8 ms·

It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago,

It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.

trident5000 6y ago
Yes, the terrorists who caused 1-2 billion in damage this summer and destroyed peoples livelihoods with a dozen deaths over a false narrative according to public and easily accessible FBI statistics, and also the terrorists who stormed the capital. Both sets of terrorists who are coordinating on all of the platforms.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Where is this $20B number coming from? It doesn't appear to reflect reality. https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...
  - trident5000 6y ago
    I stand corrected and edited. Its still a non trivial amount and apparently "most expensive riot in history" according to your source.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      There's some apples to oranges going on there. You'll see in the top ten list several listings in April 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Counting these (and the many, many other cities they took place in in 1968) separately, while lumping together "protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring", is fairly hard to justify. You should also consider what else your preferred news sources may have blown out by a similarly inaccurate 10-20x amount about the BLM protests.
eplanit 6y ago
Are you referring to Antifa and BLM, who also organized on FB and Twitter during 2020, too?
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  You mean the fictitious boogeyman "group" that not one member has ever been identified and the movement for black rights that was widely brutalized by the police? I suppose not, seeing as one is a fantasy and the other clearly had the police paying attention to their plans. Besides, neither has attempted a coup to overturn an election so it's not really the same is it?
  - yonaguska 6y ago
    Do you honestly believe that Antifa is not real?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      "Real" and "worth pissing your pants over" aren't quite the same.
      - core-questions 6y ago
        Why does that same description not apply to their adversaries?
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        When antifa storms the Capitol and gets Congressional representation (i.e. folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene), do let me know.
        lenkite 6y ago
        Well, actually an Antifa activist (who also came on CNN) was one of those charged for inciting the Capitol attack: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/utah-man-charged-federal-court-following-events-united-states-capitol https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/utah-man-charged-federal-... https://www.newsweek.com/john-sullivan-capitol-attack-leftwing-antifa-1561898 https://www.newsweek.com/john-sullivan-capitol-attack-leftwi... With men like these deliberately egging on rioters, it's no wonder a protest turned violent.
hetspookjee 6y ago
Off topic but I'm having increasingly more difficulty with the term Terrorist. How'd you call American intrusions in sovereign states? Just somewhat recently the drone strike of the General Soleimani on sovereign grounds were an act of terrorism if perceived through the eyes of most Iranians, and possibly Iraqis as the strike was on their ground. Terrorist is a term that is stretched and applied beyond meaning.
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  I would define terrorism as forced coercion of an outside group (or group perceived to be "outside") through violent actions. Controlling through fear. So yes, any assassination, and especially that one, would be terrorism. However, terrorism committed by independent actors makes them terrorists, but terrorism committed by the state is more appropriately classified as military aggression, or acts of war. The whole point of the military doing anything short of all out war is to scare an "enemy" into compliance through threat of violence. So it's not classified as terrorism for the same reason as lethal action by police is not murder. The blessing of the state changes its definition.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    That's not the standard understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  We all know how things are - the world is not a fair place. It never was, and so far its rigged in a way that it never will be. Strong oppress the weak. Skillful strong oppress in a way that weak don't even notice but that's another topic. The word terrorist currently means 'enemy of me', if me is state powerful enough to project its power on others. US took any other meaning internationally from this word over last 17 years pretty effectively. If you actively object the biggest military in the world, there is no safe place on this planet. A country that effectively uses black op sites to do torture on suspects that would be illegal back home, a country that actively uses a prison to indefinitely detain (and torture) suspects without any legal process (and so on and on... really, there are whole books about this), has absolutely 0 issues with bombing some enemy general. It can be even in the centre of Brusel for all they care, if the benefits outweigh the cons. If they kill 50 kids along, all they do is try to minimize media damage. Do you see many americans shedding tears over this? From outside its pretty hard to spot any, and anybody who cares knows how things are. Let's not pretend wars are something nice, fair and some gentlemanly approach is applied. Almost anything that works will be used.
refurb 6y ago
It amazing how the same people saying “terrorism is overblown” a few years back are jumping on the “terrorism is threatening our republic” bandwagon.
efwfwef 6y ago
It's chilling how we moved the blame from books and video games to social networks, wondering what will be next, VR?
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  This is powerful willful ignorance.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
cirgue 6y ago
Uuuuuuuum, that is emphatically not the parallel you want to draw here. We did fuck all to prevent extremism from metastasizing and set the Middle East on a course to be a shatter belt for our lifetimes and likely that of our kids. We also killed a bunch of civilians and terrorism was used as a pretext for a hell of a lot of pretty racist policies. Having power means you have to be the grownup in the room. It sucks but the choice is that or a kind of repression that strengthens the grievances of the people you’re supposed to be fighting. The way terrorists work, when they’re successful, is by leveraging the overreaction of their adversary to win adherents, resources, and eventually legitimacy. We can’t let that happen again, we can’t let that happen here, and we sure as hell can’t let it happen with white supremacists.
zionic 6y ago
Wait, are you praising the era that gave us the “patriot” act and Waco?
tomcam 6y ago
No they didn’t. Look at the damage done to Seattle and Portland with the full cooperation of Twitter and Facebook.
- titzer 6y ago
  I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.
  - zionic 6y ago
    What do you call CHAZ? Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > What do you call CHAZ? The popular view of it, especially on the Right? A fiction deliberately constructed by right-wing media (notably Fox News) and the Trump Administration. > Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM BLM isn’t a single, unified organization, so “fully supported by BLM” isn’t a meaningful phrase. The protests which spawned what was briefly called (by unknown persons) CHAZ before being renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest specifically to emphatically repudiate the implication of seditious intent were organized in part by activists identifying with the BLM movement. > and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government? Nope. Fairly good discussion here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-liste...
      - monoideism 6y ago
        OK, but what about attacking a federal courthouse for several weeks straight in Portland? All cases had to be moved to another site in a neighboring state. I don't think they should be charged with sedition, but it clearly fits the statute, which states: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire [...] to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States" Using violent attacks and arson to force a federal courthouse to close down would seem to fit that definition. While it's true that the reason the mob attacked the Capitol was arguably worse, both antifa and the Trump mob attacked federal buildings and tried to harm those guarding them. Also, regarding your source: our media has sadly divided into two, so no resource you list will convince anyone. Either they already read the resource, and so already agree with you, or they don't read it and know better than to trust it, since it's a partisan source. We would all do better to stop encouraging open partisanship among the media, and reward non-partisan perspectives. NB: this doesn't have to mean non-opinionated perspectives, although those should be clearly labeled as editorials (now, editorials have blended with news).
dang 6y ago
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics. If there are other accounts doing this, I'd like to know who they are (irrespective of which politics they're for or against). It's impossible for us to look at the history of every account posting like this, but this is a serious problem and it's getting worse, so we're raising the bar. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20using%20primarily&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

