The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  To the extent that the social industry platforms admit to controlling user speech, they tend to hide behind ‘community standards’. The phrase itself is propaganda: there is no ‘community’ involvement in creating these standards. And these standards have long been a debacle, leading to bizarre decisions. For example, Facebook once ironically censored the ACLU’s (American Civil Liberties Union) page over a post about censorship, deleting an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War for violating its standards. It has often seemed perverse in its handling of ‘hate speech’. Though eager to align itself with Black Lives Matter in its publicity, it suspended Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist, for sharing an experience of racist abuse. Yet its moderators regularly allow obvious racist abuse to stand. Often, social industry platforms are gulled into acting against a user by ‘report trolling’ – in which trolls submit false reports about their targets and incite others to do the same. They also act under pressure from governments to curtail opposition content. Facebook, for example, has cooperated with the Turkish and Israeli governments to remove Kurdish or Palestinian pages. Nor did ‘free speech’ prevent Facebook from sharing data with police surveillance programmes tracking protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore.44

  Facebook, responding to criticism, has developed a convoluted set of moderating guidelines. Yet this could not conceivably solve the problem. Every banned item has to be, and is, hedged with exceptions. Sexual content is not permitted, for example – unless it is satirical. This meant, as Sarah Jeong pointed out, that anuses are banned unless photoshopped onto a politician’s face.45 Racist terms are banned – unless they’re self-referential, empowering or humorous. This means that racist content that a moderator thinks is funny could be allowed to stand, while someone angrily responding to it could be deemed abusive and their posts removed. Much depends on how teams of reviewers, hired on a casual basis in low-wage economies, interpret the morass.

  The issue is not moderating guidelines. Any platform will have controls, and often they will be used unfairly. The issue is who determines the controls, and whether we want these commercial giants to have a monopoly over speech rights. The issue is whether they are even capable, given their overriding commitment to user addiction, and given their cooperation with governments, of controlling speech in a fair and accountable way.

  VIII.

  In recent years, trolls have allegedly taken over politics, as the traditional Right became the dark Right. Trump, the trolling pachyderm of the Twitter right, is the meet exemplar of this trend. Amanda Marcotte traces the emergence of a dark Right to the moment that trolls were recognized by a louche young reactionary, the journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, as the potential substrate for a hard-right youth movement.46 It only needed to be whipped into shape by a little leadership.

  Beyond the trolling grass roots, moreover, governments have joined the fray. The Russian Federation has been singled out by US intelligence for allegedly using paid trolls to subvert the US presidential election. There is indeed some evidence that Russia uses trolls to disseminate false and inflammatory stories, even if there is little to suggest that it made a decisive impact on the 2016 presidential election.47 But Russia is hardly unique. A total of twenty-eight governments, that we know of, maintain troll armies. The US Military has run an online sock-puppet operation since 2011, dubbed ‘Operation Earnest Voice’, to spread pro-American propaganda overseas. Since 2016, it has authorized and funded what it calls ‘counter-propaganda’, targeting US citizens. The UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group runs an extensive programme of trolling and false flags to undermine and smear individuals and companies that the government has a problem with.48

  The relationship between trolling and far-right politics is unclear. To blame it on trolling can be a way of depoliticizing a problem, as when popular Norwegian media reacted to Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of Labour Party members in Oslo and Utøya by stressing the need to engage right-wing activists more in the media. They invoked the adage: ‘Trolls burst in the sun’. Moreover, it risks playing into the self-image of the alt-right as bold tricksters and subversives. The alt-right clearly enjoys the association. As one activist told the Guardian: ‘We’re the troll army! We’re here to win. We’re savage!’49

