We know she’s just mad cause they have more melanin than she’s used to seeing
Lol I used to work at target and know for a fact that that’s literally one aisle sandwiched between several containing several an array of bland white dolls why would you fake a struggle like this?? It’s so flawed 😩😂
^^^^^^^
White girls are so pathetic
And…there’s absolutely no reason she couldn’t’ve bought one of those for her cousin, anyway? (I mean, no reason beyond “that cousin is probably being raised just like her and would do terrible things to the doll”)
i found this post on facebook this morning and went to My Generation to tally their dolls by skin color just to see how absolutely out of proportion the OP was blowing things.
they have 106 dolls total on target’s website. 87 of these dolls are white. 46 of those white dolls are blonde. counting all their total dolls of color, you get 19 (and that’s being generous and tallying any exceptionally tan ones). only one of these dolls resembles someone east asian.
so yeah, this lady only found 8 dolls (two of which are from seperate brands) and she’s still steamed when the brand she was looking at has 87 white dolls for her racist ass to choose from.
I mean, the point here isn’t that these memes are evil, it’s that these people used them to build credibility so that they could do the actual evil shit.
As
pundits, politicians, and other Very Serious People spent last weekend
admonishing “the left” for not being civil enough in their approach to
pushing back against the Trump administration’s cruel policy of forcibly
separating immigrant children from their parents, a peculiar and
carefully crafted narrative began to take shape on social media. A
closer look at this emerging narrative—a self-described “grassroots
movement” of former Democrats fleeing the party—revealed an astroturfed
campaign driven by pro-Trump Twitter users and amplified by automated
and Russian-linked accounts.
The
surge of tweets started on Saturday, June 23, when news broke that
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had been quietly asked to
leave a restaurant in Lexington, VA, the night before. The social media
campaign really took off the next day, after Rep. Maxine Waters
(D-Calif.) said in a speech that administration officials who support
Trump’s policies should expect to face pushback when they go out in
public.
Most of the tweets were strikingly similar, and the vast majority pushed
a very familiar narrative. Using the hashtag #WalkAway and claiming to
be former Democrats, social media users shared their stories of leaving
the Democratic party after being turned off by the “hate” and “division”
of “the left.” Many of them cited the incidents involving Sanders and
Waters as examples of the “intolerance” and “bullying” that supposedly
drove them to support Trump after years—in some cases, decades—of voting
for Democrats.
If this
sounds familiar, there’s good reason for that—it very much echoes the
“civility” debate playing out right now among the Very Important
Thinkers and on the opinion pages of the Very Serious Newspapers. The
basic narrative is one that we’ve heard countless times before, but this
time it’s being exploited by a new cast of characters, and, at least in
some cases, with the intent to deceive.
The
primary functional goal of an astroturfed campaign like this one is to
manipulate public opinion by gaming online algorithms to amplify certain
content and push it onto people’s social media feeds and to the top of
search engine results.
The
high volume of tweets associated with this campaign is also indicative
of an effort to drown out real, reasoned debate between humans and
replace it with content that pushes fringe or extreme viewpoints into
the mainstream, ultimately hijacking and derailing public discourse.
This particular psychological operation also aimed to use issues like
race and sexual orientation to widen existing divides and promote
infighting within the progressive movement.
Finally,
astroturfed social media campaigns like the “WalkAway Movement” aim to
create manufactured consensus, or the illusion of popularity, so that an
idea or position without much public support appears more popular and
mainstream than it actually is.
Below,
I present the anatomy of this astroturfed movement, starting with its
origins and moving on to its artificial sources of amplification, the
shaping of its narrative, and the boost it got from far-right and
Russian media platforms including Breitbart
and RT. I also discuss the potential functions of a psychological
operation such as this one, as well as the lessons—and warnings—it
offers as we head into the 2018 midterms and beyond.
The Anatomy Of An Astroturfed Movement
The “WalkAway Movement” officially started in May 2018, with posts dating back to May 19 on the group’s Facebook page.
(Unofficially, the blueprint for this campaign has been in the works
for quite some time.) Since its creation, the Facebook page has also
added a public group
for members to post content. As of June 30, the Facebook page had
nearly 12,000 followers and the public group had almost 19,000 members.
