GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 30 32 tweets 10 min read
#THREAD

Unlike damaged Kanye “death con 3 on Jewish people” West & loads of cowardly anonymous far-right trolls, Donald Trump & West's new mate White Supremacist Nick Fuentes is (at least for now) even too much for "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk's @Twitter.
Scott Wiener is a California state senator who represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. A day after Elon Musk reactivated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account, she tweeted that he was a “communist groomer,” presumably because Wiener is gay Jewish Democrat.
The thread that follows quotes extensively from Wiener's article, here:

technologyreview.com/2022/11/30/106…
Since purchasing @Twitter, Musk has brought some of the platform’s most notorious banned users back to the flock. Shortly before he restored Greene’s account, he reactivated the accounts of Donald Trump & Kanye West (of “death con 3 on Jewish people” fame).
Musk's reinstated doxxers Project Veritas; James “OK groomer” Lindsay; said McCarthyism didn’t go far enough; referred to a Jewish person as “Dr. Lampshades” (a #Holocaust myth - Jewish skin used as lampshades); & Andrew Tate (rape victims bear responsibility for getting raped).
Musk has promised, based on a 'Twitter “poll” (reportedly mobbed with extremist 4chan users & some of Musk's 80 million fake followers) to reactivate suspended accounts that didn’t break the law or generate egregious spam. That could be quite the crew: for example, Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes is a white supremacist who said “the Jews had better start being nice to people like us, because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them”,
Another possible is Milo Yiannopoulos, who worked closely with white supremacist leaders, was Sieg Heil saluted by Nazis, & recently posted about the “Jewish powers that be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country, & see us all as disposable cattle according to their ‘holy’ book”.
There's an endless cast of lesser-known insurrectionists, bigots, conspiracy theorists, & hateful online harassers. And given that Trump absolutely broke the law by inciting people to violent insurrection, Musk’s “violate the law” exclusion appears to be quite limited.
Twitter is an incredibly important platform for democracy—a place where ideas & information germinate, spread, & break out into broader media & public perception. Whether for politics, media, science, medicine, history, etc Twitter has become an epicenter of public discourse.
The reinstatement of these accounts & 'relaxed' moderation has already made @Twitter far more toxic than it was before.

Twitter took down over 1.8 MILLION accounts for violating guidelines against the promotion of #terrorism between 2015 & 2021. Who knows what's happening now.
The people previously banned from @Twitter are not just benign trolls. Many have engaged in aggressive antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, or racist harassment campaigns; are doxxers; are purveyors of misinformation that risks violence; or have incited actual insurrection.
Bringing them back not only forgives their past behaviour, it validates & enshrines their rhetoric as pillars of Twitter’s platform going forward. Musk’s reinstatement effort appears to stem from his assertion that he is a “free speech absolutist” - an utterly infantile position.
Putting aside that he’s banned multiple progressive accounts that parodied him—parody being one of the most powerful and essential forms of free speech—his free speech absolutism is actually about free hate speech, free harassment speech, & free incitement speech.
Combined with his decimation of @Twitter’s content moderation staff, Twitter will quickly become the free-for-all hellscape Musk insists he wants to avoid.

Myself & many of my followers have already been bombarded with aggressive suspicious low-follower anonymous accounts.
If (when?) @Twitter becomes a right-wing cesspool—even if it’s just a more benign version of 4chan—its role as a democratizing host to global conversations will quickly collapse, as people who don’t think Fuentes or other white supremacists & Nazis are awesome flee the platform.
More tangibly for Twitter users—and for those who are not on Twitter but are nevertheless targeted on the increasingly unmoderated platform—an antisemitic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, threatening Twitter cesspool puts a lot of people in actual physical danger.
Over the past several years, Scott Wiener has received thousands of death threats, overwhelmingly on or stemming from social media, largely in response to his work advancing LGBTQ+ civil rights, with a secondary source being his work to expand vaccine access.
The threats and harassment started when he wrote a law to repeal several felonies that singled out people living with HIV for harsh criminal treatment (felonies that didn’t apply to people with any other serious infectious diseases).
The social media threats & harassment exploded when he authored a law—supported by law enforcement, civil rights organizations, and victim advocacy groups—to end discrimination against LGBTQ+ young people in relation to California’s sex offender registry.
That bill started the #QAnon slander campaign tidal wave against him, describing him as a “pedophile” & “groomer.” The threats & harassment flared up again when he pursued legislation to allow teenagers to get vaccinated without parental consent & protect their own health.
The threats & harassment directed at him on social media include being doxxed, repeatedly threatened with decapitation & rape, told that the sender would come find him with a gun, & received a bomb threat that led to the police sweeping his home with a bomb-sniffing dog.
Several threats, either from or almost certainly inspired by social media, resulted in criminal prosecutions & convictions for those who issued them. For the first time in his life, he had to testify before a jury—against a man who was threatening his very existence.
As he received these waves of death threats, he learned a lot about the various social media platforms & how they handle the problem. @YouTube was the slowest to address the threats & harassment.
#Meta (mostly Instagram but also Facebook) was initially quite slow to act but got better over time. @Twitter WAS the most responsive & proactive, but who knows how post-Musk Twitter will react.

Wiener's experience is reflected in a new report.

