See the Strings

Malicious content exploits pathways between platforms to thrive online, subvert moderation

If you're aware of reality, you're going to immediately understand these types of studies nearly always define "hate" as being opposed to whatever narrative the ruling class is pushing. But this one takes it step further by including a Russian social media site VKontakte. Why is it here? Well, there is a messaging app called Telegram made by Russians, that became popular with people who like online privacy. Of course a Russian app will be marketed in Russia.

Look at the percentages. Only one site has substantial interaction with the Russian site: Facebook. That makes perfect sense because Facebook is a global company. If instead we focus on the American sites, what shows up is rather interesting. Gab users have abandoned Facebook. Barely any content flows from Gab to Facebook. Moreover, Gab looks like the most influential of the sites and it's main counterpart is 4chan. If you know a little Internet history, you know there was heavy overlap between 4chan and Trump support online. Twitter began purging Trump supporters during the 2016 campaign. Gab launched in August 2016. No surprise that the makers of viral memes, the very thing BigTech, major media and the ruling class want stamped out, are still going strong on Gab and 4chan. Telegram has a lot of users around the world. VKontakte is included to give the appearance of overlapping content.

The study's main purpose is creating an illusion of Russian influence. It also indicates the Western ruling class may be working on a Chinese-style firewall to keep Westerners from interacting with Russian, Chinese or other foreign platforms. Not out of any real concern about foreign influence, but because it provides a path towards free interaction. As I've discussed before, the sphere of unacceptable topics in China is smaller and more well-defineed than in the West. As long as you're not talking negatively about China or the CCP, it's likely you won't be censored on Chinese social media. Western rulers dislike CCP-censored social media for the same reason the CCP dislikes Western-censored social media.

The researchers then turned their attention to identifying malicious content related to COVID-19. They found that the coherence of COVID-19 discussion increased rapidly in the early phases of the pandemic, with hate clusters forming narratives and cohering around COVID-19 topics and misinformation. To subvert moderation efforts by social media platforms, groups sending hate messages used several adaptation strategies in order to regroup on other platforms and/or reenter a platform, the researchers found. For example, clusters frequently change their names to avoid detection by moderators' algorithms, such as vaccine to va$$ine. Similarly, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ clusters simply add strings of 1's or A's before their name.

"Because the number of independent social media platforms is growing, these hate-generating clusters are very likely to strengthen and expand their interconnections via new links, and will likely exploit new platforms which lie beyond the reach of the U.S. and other Western nations' jurisdictions." Johnson said. "The chances of getting all social media platforms globally to work together to solve this are very slim. However, our mathematical analysis identifies strategies that platforms can use as a group to effectively slow or block online hate content."

"Hate" is an umbrella term that includes Truth. You don't like anti-semitism do you? You're not an anti-semite are you? Good, then you support our efforts to stamp out hate. Oh by the way, math is hate, Christianity is hate, being white is hate, and believing in the male and female sex is hate, along with anything else true that the ruling class doesn't like.

If you're on Twitter, Facebook and other BigTech platforms, you accept that the ruling class will choose who you will interact with, what information you see, and what opinions you hold. If you don't want to live in that world, you had better get an account on Gab, Twetch, dive into Urbit or some alternative platforms.