The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  13. For Henri Bergson, comedy ‘dreams . . . ’ Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, Cosimo Classics: New York, 2005, p. 1.

  14. As Adam Kotsko has written . . . Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, Zero Books: Winchester, 2012.

  15. Trolling, to borrow a phrase from Phillips . . . Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, p. 53.

  16. André Breton, who invented the term ‘black humour’ . . . André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1969, p. 125.

  17. An early guide to flaming . . . Quoted in Bartlett, The Dark Net, p. 40.

  18. Founder Christopher Poole ensured that . . . David Kushner, ‘4chan’s Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away’, Rolling Stone, 13 March 2015.

  19. Interviewed by the New York Times in 2008 . . . Robert Munro, ‘Craigslist troll nailed with a $75,000 judgment’, Inquirer, 11 May 2009; Mattathias Schwartz, ‘The Trolls Among Us’, New York Times, 3 August 2008.

  20. Public displays of grief are regarded as . . . Quoted in Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, p. 84.

  21. Their mirth resembles what Hobbes called . . . Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Routledge: London and New York, 2016, p. 34.

  22. In August 2012, the Australian television host Charlotte Dawson tweeted . . . ‘Charlotte Dawson: How the cyber trolls beat me’, News.com.au, 3 September 2012; Sophie Goddard, ‘Charlotte Dawson commits suicide following extreme trolling’, Cosmopolitan, 24 February 2014; Nicky Park, ‘Charlotte Dawson in trouble on Twitter’, New Zealand Herald, 10 May 2012; Anna Leask, ‘Charlotte Dawson’s closest friends reveal her demons’, The Chronicle, 15 March 2014.

  23. From Project Chanology, wherein 4chan users targeted the Church of Scientology . . . Patrick Barkham, ‘Hackers declare war on Scientologists amid claims of heavy-handed Cruise control’, Guardian, 4 February 2008.

  24. Gabriella Coleman, basing her analysis on Lewis Hyde’s classic analysis . . . Benjamin Radford, Bad Clowns, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, NM, 2016; Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, Verso: London and New York, 2014.

  25. When Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown quit Twitter . . . Alex Abad-Santos, ‘The “Millie Bobby Brown is homophobic” meme is absurd, but that doesn’t mean it’s harmless’, Vox (www.vox.com), 15 June 2018; Roisin O’Connor, ‘Millie Bobby Brown quits Twitter after being turned into an “anti-gay” meme’, the Independent, 14 June 2018.

  26. Anti-spammer vigilantes often targeted . . . Lisa Nakamura, ‘“I Will Do Everything That Am Asked”: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social Media’, Journal of Visual Culture, 13(3), 2014, pp. 257–74; see also Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, Routledge: London and New York, 2002; and Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2007.

  27. The machine is perfectly congruent with . . . Raymond Williams, Toward 2000, Penguin: London, 1985.

  28. They also lend themselves to a kind of hypervigilance . . . Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press: Raleigh, NC, 2003.

  29. When the irony-Nazi and celebrity troll Andrew Auernheimer, or ‘weev’, bombastically declared that . . . Mattathias Schwartz, ‘The Trolls Among Us’, New York Times, 3 August 2008.

  30. Trolls, in the subcultural sense . . . On the demographic background of subcultural trolls, see Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, p. 2.

  31. Their vaunted detachment performs . . . Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, MN, 1987.

  32. As Jamie Bartlett describes . . . Bartlett, The Dark Net, pp. 27–33.

  33. Pew Research found . . . Maeve Duggan, ‘Part 1: Experiencing Online Harassment’, Pew Research Center, 22 October 2014; Soraya Chemaly, ‘Why women get attacked by trolls: A new study unpacks the digital gender safety gap’, Salon (www.salon.com), 23 October 2014; Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2014, p. 14.

  34. Jon Ronson mentions . . . Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, p. 243.

  35. In 2006, a thirty-one-year-old Neapolitan woman . . . Stephanie Kirchgaessner, ‘Tiziana Cantone: seeking justice for woman who killed herself over sex tape’, Guardian, 13 October 2016; ‘Tiziana Cantone: Suicide following years of humiliation online stuns Italy’, BBC News, 16 September 2016; Rossalyn Warren, ‘A Mother Wants the Internet to Forget Italy’s Most Viral Sex Tape’, The Atlantic, 16 May 2018.