That breaks down to an average of 266 new followers a day and 422 new
group members every day—quite a lot for a brand new “grassroots”
movement.
A short time later, the campaign jumped over to Twitter, with user
@usminority (“The Unsilent Minority”) spearheading the movement, or at
least spearheading the public face of the movement. One of the first tweets
that gained significant traction appeared on May 31, and was obviously
meant to elicit the attention of influential Trump supporters (11 such
accounts were tagged in the tweet). A handful of other tweets using the
hashtag #WalkAway were widely circulated over the next couple of weeks,
including one on June 11, one on June 14 and another on June 16, when Trump supporter Wayne Dupree joined in. All of those tweets garnered thousands of retweets and “likes.”
READ MORE by following the links. There are many examples of tweets and FB posts made by these “bots” and FAKE accounts.
Fascinating how white liberals and white supremacists get along perfectly
Excuse me, but I’d really like to fucking know why somebody felt the need to put a June 2017 timestamp on a November 2016 photo taken of a Jewish journalist who was not only assigned to interview Spencer for her election night coverage article, but was also racially and sexually harassed by him during said interview:
“I feel like this is an inquisition”—when he refused to say whether Hitler was good or bad—“he’s an important historical figure”—or whether the Holocaust was good or bad, said that the anti-Semitic alt-right trolls haranguing me and other Jewish journalists were “just kids having fun,” and when he slid his finger down the back of my dress and said, “You have a slit here.” Surprised at my request not to touch me, he asked me to “calm down.”
I’d like to know why somebody thought it would be funny to take a photo of a Jewish woman who immigrated to this country as a refugee, misrepresent its context, gloss over the harassment she endured, and then compare her, a victim of white supremacy, to a fucking white supremacist.
Because I know people took Trevor Noah to task for hanging out with Tomi Lahren, but I don’t think anyone compared him to a white girl with friends in the KKK, so…
this screencap is making the rounds on twitter tonight, so just want to remind everyone of this.
If I was given a budget and guidelines to infiltrate a particular foreign political community, for the sake of, say, causing chaos and massive fragmentation and making it impossible for said community to properly unite under a given candidate, the first thing I’d do is cause a diversion with the aid of very blatant burner accounts. There would still be people foolish enough to fall for the torrent of disinfo being put out by those accounts (particularly if the disinfo already matched their existing biases), but those would just be the low-hanging fruit. My actual purpose for them would be as a sort of diversionary tactic, making the public think that they’ve got my work figured out and countered.
My actual work would be done with the aid of individuals who could realistically pose as members of whatever communities I wanted to infiltrate. In this case, they’d need not only very good knowledge of the target community’s native language, but also of the community’s ‘code’ (the way in which community members communicate, their most often used words, the way they refer to in-group and out-group members, their jargon, etc). This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, to anyone with a good head for language and people-observation skills. For example, I could very easily pose as a US social-conservative or a Fundamentalist Christian from the so-called ‘Bible-belt’ simply because I’ve got over fifteen years’ worth of experience from observing these kinds of people interacting and misbehaving on the Internet.
All of this is just…. basic logic and understanding how social manipulation campaigns work. The fact that so many people on here fail to comprehend this is, honestly, terrifying, because this leaves people as prime targets for manipulation by all sorts of unscrupulous elements.
ultimately the point is that progressive and leftist and anti-oppressive circles are just as vulnerable to disinformation and propagandism as any other groups, and russian authorities manipulating american social media to influence voters is not a silly conspiracy theory but a substantiated fact which we are still in the process of fully exposing, and rather than decry this whole phenomenon as just tumblr staff being stupid, this is a good opportunity for all of us to think really critically about what content we share and why, and ask ourselves how we can ensure that the sources we’re sharing from are trustworthy and truthful
These Russian operations have been all over Eastern European social media since 2014, so it’s not like this is unprecedented. They target people on the left, on the right, and in the middle, white people, black people, it doesn’t matter. The only color that really matters to them is the color of Putin’s money. We’re not the first targets and we won’t be the last, so we need to get smarter about this.