  What is true is that online alt-right politics has found a convivial home in trolling subcultures, and has often adopted the tactics of trolling, in its dissimulation and harassment campaigns. For example, the alt-right has appropriated the trolling icon Pepe the Frog. Pepe had long been a ‘react’ meme on 4chan message boards but, when it went viral on other sites, trolls attempted to ‘reclaim’ it by deliberately associating it with white-supremacist ideology, such that no one would want to touch it. The success of that operation meant that it was easily appropriated by neo-Nazis and other rightists. More generally, trolling as a tactic of war suits the alt-right’s agenda – ‘absolute idealism must be couched in irony in order to be taken seriously’ according to Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin – and its self-image as a combative insurgency.50

  This has given the platforms some trouble. Eruptions of viral frenzy don’t just benefit the social industry platforms. They have volatilized politics, as Bruce Sterling argues, much as financial speculation unsettles industry.51 And the alt-right have been quick to take advantage. To this extent, the interests of the incipient far right and of the platforms converge. In 2017, one analysis found that Trump alone was worth about $2.5 billion to Twitter, a fifth of its share value at the time. But even if the social industry firms can’t afford to lose the alt-right, it causes them an image problem. They have, ever since the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring, prized their nebulous public image of wokeness. And, as ‘responsible’ corporations, they do not wish to be associated with ‘bad behaviour’.

  In July 2016, Twitter took the symbolic step of banning Milo Yiannopoulos. At this point, Yiannopoulos was still on his upward swing. He was a regular guest on news programmes and talk shows, with a highly marketable brand of controversy. He claimed to be ‘the most fabulous supervillain on the internet’. He was kicked off Twitter for having spearheaded a trolling campaign against the Ghostbusters actor, Leslie Jones.52 Jones had been bombarded with racist spite by these trolls ever since the movie’s release. It was easy to make an example of Yiannopoulos because of his high profile, and the prominence of the woman he was attacking. But if anything, the ban just fuelled interest in Yiannopoulos. And this interest came not just from far-right college activists, but from American liberals fascinated by his ambiguous darkness and charming sociopathy. The comedian Bill Maher even invited Yiannopoulos on to his late-night chat show to spout bigotry about trans people, and intended to have him back on.53 It was only when Yiannopoulos made comments appearing to justify adult men having sex with teenage boys that his career collapsed: one of those telling moments when we learn what the thresholds of free speech really are.

  Yiannopoulos was in some respects a typical product and exemplar of the alt-right: self-consciously both a troll and an ideological vigilante. He was both joking and deadly serious. His reaction to being banned by Twitter was to bristle, with ill-concealed delight, at the ‘emotional children of the left’ for being unable to cope with disagreeable statements. ‘All I did’, he told Business Insider, ‘was crack a few jokes.’ Likewise, when challenged about sexist statements by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News, he grinned and said: ‘And you don’t see the humour in that?’54 The far-right troll ‘weev’ takes a similar approach in claiming that, when he told reporters he was a ‘neo-Nazi white supremacist’, he was making fun of them, as it was ‘obviously’ a ridiculous statement – despite the large swastika tattoo on his body.55 He followed this up by insisting that the Left end its ‘tyrannical campaigns of censorship’, on pain of looming bloodshed: and ‘my team has all the guns and combat training’. This cultivated ambiguity, this hedging of a serious political agenda with statements ostensibly made just for the lulz, indicates where t
rolling could fit into the psychic and political economy of the alt-right.

  Breitbart, the far-right website which subsequently became Yiannopoulos’s regular outlet until his downfall, was also annexed to the Trump campaign. Steve Bannon, then chair of Breitbart News, signed up to the campaign after former Fox executive Roger Ailes became a Trump adviser. And it arguably pioneered a form of in-real-life trolling that serves its reactionary purposes, with its two best-known scoops: the sting against the liberal civil society organization, ACORN, and the framing of African-American Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. In the first instance, far-right activists visited ACORN offices claiming to be looking for housing and welfare assistance. The activists spun a yarn about their rough circumstances to elicit compassion from junior ACORN employees, then successfully goaded some of them into making statements that appeared to condone underage prostitution and criminal activity. These exchanges were then spliced together and packaged as an ‘exposé’. In the case of Shirley Sherrod, they disseminated a drastically edited clip of a speech made to the liberal anti-racist organization, the NAACP. They made it appear as if she was gloating over her refusal to help a white man, whereas the speech had the completely opposite message. In both cases, Breitbart used heavily edited footage to depict black people as enemies of white society. In both cases, the liberal establishment was provoked into panicked overreaction, prompting sackings, resignations and, in the case of ACORN, its effective termination, only to realize it had been had.56