  36. Not only that, but the way in which social media mobs form . . . ‘“Poor people don’t plan long-term. We’ll just get our hearts broken”’, Observer, 21 September 2014; Michelle Goldberg, ‘Linda Tirado Is Not a Hoax’, The Nation, 11 December 2013; ‘Duncan Storrar: The instant hero torn down in days’, BBC News, 13 May 2016; Ruth Smith, ‘Lucy Meadows was a transgender teacher who took her own life. Her story must be remembered’, Independent, 19 November 2017.

  37. The monstering of Justine Sacco . . . Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, pp. 95–111.

  38. ‘We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform,’ . . . Natasha Tiku and Casey Newton, ‘Twitter CEO: “We suck at dealing with abuse”’, The Verge, 4 February 2015.

  39. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ . . . Austin Carr and Harry McCracken, ‘“Did We Create This Monster?” How Twitter Turned Toxic’, Fast Company, May 2018.

  40. Rather than lose profitable content . . . Carr and McCracken, ‘“Did We Create This Monster?”’; Will Oremus, ‘Twitter’s New Order’, Slate Magazine (www.slate.com), 5 March 2017; Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Twitter announces global change to algorithm in effort to tackle harassment’, Guardian, 15 May 2018.

  41. As Facebook’s former chief technical officer, Ben Taylor, explained . . . Casey Newton, ‘Here’s how Twitter’s new algorithmic timeline is going to work’, The Verge, 6 February 2016.

  42. When Reddit was used to circulate leaked celebrity nude images . . . Yishan Wong, ‘Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul’, Reddit blog, 6 September 2014; Adi Robertson, ‘Was Reddit always about free speech? Yes, and no’, The Verge, 15 July 2015.

  43. For most of us, it is completely ineffectual . . . Sarah Jeong, The Internet of Garbage, Forbes: New Jersey, NJ, 2015, pp. 69–90.

  44. Nor did ‘free speech’ prevent Facebook from . . . Levi Sumagaysay, ‘Facebook hangs “Black Lives Matter” sign at its headquarters’, SiliconBeat (www.siliconbeat.com), 9 July 2016; Sam Levin, ‘Facebook temporarily blocks Black Lives Matter activist after he posts racist email’, Guardian, 12 September 2016; Issie Lapowsky, ‘It’s Too Easy for Trolls to Game Twitter’s Anti-Abuse Tools’, Wired, 13 May 2016; Glenn Greenwald, ‘Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments’, The Intercept, 30 December 2017; Russell Brandom, ‘Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram surveillance tool was used to arrest Baltimore protestors’, The Verge, 11 October 2016.

  45. This meant, as Sarah Jeong pointed out . . . Sarah Jeong, ‘Turns out Facebook moderation sucks because its guidelines suck’, The Verge, 24 April 2018.

  46. Amanda Marcotte traces this to . . . Amanda Marcotte, Troll Nation: How the American Right Devolved Into a Clubhouse of Haters, Hot Books Press: New York, 2018.

  47. There is indeed some evidence that Russia uses trolls . . . Thomas Ferguson, ‘Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election’, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper No. 66, January 2018.

  48. The UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group runs . . . Samantha B
radshaw and Philip N. Howard, ‘Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation’, Working Paper No. 2017.12 Computational Propaganda Research Project, University of Oxford, 2017; Nick Fielding and Iain Cobain, ‘Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media’, Guardian, 17 March 2011; Joel Gehrke, ‘Pentagon, State Department launch $40 million counter-propaganda effort aimed at Russia’, The Washington Examiner, 26 February 2018. The ‘counter-propaganda’ aimed at US citizens is so uncontroversial in US politics that it is openly vaunted. Nicole Gaouette, ‘State Department touts counter-propaganda funds without mentioning Russia’, CNN, 26 February 2018; Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, ‘Controversial GCHQ Unit Engaged in Domestic Law Enforcement, Online Propaganda, Psychology Research’, The Intercept, 22 June 2015.

  49. As one activist told the Guardian . . . Sanjiv Bhattacharya, ‘“Call me a racist, but don’t say I’m a Buddhist”: meet America’s alt right’, Observer, 9 October 2016.

  50. More generally, trolling as a tactic of war suits the alt-right’s agenda . . . Quoted in Aja Romano, ‘How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology’, Vox, 11 January 2017.

  51. They have volatilized politics, as Bruce Sterling argues . . . Social media ‘destabilizes the stately process of democratic power struggle, in much the way that, say, digital finance disrupts heavy industry. Bursts of popular viral fever appear, but very little statecraft gets accomplished. Old institutions are corroded or abandoned, yet no new ones are built.’ Bruce Sterling, ‘Notes on the 2106 US election’, Texte zur Kunst, 11 November 2016.