Wiener says it could be worse for people who, unlike him, don't have resources, a platform, or a role where they can highlight this issue eg educators standing up to activists are harassed & called “groomers” online, turning them into potential targets for real-world violence.
The lives of the vast majority of people who are threatened, stalked, harassed, or doxxed on @Twitter will get worse as Musk empties out the Twitter equivalent of the Phantom Zone, allowing vicious, bigoted, & even violent harassers, Nazis, & white supremacists to return.
School board members, teachers, & librarians are being targeted by extremists claiming educators are “grooming” their kids to be transgender or teaching them critical race theory. Progressive activists’ home addresses are posted online, as are pics of community leaders’ families.
Public health leaders are viciously harassed & threatened by anti-vaxxers, & physicians are harassed & threatened by elements of the anti-choice movement.

If think this couldn't happen here in Britain, I have a bridge to sell you.

Suffice it to say that for every prominent public figure like Wiener who’s getting harassed & threatened, thousands of people are suffering in silence.

Elon Musk owns @Twitter, & he has the power to shape and change it. Yet Twitter is so much more than a private asset.
It matters to our democracy & public discourse. And it matters in terms of whether people are safe. Musk lives in a rarefied world. He is, in fact, the richest man in the world. He has access to every conceivable resource—security, investigators, or whatever else he needs.
Most of us don’t have those resources. As Musk plays his chaotic @Twitter game, we’re the ones left suffering the consequences. - Scott Wiener.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with GET A GRIP

GET A GRIP Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @docrussjackson

Dec 1
#THREAD

'Divide & rule' is an effective political strategy.

"Far-right populist parties thrive whenever there is a crisis. They either construct or exaggerate a crisis, or instrumentalize existing crises." It's all they've got - but around 30% of voters fall for it every time. ImageImageImage
'Divide & rule' (Latin: divide et impera), is gaining & maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into smaller groups, by turning them against each other: individually, these groups then have less power than the one implementing the strategy. ImageImage
It is a political strategy to gain or retain power, & it works primarily by cultivating disunity among potential opponents, often by co-opting some individuals & groups, while excluding others.

It often involves scapegoating particular identities - as the Nazis did with Jews. Image
Read 6 tweets
Dec 1
#THREAD

Smith & Engel showed 120 men a photo of a car. For half the subjects, the photograph showed only the car, whereas for the other subjects a sexually objectified woman features. After examining the picture, participants were asked to evaluate the car on several dimensions. Image
Those who saw the car with the attractive female next to it rated the car as significantly more appealing & better designed. They also estimated it to be more expensive & faster.
When the authors later asked a subset of the participants of their ratings had been influenced by the presence of the model, 22 out of 23 denied it.

One respondent claimed, “I don’t let anything but the thing itself influence my judgments. The other is just #propaganda.”
Read 10 tweets
Nov 30
#THREAD

Christian fascism is a far-right political ideology that denotes an intersection between (neo)fascism & Christianity.

It is sometimes referred to as #Christofascism, a neologism coined in 1970 by the liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle.
Most fascist movements portray themselves as defenders of Christianity & the traditional Christian family against atheists & amoral humanists. Modern #neofascists claim "Judeo-Christian values must be defended", or are "under attack from western liberals".
This was true of Catholic fascist movements in Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, & Brazil.

We see the rise of divisive, intolerant, nationalistic & fundamentalist #Christofascist rhetoric in the USA, & now here in the UK too.
Read 24 tweets
Nov 30
#THREAD

Non dom billionaire Jonathan Harmsworth's DMG Media & Harmsworth Media are the media subsidiaries of DMGT, & publish the following titles:

i
Metro
Daily Mail
MailOnline
New Scientist
Mail on Sunday
Irish Mail on Sunday

#EnoughIsEnough
DMG Media is an intermediate holding company for Associated Newspapers, Northcliffe Media, Harmsworth Printing, Harmsworth Media, & other subsidiaries of Daily Mail & General Trust.

Its portfolio regularly reach 63% of the GB adult population every month.
The London Evening Standard was owned by DMGT, then sold to Lebedev in 2009. DMGT maintains a 5% share.

On 27 April 2007, Associated Newspapers was ordered to pay undisclosed damages to Hugh Grant.
Read 12 tweets
Nov 30
'Critical theories of neoliberalism (CTNL) & their significance for left politics', by Matthew Lepori.

A thoughtful discussion article attempting to synthesise a very wide-ranging critique of #neoliberalism in order to build left-alliances.
It's not open access, I'll just thread a few extracts.

There is no battle between those studying #neoliberalism as a political economy (‘Marxian’) & those studying it as a governmental project designed to constitute particular types of social & political subjects (Foucauldian).
Some analysts treat neoliberalism as an ideology & class project emerging in reaction to falling rates of profit, this economic ‘trigger’ is not explained through structural-economic contradictions but through politics eg strikes, inflationary policies, & an open global economy.
Read 53 tweets
Nov 29
Ignore the divisive reactionary dickheads demonising & scapegoating Albanians.

FUN FACT: 53% of Albanian asylum seekers' claims were granted in an initial decision in the year to June 2022 (the share is expected to increase after accounting for appeals).

britannica.com/place/Albania
The largest nationality crossing the channel in small boats in the first half of 2022 was Albanians.

In the second quarter of the year, Albanians also became the top country of nationality for asylum applicants (3,289 people).

migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/press/a-tale-o…
In the year ending June 2022, a majority (53%) of Albanian asylum applicants were successful at initial decision, and the share is expected to increase after accounting for appeals. This compares to 76% positive initial decisions for all nationalities.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(