  In their ideological framing of the ACORN sting, the conservative activists involved claimed that ACORN inhabited a ‘revolutionary, socialistic, atheistic world, where all means are justifiable’, thus licensing all means employed by the Right to combat them. In a vivid and telling stroke, they called for conservative activists to ‘create chaos for glory’.57 Andrew Breitbart, discussing the Sherrod case, asserted that her ‘racist’ speech showed that the NAACP had no right to judge Tea Party members as racist, and indeed was ‘a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist’. Rationalization was the key word here.

  Notably, while much alt-right trolling reheats anti-communist paranoia along with traditional fascist ideas, pro-Trump trolling campaigns are often aimed at conservatives who are critical of the alt-right. When The Daily Beast reported that Breitbart incited ‘hate mobs’ to threaten and dox critics on the Right, then editor Steve Bannon disavowed any responsibility. Trolling is an effective weapon precisely because responsibility for it is diffuse and ambiguous. Nonetheless, Bannon gloried in the site’s reputation for thuggishness. When an insider described Andrew Breitbart as ‘the kind of people who, if you accidentally brushed against their shopping cart in the supermarket, their response is to burn down your house’, Bannon was delighted.58 He explained: ‘If a guy comes after our audience. . . we’re going to leave a mark. We’re not shy about it at all. We’ve got some lads that like to mix it up.’

  This relishing of chaos even while scolding it, playing the part of both troll and witch-hunter, insider and outsider, became part of the affective basis for Trumpism. Social industry platforms prize their self-image as a technology of freedom. And they have at times been used for progressive ends, helped marginalized groups gain attention, or enabled demonized figures to outmanoeuvre the legacy media. But in generalizing the troll–vigilante dialectic, they have also provided an ideal tool for the convocation of new, reactionary masses.

  IX.

  What happens when trolling appears in meatspace? In its subcultural origins, trolling insisted on a sharp differentiation between online and offline behaviour. On the internet, nothing mattered; nothing was to be taken seriously. It was, ostensibly, performance art.59

  But, as trolling became generalized, the already tenuous gap between the real and the performed tended to collapse. Trolls have always been adept at manipulating bits of culture. They turned Pepe the Frog into a repulsive symbol of fascism. They transformed the music video for Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ into a cruel joke. They turned the V for Vendetta mask into a protest icon. And they have often justified their use of racist, sexist or homophobic language as a tricksterish attempt to deflate the terms and make fun of them. But ‘irony’ isn’t as subversive as this implies. Irony made Rick Astley’s records start selling again. It handed a popular icon to the alt-right. Irony makes unappetizing ideologies digestible. And while it offers an easy rationalization for trolls engaging in sexist or racist attacks – ‘I did it for the lulz’ – the effect of these attacks is the same as if they were sincere.