  52. He was kicked off Twitter for . . . Elle Hunt, ‘Milo Yiannopoulos, rightwing writer, permanently banned from Twitter’, Guardian, 20 July 2016.

  53. The comedian Bill Maher even invited Yiannopoulos on to his late-night chat show . . . Maya Oppenheim, ‘Bill Maher invites Milo Yiannopoulos back on show’, Independent, 7 June 2017.

  54. Likewise, when challenged about sexist statements by Cathy Newman . . . Milo Yiannopoulos, ‘Twitter’s Post-Milo Depression’, Breitbart (www.breitbart.com), 12 August 2016; Claudia Romeo and Joe Daunt, ‘Milo Yiannopoulos defends his Leslie Jones tweets: All I did was crack a few jokes about a Hollywood star’, Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com), 1 August 2016; ‘Milo Yiannopoulos’ fiery interview with Channel 4 News’, Channel 4 News, 18 November 2016 (www.youtube.com).

  55. The far-right troll ‘weev’ takes a similar approach . . . The far-right troll Andrew Auernheimer, ‘Statement on Sarah Jeong’, weev.net, 2 August 2018.

  56. In both cases, the liberal establishment was . . . ‘Timeline of Breitbart’s Sherrod smear’, Media Matters for America (mediamatters.org), 22 July 2010; Mark Jurkowitz, ‘The Reconstruction of a Media Mess’, Pew Research Center, Project for Excellence in Journalism, 26 July 2010; Chris Rovzar, ‘Just How Heavily Edited Was the ACORN-Sting Video?’, New York, 2 April 2010; on the astonishing gullibility of the liberal media in the ACORN case, see ‘NYT and the ACORN Hoax’, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (fair.org), 11 March 2010; Rick Ungar, ‘James O’Keefe Pays $100,000 To ACORN Employee He Smeared – Conservative Media Yawns’, Forbes, 8 March 2013; John Atlas, ‘ACORN Vindicated of Wrongdoing by the Congressional Watchdog Office’, Huffington Post, 5 May 2015.

  57. In a vivid and telling stroke . . . James O’Keefe, ‘Chaos for Glory: My Time With Acorn’, Breitbart, 10 September 2009.

  58. When an insider described Andrew Breitbart as . . . Lloyd Grove, ‘How Breitbart Unleashes Hate Mobs to Threaten, Dox, and Troll Trump Critics’, the Daily Beast, 1 March 2016.

  59. It was, ostensibly, performance art . . . Aja Romano makes the ‘performance art’ analogy in ‘How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology’, Vox, 11 January 2017.

  60. As Sarah Jeong points out . . . Jeong, The Internet of Garbage, pp. 22–5; Keith Stuart, ‘Zoe Quinn: “All Gamergate has done is ruin people’s lives”’, Guardian, 3 December 2014; Zachary Jason, ‘Game of Fear’, Boston Magazine, 28 April 2015; Alex Hern, ‘Gamergate hits new low with attempts to send Swat teams to critics’, Guardian, 13 January 2015.

  61. Before his attack, Minassian had declared on Facebook . . . Jason Wilson, ‘Toronto van attack: Facebook post may link suspect to misogynist “incel” subculture’, Guardian, 25 April 2018; ‘Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became “incel hero”’, BBC News, 26 April 2018; David Futrelle, ‘When a Mass Murderer Has a Cult Following’, The Cut (www.thecut.com), 27 April 2018; Justin Ling, ‘“Not as ironic as I imagined”: the incels spokesman on why he is renouncing them’, Guardian, 19 June 2018.

  62. During the rampage by former student Nikolas Cruz . . . David Futrelle, ‘Incels hail “our savior St. Nikolas Cruz” for Valentine’s Day school shooting’, We Hunted the Mammoth, 14 February 2018; Anna North, ‘Men’s Rights Activists Come Out In Support Of Salon Killer’, Jezebel (www.jezebel.com), 14 October 2011.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. After about twenty minutes . . . Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, ‘Gunman in “Pizzagate” Shooting is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison’, New York Times, 23 June 2017; ‘The saga of “Pizzagate”: The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread’, BBC Trending, 2 December 2016; Amanda Robb, ‘Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal’, Rolling Stone, 16 November 2017; Mark Segraves, ‘Charging documents for Edgar Welch’, Twitter.com, 5 December 2016; Andrew Kaczynski, ‘Michael Flynn quietly deletes fake news tweet about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in sex crimes’, CNN, 14 December 2016.

