Thread by @fraying

This episode was equal parts interesting and infuriating.
youarenotsosmart.com/2019/04/09/yan…

Scratch any conspiracy theory deep enough and you’ll find anti-Semitism. So this isn’t some abstract investigation into an amusing subculture. This is people who hate me and my family. They believe things that put us in ovens. It’s deadly fucking serious to me.

And it’s NOT EQUAL between democrats and republicans. We have a president now who is actively supporting lunatic conspiracy theories. That CHANGES EVERYTHING.

I’ve worked in online community since 1995. I have seen where conspiracy theories lead. It’s not trivial. And I’ve seen the company policies and interaction designs that increase conspiratorial thinking. None of that was discussed here.

If you do community management, eventually you will get an email that says the government is making the computer do things, and you have to help the user find their alien babies. I’m not even joking.

And if you reply like a normal person, that user will say, I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE AND I’M COMING TO GET YOU. And maybe it’s just crazy talk but then you remember the person who showed up at YouTube with a gun.

What happened in New Zealand is directly connected to conspiracy communities online. To behave any other way is criminally liable.

So yeah. Investigate the Flat Earthers. But do it like you’re a bomb disposal technician, BECAUSE YOU ARE.

The podcast also really just wrote off the connection to mental illness, but online, that’s not a line you can draw. Conspiracy communities contain a lot of mentally ill people. If you think the walls tell you to do things, that’s not just conspiracy, that’s schizophrenia.

And when you’re on the other end of it, it doesn’t matter which it is. It’s all the same.

What’s different now is that conspiratorial people and mentally ill people are all mixing together in communities that amplify that interest. YouTube captures it and algorithmically feeds it. Facebook identifies it and lets people advertise to it.

That’s NEW. That’s NEVER HAPPENED. And you know what the result is? The conspiracy theorist in the White House. Disgruntled white men picking up machine guns and killing people en mass. An epidemic of violence and cruelty.

This is NOT the same as in the 90s. This is NOT democrats taking the “Russia stuff” too seriously. This is fucking new, fucking terrifying, and it’s wrong of @notsmartblog to present it as anything short of an emergency.