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This article is so frustrating. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
I mean, it's good to finally have acknowledgment, in the NYT, that @YouTube radicalization algorithms aren't accidental but intentional. 
URGH. Hey, @beccalew: Trans women, POC, women in games and politics, and other vulnerable people have been telling everyone this for at LEAST half a decade. "No one thought of it as radicalizing," my ass. You just didn't listen. Stop erasing history.
It's probably unproductive to feel this way, but I'm also frustrated with the sympathetic "these young men becoming fascists were preyed upon by manipulative alt-righters" takes, just like the sympathetic portraits the press paints of the ones who go on to become mass shooters.
The world is constructed with the assumption that the default human is a white man. Oh, they're alienated? You think women, ESPECIALLY queer women/WOC *aren't* alienated? Yet somehow they're not shooting up or burning schools and mosques and synagogues.
Game researchers were pointing out that game companies like Zynga were focusing on making games addictive rather than necessarily fun like 10 years ago, and that this had ominous implications for other technology, but again, no one listened.
Like, is this really a transformation? This is someone who was sitting there getting off on watching videos of people being devastated, traumatized, and afraid. I'm not sure that you can be "radicalized" into that if that sadism wasn't already there.
Look, my take is make Nazis Afraid Again. Make the consequences of publicly being a Nazi/alt-righter burn anyone who flirts with it. But I'm also all for a multiplicity of tactics to shut down fascists, and @ContraPoints subverting alt-right aesthetics is doing heaven's work.
Especially given that the alt-right so often subverts the language and aesthetics of inclusivity.
👇
During my talk at the Gotland Game Conference, I pointed out how the term "canary in the coal mine" has come to represent people who AREN'T listened to, which, like, is the opposite of what it's supposed to be.
Miners took canaries down into the coal mines and *watched them* for signs that they were suffering. Because that was self-preservation.
If white men had any sense, they would be watching marginalized people and being alarmed at signs of suffering, instead of trying to shut it down/cover it up/mock it. Because unless they're SUPER-elite, it doesn't bode well for them either.