  2. In Giorgio De Maria’s cult horror novel . . . Giorgio De Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin, W. W. Norton & Company Ltd: London, 2017.

  3. The social industry platform is one powerful faction . . . Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016.

  4. In the UK, print circulation is heading for a cliff fall . . . ‘World Press Trends 2017: The audience-focused era arrives’, World News Publishing Focus, 6 August 2017; ‘Newspapers Fact Sheet’, Pew Research Center, 13 June 2018; Roy Greenslade, ‘Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall’, Guardian, 27 May 2016.

  5. British press barons are discussing . . . Robert Cookson, ‘UK publishers look to consolidate in print battle’, Financial Times, 10 April 2016; Anna Nicolaou, ‘Advertising revenues on US digital platforms set to surpass TV’, Financial Times, 8 June 2016.

  6. Most of it came from smartphone users . . . Matthew Ingram, ‘Google and Facebook Account For Nearly All Growth in Digital Ads’, Fortune, 26 April 2017; John Koetsier, ‘Mobile Advertising Will Drive 75% Of All Digital Ad Spend In 2018: Here’s What’s Changing’, Forbes, 23 February 2018.

  7. Already in 2016, 62 per cent of Americans . . . Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer, ‘News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016’, Pew Research Center, 26 May 2016.

  8. YouTube ranks second . . . Geoff Colvin, ‘Why Facebook and Google Still Resist Calling Themselves Media Companies’, Fortune, 16 November 2016.

  9. They are leaders of the pack among . . . Simon Bowers, ‘Google expected to reveal growth of offshore cash funds to $43bn’, Guardian, 26 January 2016; Alanna Petroff, ‘Top 50 U.S. companies hold $1.4 trillion in cash offshore’, CNN, 14 April 2016.

  10. The project proposes . . . Hannah Kuchler, ‘Facebook launches journalism project’, Financial Times, 11 January 2017.

  11. When Mark Zuckerberg writes . . . Jeff John Roberts, ‘Why Facebook Won’t Admit It’s a Media Company’, Fortune, 14 November 2016; Karissa Bell, ‘Facebook: We’re not a media company. Also Facebook: Watch our news shows’, Mashable, 8 June 2018.

  12. Mark Zuckerberg’s extreme agnosticism . . . Kara Swisher, ‘Full transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode’, Recode (www.recode.net), 18 July 2018; Alex Hern, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on Holocaust denial “irresponsible”’, Guardian, 19 July 2018.

  13. Facebook’s old media competitors miss the mark . . . Sam Thielman, ‘Faceb
ook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show’, Guardian, 12 May 2016.

  14. Google reacted as any good monopolist would . . . Oscar Williams, ‘Google News Spain to be shut down: what does it mean?’, Guardian, 12 December 2014.

  15. After all, Trump’s candidacy was supposed to . . . Ben Norton, ‘How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy’, Salon, 10 November 2016.

  16. This false claim was shared . . . Sapna Maheshwari, ‘How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study’, New York Times, 20 November 2016.

  17. As Martin Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, complained . . . Jim Rutenberg, ‘Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News’, New York Times, 6 November 2016.

  18. For example, a study by researchers at Ohio State University looked at . . . Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, ‘Fake News Did Have a Significant Impact on the Vote in the 2016 Election’, Ohio State University, February 2018.

  19. These other factors might include . . . Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, ‘Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election’, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper No. 66, January 2018.

  20. In another, Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile said . . . Jordan Weissman, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches Have Leaked. No Wonder She Didn’t Want Them to Get Out’, Slate, 7 October 2016; Rachel Revesz, ‘CNN fires Donna Brazile for allegedly giving debate questions to Hillary Clinton in advance’, Independent, 31 October 2016; David A. Graham, ‘Russian Trolls and the Trump Campaign Both Tried to Depress Black Turnout’, The Atlantic, 17 December 2016.

  21. Trump’s claim that she lied . . . Jon Greenberg and Angie Drobnic Holan, ‘Trump right that Clinton made up story about Bosnia sniper fire’, PolitiFact, 22 June 2016.

  22. Both stories, aggressively promoted by the Post . . . Glenn Greenwald, ‘Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid’, The Intercept, 31 December 2016.