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  As social media researcher Jamie Bartlett explained, once one person found a home address, another tried to get to the next level by, say, finding her dad's phone number or pictures of her friends. “The herd mentality kicks in,” said Bartlett, “and the victim becomes nothing but an object of strange competitive urges.”17

  In other words, the escalating tussle set anonymous attackers against a victim they only imagined. Quinn's attackers may have seen pictures of her, even nude ones, and they felt intensely enough to post abusive comments, dox her, threaten her, etc. But she never existed as a person, as someone who might be scared of the violent abuse heaped on her by strangers. Like in a video game, she was just an avatar they attacked, each trying to get a higher score.

  This dynamic, becoming more common as a trollish 4chan ethos expanded across an increasingly crowded, anonymous web, also describes virtually every offline extremist attack. Extremism isn't about hating an individual person, but hating a person's generalized religion, race, profession, political opinions, and so on. It's even less personal for terrorists who, by definition, don't attack their ultimate targets. Terrorists set off bombs or shoot people so they can terrify a group of living people, be they Muslims, Communists, law enforcement, research scientists, etc.

  In 2009, Ashton Kutcher was lauded for using his army of followers to fight malaria. Anonymous had deployed doxing and a massive digital army of trolls against the KKK. Now these same tools were being used to discharge hate on a massive scale. And, instead aiming their ire at institutions or members of hate groups, Gamergate advocates were terrorizing private individuals on the basis of false information for the alleged crime of creating a video game whose politics they disliked. Easy to launch and hard to police, Gamergate was a massive digital nightmare that demonstrated how trolling could be utilized for explicitly political purposes: resistance to the reputed “culture war” being waged by feminists and other advocates of left-wing “politically correct” ideology.

  Christopher Poole, or moot, 4chan's founder, shared some of the same personality profiles as eventual extremists—including divorced parents and social insularity. He was also constantly immersed in an online universe filled with extremist rhetoric. That he never went down the path of radicalization shows how predicting future extremist activity based on superficial evidence is somewhere between useless and dangerous. In fact, though moot had founded 4chan and championed anonymity and free speech, he did enforce some basic rules on his board. Once it was clear that 4chan was a hub for planning Gamergate attacks, for example, he banned all related discussions on the site. But, despite his legendary status, moot was not immune to attacks from 4chan-ers who called him a “soulless informant.”18

  This was not the first time moot had received death threats from angry anons. Wary of being doxed himself, he refused to provide his current location, countries he recently visited, or the name of the university he attended for a few terms.19 He had been worn down by dealing with controversies linked to the site. Gamergate was the final straw. Poole walked away from the site in 2015 and started a job at Google the following year. The culture that had grown up around message boards like 4chan was now a beast he didn't want to, or couldn't, control. And its cynical, outrageous ethos was infecting the mainstream media.

  On January 15, 2009, a Latvian investor named Janis Krums tweeted: “There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”1 His tweet and photo went out to 170 followers, making Krums the first to report what was quickly dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson”—the safe ditching of United Airlines Flight 1549. By beating the national media to the scene, Krums even became part of the news; he was interviewed live on MSNBC half an hour after his tweet.2 The day was also a defining moment for Twitter, its emergence as a crowd-sourced news provider with millions of reporters globally.

  Krums's tweet showed that social media could be faster than mainstream media, but it didn't completely transform the dynamic between traditional and crowd-sourced news. Within a few minutes, organizations like CNN and the New York Times took over with more in-depth and substantive reporting. The old-guard mainstream media was still able to assert itself as the authority. But over the next few years, as social media became many people's primary news source, mainstream media began to cover the online ecosystem as news itself. Online trends became newsworthy simply because the sheer number of people talking about something made it news. The status of social media had metamorphosed again—this time more profoundly. Crowd-sourced reporting went from being traditional media's speedy little sibling to actually creating news.

  In 2014, for example, Time ran an end-of-year piece called “Top 10 Things that Broke the Internet”—a list that included “Kim Kardashian's butt,” a viral video of “The Apparently Kid,” and surveillance camera footage of “Solange and Jay-Z's Elevator Fight.”3 Entertainment and human-interest stories have always been popular, but these items became news solely because of the popular reaction to them on the internet.

  Mainstream media's difficult new role in breaking news was crystalized in another item on the list, “The Celebrity Nude Photo Leak,”4 that resulted from hackers publishing private, naked photos of three female celebrities to sites including 4chan. Journalists faced a paradox: the photos were clearly illegal invasions of privacy, but even critical coverage would advertise their existence, effectively encouraging millions of people to search for them online.

  When the traditional media covered stories about what “broke the internet,” it was, in a sense, being radically democratic. But, by chasing online trends simply because they were trends, it also abdicated its role as a gatekeeper for what was newsworthy. The mainstream media began increasingly offering itself to internet mobs as a megaphone for rumors, fads, and hoaxes.

  On July 20, 2012, James Eagan Holmes entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of a Batman movie. After tossing tear gas canisters into the aisles, he began firing multiple firearms, killing twelve people and wounding over a hundred.