trident5000 6y ago

Yes, the terrorists who caused 1-2 billion in damage this summer and destroyed peoples livelihoods with a dozen deaths over a false narrative according to public and easily accessible FBI statistics, and also the terrorists who stormed the capital. Both sets of terrorists who are coordinating on all of the platforms.

ceejayoz 6y ago
Where is this $20B number coming from? It doesn't appear to reflect reality. https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...
- trident5000 6y ago
  I stand corrected and edited. Its still a non trivial amount and apparently "most expensive riot in history" according to your source.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    There's some apples to oranges going on there. You'll see in the top ten list several listings in April 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Counting these (and the many, many other cities they took place in in 1968) separately, while lumping together "protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring", is fairly hard to justify. You should also consider what else your preferred news sources may have blown out by a similarly inaccurate 10-20x amount about the BLM protests.

eplanit 6y ago

Are you referring to Antifa and BLM, who also organized on FB and Twitter during 2020, too?

bananabreakfast 6y ago
You mean the fictitious boogeyman "group" that not one member has ever been identified and the movement for black rights that was widely brutalized by the police? I suppose not, seeing as one is a fantasy and the other clearly had the police paying attention to their plans. Besides, neither has attempted a coup to overturn an election so it's not really the same is it?
- yonaguska 6y ago
  Do you honestly believe that Antifa is not real?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    "Real" and "worth pissing your pants over" aren't quite the same.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      Why does that same description not apply to their adversaries?
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        When antifa storms the Capitol and gets Congressional representation (i.e. folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene), do let me know.
        lenkite 6y ago
        Well, actually an Antifa activist (who also came on CNN) was one of those charged for inciting the Capitol attack: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/utah-man-charged-federal-court-following-events-united-states-capitol https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/utah-man-charged-federal-... https://www.newsweek.com/john-sullivan-capitol-attack-leftwing-antifa-1561898 https://www.newsweek.com/john-sullivan-capitol-attack-leftwi... With men like these deliberately egging on rioters, it's no wonder a protest turned violent.

hetspookjee 6y ago

Off topic but I'm having increasingly more difficulty with the term Terrorist. How'd you call American intrusions in sovereign states? Just somewhat recently the drone strike of the General Soleimani on sovereign grounds were an act of terrorism if perceived through the eyes of most Iranians, and possibly Iraqis as the strike was on their ground. Terrorist is a term that is stretched and applied beyond meaning.