when I was in high school (2011 or thereabouts), I was part of a forum for fans of a particular webcomic (coughcough @discordcomics coughcough). because the webcomic was about queer people, almost everyone in the forum was some kind of queer. I learned like 90% of my queer politics through being a member and interacting with trans folks and ace folks and nonbinary folks and what have you all the time.
we had a section for cool queer news stories, and one day someone posted a link to a blog. it was written by a lesbian in Syria, and the post that was shared was her recounting how the night before, the secret police had come to take her away for being a lesbian, but her father had identified each of the men by name (like, “Don’t I know you from —?” and “Isn’t your father so-and-so?”), shaming them into leaving her alone. it was a heartwarming story, a really important bright spot for us queer folks (a Muslim dad! in Syria! standing up for his lesbian daughter!), and so when she was apparently kidnapped in broad daylight by armed men, the internet (including us!) freaked out and tried to search for her.
now, according to him, he was trying to uplift the voices of Muslims (particularly Muslim women) who he’d met while studying. people were spreading misinformation about the Middle East and Muslims on the internet, and he wasn’t being listened to as a straight white man, and so he thought his opinions might be given more weight if they came from a Muslim lesbian woman.
the problem is, even if what he said was 100% accurate–even if he had so deeply studied the plight of women, particularly lesbians, in Syria, that no actual Syrian Muslim lesbian would disagree with him–the problem is that he’s not a Syrian Muslim lesbian. he’s a white guy from Georgia. he could do nothing but parrot talking points by actual queer Syrians all day and that would never give him the experience or knowledge to be able to speak for them.
the problem isn’t that the deleted blogs promoted ideas from BLM and other social justice groups. lots of people can do that, even if they’re not black or not American. even I can do that. but one thing I can’t do, as a white woman, is to pretend that I am black–to steal photos of real black people to use as my profile pics, to use AAVE exclusively, to talk about how “our” people are oppressed and hurt by white supremacy–even if it’s to promote goals that I agree with. that’s rachel dolezal levels of fuckery. or, more accurately, this is hivliving levels of fuckery.
imagine this wasn’t the IRA. imagine it was a bunch of white kids from spokane, or any one of the police officers who blame BLM for self-inflicted wounds and vandalism, or cole fucking sprouse. would we still be saying “but they made good points”? would we still be defending them as martyrs to tumblr’s censorship? would we claim them as legitimate social justice activists, instead of frauds who duped innocent people into believing they were members of marginalized groups?
“would we still be saying “but they made good points”? would we still be defending them as martyrs to tumblr’s censorship? would we claim them as legitimate social justice activists, instead of frauds who duped innocent people into believing they were members of marginalized groups?“
Wait… people are actually doing this? They do know why Russians have bots doing this stuff, right? This isn’t like… people trying to promote social justice causes for their own sake. This has a way more cynical political purpose.
I mean, I knew a lot of people on Tumblr were a bit thick in the head, but… Damn.
To be fair, the U.S. has a long and storied history of accusing genuine leftists (particularly black activists, like the Black Panthers) of being Russian shills and silencing them on that basis. It is completely understandable that leftists would assume that this is more of the same.
Except that this is more like COINTELPRO: a government infiltrating an organization and using that position in the organization to spread chaos and divide ranks. I cannot believe that people are ignoring that the tactics the IRA has been using are exactly like those used by the FBI, except that it’s the Russian government and not the American one.
I’m not even surprised that this has been the response by some people, I know waaaaaay too many lefties who still think RT is a brave news network willing to fight for what’s right.
Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your prison owning donors depend on
👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆
welp;
Actual quote, in context:
“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition… I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.“
Don’t spread misinformation just to fit a narrative, Clinton is advocating for there to be a cap on who gets free college so that the government doesn’t have to subsidize the education of people with enough disposable income to pay for it themselves. The plan she’s proposing would have a better chance of being passed, is more cost-effective, and still opens up higher education to low-income individuals who previously couldn’t afford it.
the op lagonegirl literally ended up being a russian psyop im losing my mind
Reblogging this as an example of what the Russian interference here on tumblr was. I have seen some people in the past days casting doubts on Tumblr because the blogs that were banned had social justice content.
But that was the point exactly. They posted some real things and a lot of half-truths that would appealto the kind of politics on here and therefore spread disinformation to discourage us from participating in stopping Trump through the only option we had. I’m glad tumblr left these posts up so we could see for ourselves.