  Holmes's attack resulted in the most casualties in any mass shooting in modern American history, although that number has since been surpassed multiple times. In the rush to cover it, the media seized upon an online group of self-professed Holmes supporters who called themselves “Holmies.” Because of the inherent difficulties of confirming details on the anonymous web, accurately covering online activity is difficult. In the case of the Holmies, however, reportage went far beyond minor errors. Some stories suggested the group could have tens of thousands of members. In the end, it turned out that the “Holmies” were fewer than a dozen trolls.5

  Here was the catch: The reporting was massively flawed, but it was not a failure—at least not in economic terms. The story—sensationalist, hyperbolic and exploitative—was popular with readers. In the developing online media ecosystem, the economic imperative was to drive page views.

  Trolls, especially the well-organized, tech-savvy kind on 4chan, could be a huge nuisance for journalists. Nonetheless, the “Holmies” ruse handed the media bankable content on a silver platter. By widely broadcasting the Holmies story, reporters inadvertently paid the trolls back with huge publicity. “In short,” wrote Whitney Philips in her book This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, “trolling works for trolls and works for mainstream media because it turns into page views and page views into advertising.”6 The mainstream media was effectively encouraging the trolls to come out of their ghetto. In the second decade of the new millennium, 4chan's antisocial ethos began informing more and more interactions on the internet—including social media.

  Part of this was due to the rush of people joining social media networks. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of active Twitter users in the United States exploded, from ten million to sixty-six million. Tens of millions rushed to leverage the app to network, promote their personal brand, and add value to their social media platform.

  In the face of what amounted to growing competition
for wavelength, Twitter users developed various solutions, many of which bore strong resemblances to the well-worn techniques of 4chan anons from earlier in the 2000s. One was obsessiveness, relying on near constant posting or retweeting to expand a network. On 4chan this activity was known as “meme-forcing”—constantly reposting a meme in the hopes that it will catch on.

  Twitter's format, a constantly updating feed and a 140-character limit, also encouraged users toward hot takes and snappy hashtags. Just like 4chan's architecture that forever deleted posts, sometimes in fifteen minutes, users were steered away from thoughtful, nuanced messaging. Tweets needed to be easily digestible bits on a fast-moving feed.

  Other Twitter users relied on creating controversy and acrimony as an easy way to drive up retweets, a trollish skill perfected by 4chan-ers who baited their online victims with offensive comments.

  The changes to the social and political environment brought about by Twitter, Facebook, comment streams, and other social media beginning around 2008 were enormous. They were too numerous and multifaceted to be defined in one particular way, but perhaps their biggest impact was creating an addictive medium that expanded by injecting overheated and divisive political and social issues into the rhythm of everyday life. It birthed what was descriptively called “outrage culture.”

  The result was that, although 4chan was still the potty-mouthed teenager in the room, many reputedly “mature” social media interactions were becoming increasingly antisocial. And, as ripe as 4chan culture was for ugly eruptions like Gamergate, it was hardly corrupting an otherwise innocent internet. To be heard above the internet's background noise, more and more users of mainstream social media joined an often funny, frequently angry, but always frantic race to the bottom—or the zenith—of offensive hostility.

  Since 2010, as mainstream media increasingly relinquished its gatekeeper role and rewarded trollish behavior while acrimonious interactions on Twitter and other social media became commonplace, an unholy alliance of the exploding 4chan culture and social media's massive reach created new opportunities for enterprising extremists.

  One of the earliest journalists to cover Gamergate was a British-born technology writer named Milo Yiannopoulos. By the age of twenty-nine, Yiannopoulos had dropped out of his grammar school and two universities, started an unsuccessful European technology journal, and created a soon defunct ranking system for tech startups. But, in the year following Gamergate, his career began to take off.

  On September 1, 2014, a month after violent threats led developer Zoë Quinn to flee her house, he posted an article on right-wing news site Breitbart titled “Feminist Bullies tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos claimed Gamergate was a culture war, one which he used to leapfrog into issues far beyond technology. Yiannopoulos became a well-known, outspoken, and sometimes outrageous critic of Islam, feminism, and political correctness, among other right-wing bugbears. By March 2015, he had established enough credibility as a social critic that he was invited to talk about feminism and discrimination against men on an episode of the BBC's daytime “issues” television show The Big Questions.

  His employer, Breitbart News Network, also had big plans for Yiannopoulos. Breitbart had started in 2005 as a right-leaning online news aggregator. Over the next few years, founder Andrew Breitbart became more extreme in his attacks on liberalism as well as some traditional conservative positions and publications, what he referred to as the “old guard.” Following Breitbart's 2012 death, executive chairman Steve Bannon continued reshaping the organization. In October 2015, Bannon named Yiannopoulos editor of the new Breitbart tech section, but his plans for the young writer—who was at home in an internet culture defined by controversy, trolling, and semi-ironic attacks on politically correct ideas—were much bigger.