  And it started to spill out into the ‘real world’, with lethal effects. An example of this was the ‘Gamergate’ scandal. This began when video-game developer, Zoë Quinn, discovered that her ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, had posted a long article about their relationship on the internet. In it, he accused her of cheating and blamed her professional success on her trading of sexual favours for good press. The accusation, which became known as ‘Gamergate’, was nonsense. It was revenge porn. But it tapped into male resentment over the growing feminist voice in the gaming industry. Men rallied to ‘Gamergate’, believing not only that a woman had gained from sexual favours, but that this somehow diminished them. It was somehow ‘typical’ of an injustice they were going through, an injustice signalled by the growing profile of women in the gaming industry. Gjoni wanted the post to trigger storms of harassment, and openly appealed to Quinn’s haters on 4chan and Reddit message boards to target her. He succeeded. Quinn faced swarms of trolling anons, death threats, doxing and abuse. She saved copies of the abuse on her computer. By the time she stopped keeping records, the saved abuse took up a total of sixteen gigabytes of computer memory. This was trolling for a cause, even if it wasn’t clear what the cause was: none of Gamergate’s advocates ever explained what, practically, would allay their collective outrage.

  As Sarah Jeong points out, however, the harassment of Quinn was one of only a small number of unambiguous, ‘documentable’ examples of online harassment.60 And in the context of Gamergate, as the storms of viral fever spread, dragging journalists, developers and onlookers into the vortex, the accusations of harassment were less clear. Paranoia reigned, understandably in the circumstances. Every opinion was a threat, or a harassment, or a manipulation, or a troll, necessitating belligerent vigilance. It was a classic shitstorm. And it was impossible to change one’s opinion without provoking attack. The worst bile, naturally, was reserved for women, especially those who defected from the Gamergate cause. When Grace Lynn, a supporter of Gamergate, had a change of heart, she was subject to waves of harassment culminating in a ‘SWATting’, where the target’s home address is used to make a false emergency call resulting in armed police raiding the property. Lynn defused the situation, but previous ‘SWATtings’ have resulted in police killing unwitting victims.

  The consequences of a major cultural shift were being filtered through the Twittering Machine in the worst way. Instead of amplifying women’s demands for equality, or even just clarifying the issues, Gamergate empowered sadists and sexist provocateurs. It became a defining moment in the emergence of a new subcultural style of right-wing activism predicated on male resentment fused with trolling culture. Joining other subcultural streams, from ‘pick-up artists’ to ‘incels’ (the ‘involuntary celibate’), and adopting a reboot of 1970s anti-feminist activism, many Gamergaters became Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs). It is the MRAs, more than anyone else, who have taken their trolling into the real world with bloody consequences. Trolling, having been filtered through the machine, entered meatspace with a vengeance.

  In April 2018, at a busy intersection in Toronto, a man drove a rented van into a crowd of pedestrians, killing ten and injuring sixteen. The mode of attack directly echoed the methods of the so-called Islamic State. But the suspect, Alek Minassian, was not a member of any known network and had no criminal record. He had even briefly enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces. He was an incel partisan. Incels,
a subculture within a subculture, a bleak fraction of MRAs, share with their confederates a Planet of the Apes vision of female sexuality in which women have evolved to prefer physically dominant men. They think their unwilling celibacy, far from being a normal state of affairs, is a special punishment inflicted by fate. That their sexual frustration derives from genetic deficit. Before his attack, Minassian had declared on Facebook: ‘The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’61

  The Chads referred to by Minassian are stereotypical alpha males, and Stacys are their stereotypically attractive female counterparts. Chad and Stacy are football jock and cheerleader, an American success story: and the success story is a superego ideal which taunts the incel. Worse, for incels it’s a form of sexual despotism in which they are an oppressed caste. Their equivalent of the ‘oppressive Tawaghit’ of Islamic State propaganda. A fantasy image superimposed on layers of agonized self-loathing, anguished world- and women-hatred, sadism, masochism and death drive.

  As the reference to Elliot Rodger made clear, Minassian was far from the first of his type. And many incels hope for more. During the rampage by former student Nikolas Cruz at a Florida high school in September 2017, incel communities were desperately rooting for the killer in the same ironic idiom: scorning the ‘normies, stacies and chads’ and praying the ‘HERO’ with the gun would also be ‘ugly’.62 Years before, MRAs had cheered on the mass murderer Scott Dekraai when he shot his ex-wife and eight others during a custody battle over his son.