fierceawakening:

shanneibh:

katisconfused:

eatingcroutons:

Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.

But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.

That username was black-to-the-bones, and this is the post I reblogged from them:

When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.

The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.

Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.

When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage. 

Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.

So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?

Fact. Check. Everything.

Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.

Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.

Yeah when they originally started talking about this (like when they started investigating), and when they mentioned stuff like how they turned shit like gamer spaces into altright recruiting, I immediately thought of how many people seem to esculate outrage on the left too but like, you cannot call people out. Like look at this post.

Tumblr has honestly made this easy for then because you are not really allowed to question shit. Like if you “well actual” a post like that you are likely to get more hate then the person posting the missinfo. So even when you KNOW the post is wrong you don’t do shit because it is just not worth it.

Like if you currently are saying “all people who think [thing I disagree with] are [terrible thing] even if they are in the same groups”, examine how you are acting and what you are reblogging. Because a lot of people I think have just been playing along with escalating uncharitable behavior to the point I have basically lost friends to the tunblr outrage machine because they seriously cannot grasp why “oh I didn’t mean you” when gleefully reblogging posts shitting on certain subcategories of marginalized people for not being ____ enough could be harming people and is really not justified when you are usually lying about punching down.

I blogged the email tumblr sent me and I’m getting a disheartening number of “ no, I know some of these blogs; they’re all good people “ answers and one went so far as to say the entire Russian trolls story is just a conspiracy to remove marginalised people’s blogs.

The online Left has huge cultural problems that were exploited to help elect our worst nightmare. If you aren’t concerned about that, you need to wake the fuck up. Now.

Jesus fuck.

“one went so far as to say the entire Russian trolls story is just a conspiracy to remove marginalised people’s blogs”

Why am I not surprised? The far Left is (almost) as full of batshit conspiracy theories as the far Right.

I’m kind of glad that awful post about Julia Ioffe (I reblogged the rebuttal to that one) was from a Russian troll rather than an actual American leftist.