  On December 8, 2015, Yiannopoulos published an anti-feminist screed with the typically outrageous clickbait headline “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” That afternoon, in emails later released by BuzzFeed, Bannon contacted Yiannopoulos to berate him for merely writing silly articles and not focusing on the larger agenda of the far right.

  “Dude,” wrote Bannon “—we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!! U should be OWNING this conversation because u r everything they hate!!! Drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilization.”7

  Yiannopoulos wasn't a great writer or reporter—much of his work for Breitbart was ghostwritten8—but Bannon wasn't looking for superlative prose. In Yiannopoulos, he saw someone who could spread the gospel of what was becoming known as the alt-right by tapping into the convergence of 4chan culture and social media's power to dictate news.

  Throughout 2016, with Bannon's support, Yiannopoulos's star rose as he fomented angry social media encounters that were reminiscent of Gamergate. He created inflammatory public appearances, like a May 2016 speech at DePaul University in which he equated feminism with cancer. These appearances led to angry protests on campus that were videoed and uploaded to YouTube, gaining so many views that they were covered by mainstream publication while they were endlessly debated in angry social media encounters.

  By simply enraging huge swaths of the left, Yiannopoulos became a headline-grabbing celebrity. The media, in turn, rewarded him for his trollish stunts with profiles in mainstream magazines. To his fans, he was the “poster child for offensive speech” and a champion of first amendment rights. He was a 4chan troll who had emerged from the online sewer with a sharp suit, dyed hair, and a specific political agenda.

  Yiannopoulos was well aware of his unique value to Breitbart and other elements of the alt-right. Traditional conservatism, by its nature resistant to social change, was associated with stodgy, old, white men. By contrast, Yiannopoulos was an immigrant, gay, and had a long-term African American boyfriend. He happily weaponized his “fabulous catty gay male behavior”9 for the alt-right, peppering his anti-feminist speeches with obscenities and references to gay sex. At the same time he authored articles with homophobic headlines like “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It's Time to Get Back into the Closet” and claimed on television he would probably choose not to be gay if possible—even though it would be “career suicide.”10 To his fans, Yiannopoulos's form of free-wheeling transgression made hate seem fresh and fun. He shamelessly directed bile at women and Muslims before claiming it was all a big joke and that Social Justice Warriors should loosen up.

  Like any good troll, Yiannopoulos also tried to flip the tables on some of his left-wing critics, especially campus protesters. Quick to be outraged by his stunts, Yiannopoulos cast the often successful attempts to shut down his speeches as moralizing and restrictive.

  “I have said in the past,” Yiannopoulos wrote to BuzzFeed, “that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about. But everyone who knows me also knows I'm not a racist.”11 Yiannopoulos and 4chan shared the same two rules: nothing is prohibited and make fun of everything. But Yiannopoulos's flippant denials that his most offensive behavior actually meant anything were, at best, dubious.

  In April of 2016, Yiannopoulos was videoed in a Dallas karaoke bar singing “God Bless America” to a crowd, including a well-known thirty-eight-year-old white nationalist named Richard Spencer, who were uniformed in preppy pastels and crew cuts and raising their arms in Nazi salutes. After realizing what was happening, the bartender at One Nostalgia Tavern kicked out the obnoxious group.

  Though he entered the bar with well-known racists, Yiannopoulos lamely claimed not to have seen the Nazi salutes due to his “severe myopia.”12 Likewise, while Yiannopoulos may never have “really believed” in fascist ideologies, he certainly knew his value to the far right in vilifying Islam, feminists, left-wing “political correctness,” and other frequent targets.

  Another young man who would eventually wrangle 4chan and social media for his right-wing extremist purposes, grew up
in suburban Columbus, Ohio, during the early 2000s. Andrew Anglin would spend hours online in his parents’ basement, trollishly encouraging people to send anonymous death threats to the violently homophobic Westboro Baptist Church or mocking the KKK. During his freshman year at an alternative public high school, he had shoulder-length hair and dated the only other vegan in his class.

  Over the next few years, however, Anglin's personality and politics changed. Friends describe him as becoming angry and violent, once slamming his head repeatedly on a sidewalk outside a party. At around the same time, he moved away from his left-of-center political pranks. An avid 4chan anon, the emotionally unstable Anglin claims to have first discovered neo-Nazi ideology on the site. After a personal journey that included travels in Southeast Asia and several failed websites, he launched the neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer on July 4, 2013.13

  Daily Stormer took its name from the rabidly anti-Semitic weekly German tabloid Der Stürmer, which published from 1923 until the end of WWII. Unlike the official Nazi party newspaper, Der Stürmer made no pretense of respectability, running profane cartoons and calling for the extermination of Jews in the early 1930s.

  Anglin imitated this bombastic ethos while borrowing the authority of mainstream sources and leveraging the trollish techniques perfected on 4chan. Daily Stormer's outdated logo, for example, was a nod to 1980s kitsch, while Anglin's over-the-top writing was less Mein Kampf than the sort of biting parody and sarcastic wit popularized in the 1990s by Vice and South Park.