I don’t know if it actually worked on anyone, I hope we all remember to check our sources before making our decisions, but life is short and maybe some people didn’t. There are plenty of real social justice blogs available still, so I hope we will follow those instead.
Holly Maniatty, a certified sign language interpreter upstaged hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg with her enthusiasm during his concert at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Maniatty has worked numerous festivals and concerts with well-known rappers including Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan and Killer Mike and this isn’t the first time that she has stolen the show with her major skills.
This looks like some special type of sign language that assists people with understanding the beats and innuendo along with lyrics.
Snoop Dogg made the right choice!
I thought this was so cool and exciting that I went and learned more about the interpreter here: http://www.thestory.org/transcript-interview-holly-maniatty-interpreter-wu-tang-clan it’s really cool how she spends so much time studying the music so that she can express the performer’s personality and intent. She also tries to make jokes/innuendo work, which is why she’s using a lot of extra expressions, and she is using her body to express important parts of the beat. There’s a bit where she “invites (signed) applause” that works really well with the music. Idk, I don’t know enough about signing to really comment on this, but it strikes me that she’s getting a lot of information into her performance.
One bizarre thing I noticed was how all the outlets reporting on Maniatty’s gone-viral performance was the language they used to describe it. They say she “upstaged” Snoop Dogg, that she “out G’ed him” or “stole the show,” and I think they all profoundly missed the point, even if the word choices were subconscious. Look at the OP for this post, it says she “upstaged” him and regularly “steals” the attention. It’s not like she’s a random dancer or attention seeker: she’s hired by the performers to make their performance accessible! This is her job, and she was specifically chosen and invited by the performer to be there. She isn’t stealing the show, she is charged with making it accessible to a Deaf and HoH audience.
And instead of a literal translation of the lyrics (which often doesn’t really work with hip-hop, because a lot of the cleverness/entertainment is in secondary meanings and rhythm) she’s trying to express the intention. I bet the performers who choose her are super glad they did, since she studies them so carefully, and tries to put their stage personalities across in sign! So many more of their fans are getting their money’s worth! She’s not doing it for parody, she’s doing it to serve the audience. If she was a threat to the performance, if the value she’s adding is distracting or “upstaging,” then PEOPLE WOULD USE A LYRIC MARQUEE INSTEAD. Basically live closed-captioning for events. But they don’t, because the whole-body human interpretation is what actually transmits the meaning, and artists want the audience to appreciate then meaning.
So it’s very weird to see so much language in these articles/posts crowing about how this (brilliant, master-of-her-craft) white woman “stole” the show and “did better at it” than Snoop Dogg. A lot of weird intersectional stuff to think about there.
(I’m totally overthinking this, the video is SUCH good fun though! It makes ONE WHOLE exciting performance!!! and we are so lucky to live in a world where there are people who care about making music accessible!
Here’s another Russian prop post I rebloggged. (OP, not the commentary.)
I remember that I added this commentary out of boiling annoyance, but tried to do so in a productive way. I think it’s actually quite interesting in light of the OP being an alleged Russian propagandist, and it being a pretty good example of steering a conversation.
See how the criticism is bracketed with a friendly start that recognizes the good points of the post, and ends with a self-deprecating and positive ending for people to reblog from? That’s my favorite way to offer critique, because it raises the level of the conversation, keeps the OP in good faith, but still points out the flaws; the OP can’t really say that you’re being nasty and hateful and singling them out personally, if you sympathetically agree that they’ve done the best job that they could.
And it deliberately changes the direction: from the negative narrative of one performer “upstaging” another, to the positive “two performers creating a unified performance.” So the OP can’t really argue: they’ve been wrapped up and redirected, and they either have to ignore me or agree with me.
Obviously, I can’t claim that this was a long-term political plot, I just did this because those two words (”upstage”/”stole”) in the OP annoyed me viscerally, and I am very pedantic and mischievous.
I have decided not to delete this, even though it’s from an alleged Russian propagandist deliberately destroying the mechanism of democracy by encouraging Leftist Millennial Nihilism ™, because I think this is actually an interesting example of how critical engagement and discussion can change the conversation a little bit.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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