How to Use Digital Extremism to Extort a Social Media Platform
You can already see the gears turning on Substack
The principle of “no enemies to the right” has been debated in a lot of right-wing circles recently. Influencers in the conservative movement routinely caution that it is morally corrupting. I don’t know, that’s above my pay grade. It is certainly untenable in practice, because of the strange bedfellows problem. You can’t look at this stuff in an ideological way, it’s always a question of, as Comrade Lenin said, “who, whom?” That is, who will overtake whom?
Mike Masnick, a sort of pseudo-libertarian hatchet man for the tech cartel, thinks Substack is becoming the “Nazi bar.” Here’s an excerpt from his post:
I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you realize that there’s spam. Or illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the copyright police will.
But, then you realize that beyond spam and content that breaks the rules, you end up with malicious users who cause trouble. And trouble drives away users, advertisers, or both. And if you don’t deal with the malicious users, the malicious users define you. It’s the “oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now” problem.
And, look, sure, in the US, you can run the Nazi bar, thanks to the 1st Amendment. But running a Nazi bar is not winning any free speech awards. It’s not standing up for free speech. It’s building your own brand as the Nazi bar and abdicating your own free speech rights of association to kick Nazis out of your private property, and to craft a different kind of community. Let the Nazis build their own bar, or everyone will just assume you’re a Nazi too.
It was understandable a decade ago, before the idea of “trust & safety” was a thing, that not everyone would understand all this. But it is unacceptable for the CEO of a social media site today to not realize this.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that they imagine every problem has a technical solution, when in reality the world of social taboos is just vastly more powerful. The taboo against Nazis is one of the most powerful. Everyone knows Nazis are bad.
So when a tech platform isn’t doing what you want, the thing you want to do is send in the Nazis. The Nazis get chewed up by Antifa and the vast extremism-watching business, the tech platform is forced to do what you want, everyone wins.
The ADL has started to train its unsleeping eye on this here chunk of Internet real estate. They had a big report a couple of weeks ago, which you can read here.
If you look at Israeli tradecraft when it comes to digital media, lots of them are trained to run “avatars,” or fake accounts, and we’ve discussed a few specific cases of Jews pretending to be Nazis, like the Bronze Age Pervert and his network. Haaretz has reported on a lot of this. With a network of guys like this, it’s trivially easy to extort a social media platform. Here’s how it would work:
Problem: A tech platform isn’t doing what you want.
Solution: Create a bunch of avatars to generate far-right propaganda on that platform (there is a long history of this, covered in previous posts here).
All of a sudden the platform has an extremism problem.
Offer to solve the extremism problem by handing over content moderation decisions to the ADL.
The Israelis are, of course, not by any means the only player in this space, but they are a big, influential one that often goes undiscussed. This stuff isn’t actually that complicated, and ideology really has nothing to do with it, it’s simple extortion.
I don’t really think the campaign against Substack is going to work, because you have to assume the U.S. state is aware of how corrupted the legacy media is, and I think this platform might be the chosen alternative. I don’t know, we’ll see.