We are all conditioned to react
Oh gee, whaddya know, the Twitter account that got the Covington thing going appears to have been one of those disrupter types.
Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats.
The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.
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The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020,” its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.
130 times a day – that’s doing it for pay, because that’s a full-time job.
Late on Friday, the account posted a minute-long video showing the now-
iconicfamiliar confrontation between a Native American elder and the high school students, with the caption, “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.”That version of the video was viewed at least 2.5 million times and was retweeted at least 14,400 times, according to a cached version of the tweet seen by CNN Business.
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Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at Storyful, a service that vets content online, was monitoring Twitter activity on Saturday morning and said the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.In one indicator of the @2020fight’s video’s virality, multiple newsrooms, including some national American outlets, reached out to the user asking them directly about the video.
McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its “high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else’s image in the profile photo.”
Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher who saw the tweet and shared it herself on Saturday, said she later realized that a network of anonymous accounts were working to amplify the video.
Speaking about the nature of fake accounts on social media, McKew told CNN Business, “This is the new landscape: where bad actors monitor us and appropriate content that fits their needs. They know how to get it where they need to go so it amplifies naturally. And at this point, we are all conditioned to react and engage or deny in specific ways. And we all did.”
So there’s that.
Yeah, no teacher alive has time for that sort of tweeting.
“130 tweets a day? Hold my Coke.” – Donald Trump.
I hate to get all conspiracy theory, but what role has Nathan Phillips been playing in this? He has issued many demonstrably untrue statements, most of which supported the false narrative of the initially tweeted video. Was he working with them? Or just couldn’t resist joining in on a good story?
No doubt with Russian bots pushing in both directions to further inflame and polarize, sand at the same time cast further doubt on the media.
I’m not on Twitter (and less and less on Facebook), but it’s alarming to find how easily I succumbed to confirmation bias. Pretty cheap as lessons go, but not one of my better moments.
Mistakes were made.
Okay when the story first broke, I thought that the people breaking the story were deeply irresponsible. The hunt for the teens’ identities that soon erupted (Ending up with harassment being directed to at least one person who wasn’t even there) was despicable.
One guy I noticed on Patheos was talking about how there is a lot you can do with box cutters.
Because that’s how you deal with a fifteen year old with differing political views, with box cutters.
During an argument with another Internet tough guy he said that they were Nazis and deserved everything they got. I brought up the Nazi’s use of child soldiers, and how they were indoctrinated, should those children have been hanged?
Internet tough guy said the Hitlerjugend should have been strung up along with the adults.
You can guess who got the more upvotes, it was the guy who was advocating hanging children.
And this was on atheist boards. A lot of the upvotes weren’t bots, they were people I know to hold leftwing views, who I’d had read previously in other circumstances, who I generally considered to have thoughtful, intelligent points on other topics.
The brakes have been stripped out. That little voice in people’s heads that says “Hey, this person isn’t old enough to vote, drink or drive” – that’s just gone.
And I’m not entirely sure how everyone is supposed to get it back.
Yes, the blood lust, however verbal, is disquieting.
This Facebook public post goes into great detail, analyzing the video available.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157990637982977&id=817262976
This article discusses the popularity of MAGA hats among teens and preteens visiting DC. The young people often lack perspective and conceive of the hats differently from adults.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/22/18192933/covington-catholic-maga-teen-nick-sandmann-hat
Both I think are worthwhile, and offer some points I hadn’t seen raised before (on various “sides” of the situation).
Sackbut, that article doesn’t in anyway reduce the horrors of the MAGA hat. If the kids are laughing at political correctness, that usually means they are laughing at the idea that other people have the same rights that they have. If they are because they are part of a “winning team”, it is awful to think that someone would follow the Trump bandwagon just because they are winning. If they are rebelling against adults, I would say WTF? Adults in their group (white, especially male) are wearing the same hats, so it’s no rebellion at all.
The article makes the point that the hats are used for bullying the “other” – students who don’t look like the hat wearers. There is nothing in this article to suggest that the kids wearing the hats are doing anything other than the adults wearing the hats; the whole thing seemed like an exercise in pretzel logic to somehow make the hats “different” for teens, but for me, they failed.
From the article:
It appears that both liberals and conservatives read the hats the same way, but with different words. Adults and teens don’t appear to be particularly different in their view of the hats, either, though they may use different words, phrases, or postures to express what the hats mean to them.
The hat article (as well as the linked 2017 article about preteens) makes the point that kids buy these hats sometimes to fit in, or because the adults are uncomfortable with them. The 2017 article states that the the largest demographic wearing MAGA hats in DC was visiting middle-school boys. This doesn’t absolve anybody, but it does support the idea that wearing a MAGA hat was not an independent, fully wrought decision on the part of each of the boys. I think that idea is worth considering.
I would agree that it does that (I don’t actually think it’s an independent, fully wrought decision on the part of most adults). But at the same time, it does appear from the article that it is used in bullying, it is used by white kids, it still has the same basic meaning. And for these boys, I doubt it makes the adults around them uncomfortable, because these boys are surrounded by like minded people (I realize there are liberal Catholics, and that some of them probably send their kids to Catholic schools for reasons other than religious indoctrination, but….).
I know a lot of teens (I teach college freshmen). They buy the MAGA hats because they are misogynistic and racist, for the most part, and they like that it is easy to proclaim that in what they, and others around here, perceive as a socially acceptable way. It is a symbol of something, and if kids are using it to make adults uncomfortable, then they are signalling that they are willing to ignore the horrible ramifications of that hat, that phrase, and the actions they themselves are engaging in…
I was a teen once. There were occasionally kids who wore Nazi swastikas to make people uncomfortable. Some of them didn’t mean anything else by it. These kids were a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the kids, and the other kids ignored them, they did not emulate them to “fit in”. They made sure the other kids didn’t “fit in” because what they were using as a symbol of rebellion was a symbol of something so horrendous that it goes beyond rebellion. It was also very difficult for the handful of Jewish students at our school, and the other kids did not see that as okay.
So, no. There is no other meaning for that hat, regardless of what the kids might choose to think or claim. If kids are just going along to fit in, what they are fitting in with has a meaning outside of their own narrow world, and they are old enough to realize that, and probably do. They are likely wearing the hat because they are assholes.
Iknklast, I agree they are assholes. I like to learn how assholes think, and the information about the hats as fashion statements helps fill in the picture. I did not consider the information exculpatory, only enlightening.
On the topic of the hat as fashion, back in the late 1970s a lot of punk rockers wore swastikas, either armbands or painted onto clothing. I asked quite a few of them why, considering (and often having to explain) what that symbol represented, and the general response was that it had nothing to do with the Nazi ideology and everything to do with the overall punk look because of the shock and horror it caused amongst the ‘establishment’.
I suppose we simply can’t assume that young people really think their choices through as we old fogies do.
Living where we do (not far from National Airport, with several tourist hotels in the area), we see lots of tourists around, including an inundation of teenagers starting around April and lasting till around mid-June). They swarm the food court at the mall and the local restaurants (according to our daughter, they’re awful tippers). And yes, an inordinate number of them wear maga hats, something very few locals do. In addition to the racist and misogynist message those hats send, they’re also a big fuck you to all the people who are out of work or losing business because of the shutdown. The kids may not think they are, but messages received aren’t always the same as messages sent.
Oh, so they are, I hadn’t thought of that. Mind you I think of them as pretty much a big fuck you to everyone except Trump & the trumpettes.
True.