This is a caustic type of control that uses honest people to spread by confusing their sensibilities. They protect the exercise of these lies, in their quest for morality and justice, and allow its venom to spread. Soon, it kills both host and victim. Leaving all powerless to the purveyor of the propaganda. This is easily identifiable. We must not protect this. It is not speech. Getting pulled into a quasi-logical debate where this is confused with speech is exactly what the purveyors want. They want us to confuse this with speech so it can be protected while it erodes the minds of its consumers.

18 points by AndrewBissell 6y ago

Taibbi is good. Leftists probably seriously dislike him now. He would have been cancelled for this if he worked for a centrist or left-leaning media... QAnon groups have been moving to Gab. Good for Gab, good for them and good for everyone else in the US who wants to be able to exercise their constitutional rights.

1cvmask 6y ago

Censorship (including deplatforming, algorithmic deranking, cutting off payments, jailing and of course killing journalists) is the norm for voices that are not deemed worthy of hearing and predates social media and internet platforms. Modern censorship examples on social media: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/facebook-palestine-censorship-anti-semitism-guidelines https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/facebook-palestine-censor... Attempts of censorship of famous celebrities: https://www.lowkickmma.com/joe-rogan-reacts-to-spotify-employees-trying-to-censor-him/ https://www.lowkickmma.com/joe-rogan-reacts-to-spotify-emplo... And jail time (censorship by other means) approved by the US Supreme court in 1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2776_(1917_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2776_(1917_film... Independant American journalist allegedly on Obama’s kill list (censorship by other means): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-... Australian journalist allegedly on Obama’s poisoning/kill/kidnap list: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-kill-Julian-Assange-make-look-like-accident.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-...

gedy 6y ago
I think one point that gets lost is that over the past 50 or so years, the left leaning, counter culture would lean on and shout "Freedom of SPEECH" when they were trying to make statements that were not mainstream/accepted by society. It just feels duplicitous/revengeful for them to now do the same after winning the culture wars and say "oh that's the way it is, censorship is the norm".
- smohare 6y ago
  Suggesting calls for social equality are somehow analogous to concerted disinformation campaigns strikes me as exceedingly intellectually dishonest.
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    There have never been disinformation campaigns in the name of social equality? Hmm, I'm skeptical, not least because I've seen a few, albeit on really controversial issues.
  - gedy 6y ago
    Not all of these issues were about "social equality", and not referring to qanon stuff exclusively.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Giant Silicon Valley corporations like Facebook and Twitter are not "The Left".

Daishiman 6y ago

You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. But out of all the dramatically more contentious issues in censorship, QAnon is a no-brainer compared to so many other more delicate topics. Kind of bored of these QAnon hot takes. They're truly out there in their level of insanity and outrageous denial of consensus reality. There's so many others tiptoeing gray zones; those would be much more interesting to cover.

mas3god 6y ago
Its russiagate for the right

troughway 6y ago

Can someone give us a rundown on who QAnon is/what they stand for? Is this a White Supremacist? Group? Individual?

krapp 6y ago
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory. It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal. The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested. No part of the theory is based on fact. Although preceded by similar viral conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, the theory proper began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by "Q", who was presumably a single American individual. It is now likely 'Q' has become a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon. (...) QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", the title of his 1964 essay on religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. QAnon's vocabulary echoes Christian tropes—"The Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgement Day) and "The Great Awakening"—evoking the reputed historical religious Great Awakenings of the early 18th century to the late 20th century. According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil." Some QAnon supporters say the forthcoming reckoning will be a "reverse rapture": not only the end of the world as we know it, but a new beginning, with salvation and utopia on earth for the survivors. (...) The Washington Post and The Forward magazine have called QAnon's targeting of Jewish figures like George Soros and the Rothschilds "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article in August 2018 asserted: "some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories". The Anti-Defamation League reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism. The Czarist hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has intersected with the QAnon conspiracy theories, with Republican QAnon fan Mary Ann Mendoza retweeting a Twitter thread about the Rothschild family, Satanic High Priestesses, and American presidents saying that "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion Is Not A Fabrication. And, It Certainly Is Not Anti-Semitic To Point Out This Fact." Mendoza, who sits on the advisory board of Women for Trump and was scheduled to speak at the 2020 Republican convention until news came out of her Twitter activity, later denied knowing the content of the thread, although anti-Semitic references appeared in the first few tweets. Similarly, Trump has denied knowing anything about QAnon except that QAnon fans like him and "love our country." By 2020, QAnon followers were advancing a theory that Hollywood elites were engaging in "adrenochrome harvesting," in which adrenaline is extracted from children's blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. Adrenochrome harvesting is rooted in antisemitic myths of blood libel dating to the Middle Ages that Jews murder Christian children for their blood for use in religious rituals. QAnon believers have also promoted a centuries-old antisemitic trope about an international banking conspiracy orchestrated by the Rothschild family. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has described QAnon as a "Nazi group rebranded", and its theories as a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

silexia 6y ago

Keep in mind this is not a government ban, but a private business saying we don't want your lies and garbage here. Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook?

krapp 6y ago
>Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook? I don't know. It's weird how this was a non-issue until around 2016, when all of a sudden it became an existential threat to free speech and civilization itself. It's almost as if there's a tacit agenda behind the presentation of concern for free speech in the general case, with the goal of normalizing extremist right-wing speech in parallel with its increasing adoption and normalization within a specific mainstream American political party.
gdulli 6y ago
> Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook? In this case, the two are linked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong "The restaurant is the center of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which has been discredited by a wide variety of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. One Pizzagate activist fired a gun in the restaurant in 2016, and another started a fire in it in 2019."
- aleister_777 6y ago
  Pizzagate dropped in 2016. The shooting happened in Dec 2016. Q's first post wasn't until Oct 2017. Two things are being conflated here.
atom_arranger 6y ago
It would be more like a restaurant banning people for talking about things they did not like.
- Can_Not 6y ago

luminadiffusion 6y ago

This article missed the entire point. Here’s the problem: Free speech rights are intended to protect speech. They are not intended to protect propaganda. Nor would we want them to. Propaganda is relatively easy to identify and is not speech. Take Trump, for example. He does not lie in an attempt to convince you of the truth of his perspective. He lies to show you who has power in the situation. He knows that you know that his excuses are shallow and dumb - that’s the whole point. He is asserting that he can create his own reality and say whatever he wants and you cannot stop him. The majority of his supporters do the same thing. When they repeat his lies, they are not attempting to convince you of their truth. They are showing you their allegiance. This is similar with QAnon and a myriad of other right wing groups. After repeating their lies over and over, their supporters begin to get confused about what is actually real. They originally bought in to the scheme to be part of the group, but the scheme took and and they lost their grasp on any truth. There is no truth once this takes over. This is not speech. This is a caustic type of control that uses honest people to spread by confusing their sensibilities. They protect the exercise of these lies, in their quest for morality and justice, and allow its venom to spread. Soon, it kills both host and victim. Leaving all powerless to the purveyor of the propaganda. This is easily identifiable. We must not protect this. It is not speech. Getting pulled into a quasi-logical debate where this is confused with speech is exactly what the purveyors want. They want us to confuse this with speech so it can be protected while it erodes the minds of its consumers.