bananabreakfast 6y ago
I would define terrorism as forced coercion of an outside group (or group perceived to be "outside") through violent actions. Controlling through fear. So yes, any assassination, and especially that one, would be terrorism. However, terrorism committed by independent actors makes them terrorists, but terrorism committed by the state is more appropriately classified as military aggression, or acts of war. The whole point of the military doing anything short of all out war is to scare an "enemy" into compliance through threat of violence. So it's not classified as terrorism for the same reason as lethal action by police is not murder. The blessing of the state changes its definition.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That's not the standard understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism
saiya-jin 6y ago
We all know how things are - the world is not a fair place. It never was, and so far its rigged in a way that it never will be. Strong oppress the weak. Skillful strong oppress in a way that weak don't even notice but that's another topic. The word terrorist currently means 'enemy of me', if me is state powerful enough to project its power on others. US took any other meaning internationally from this word over last 17 years pretty effectively. If you actively object the biggest military in the world, there is no safe place on this planet. A country that effectively uses black op sites to do torture on suspects that would be illegal back home, a country that actively uses a prison to indefinitely detain (and torture) suspects without any legal process (and so on and on... really, there are whole books about this), has absolutely 0 issues with bombing some enemy general. It can be even in the centre of Brusel for all they care, if the benefits outweigh the cons. If they kill 50 kids along, all they do is try to minimize media damage. Do you see many americans shedding tears over this? From outside its pretty hard to spot any, and anybody who cares knows how things are. Let's not pretend wars are something nice, fair and some gentlemanly approach is applied. Almost anything that works will be used.

refurb 6y ago

It amazing how the same people saying “terrorism is overblown” a few years back are jumping on the “terrorism is threatening our republic” bandwagon.

efwfwef 6y ago

It's chilling how we moved the blame from books and video games to social networks, wondering what will be next, VR?

DangitBobby 6y ago
This is powerful willful ignorance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cirgue 6y ago

Uuuuuuuum, that is emphatically not the parallel you want to draw here. We did fuck all to prevent extremism from metastasizing and set the Middle East on a course to be a shatter belt for our lifetimes and likely that of our kids. We also killed a bunch of civilians and terrorism was used as a pretext for a hell of a lot of pretty racist policies. Having power means you have to be the grownup in the room. It sucks but the choice is that or a kind of repression that strengthens the grievances of the people you’re supposed to be fighting. The way terrorists work, when they’re successful, is by leveraging the overreaction of their adversary to win adherents, resources, and eventually legitimacy. We can’t let that happen again, we can’t let that happen here, and we sure as hell can’t let it happen with white supremacists.

zionic 6y ago

Wait, are you praising the era that gave us the “patriot” act and Waco?

tomcam 6y ago

No they didn’t. Look at the damage done to Seattle and Portland with the full cooperation of Twitter and Facebook.

titzer 6y ago
I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.
- zionic 6y ago
  What do you call CHAZ? Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > What do you call CHAZ? The popular view of it, especially on the Right? A fiction deliberately constructed by right-wing media (notably Fox News) and the Trump Administration. > Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM BLM isn’t a single, unified organization, so “fully supported by BLM” isn’t a meaningful phrase. The protests which spawned what was briefly called (by unknown persons) CHAZ before being renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest specifically to emphatically repudiate the implication of seditious intent were organized in part by activists identifying with the BLM movement. > and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government? Nope. Fairly good discussion here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-liste...
    - monoideism 6y ago
      OK, but what about attacking a federal courthouse for several weeks straight in Portland? All cases had to be moved to another site in a neighboring state. I don't think they should be charged with sedition, but it clearly fits the statute, which states: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire [...] to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States" Using violent attacks and arson to force a federal courthouse to close down would seem to fit that definition. While it's true that the reason the mob attacked the Capitol was arguably worse, both antifa and the Trump mob attacked federal buildings and tried to harm those guarding them. Also, regarding your source: our media has sadly divided into two, so no resource you list will convince anyone. Either they already read the resource, and so already agree with you, or they don't read it and know better than to trust it, since it's a partisan source. We would all do better to stop encouraging open partisanship among the media, and reward non-partisan perspectives. NB: this doesn't have to mean non-opinionated perspectives, although those should be clearly labeled as editorials (now, editorials have blended with news).

dang 6y ago

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics. If there are other accounts doing this, I'd like to know who they are (irrespective of which politics they're for or against). It's impossible for us to look at the history of every account posting like this, but this is a serious problem and it's getting worse, so we're raising the bar. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20using%20primarily&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...