Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • New homes for hatred

    The Atlantic, on hateful trolls finding new homes online:

    this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British parenting forum Mumsnet.

    On these sites and others, they use many of the same trolling tactics as other internet-based fringe political movements to disrupt conversation, skew reality, and make the internet another dangerous place for trans women through doxing and harassment. Anti-trans activists have used social media to call out specific trans women who use women’s bathrooms, for instance, labeling them “predators” and “pedophiles,” and promising to resist them by any means necessary—be it pepper spray or pistol. GLAAD has shown that these sorts of attacks have warped online discourse, turning focus away from discrimination and instead encouraging renewed debate about trans women’s bodies.

    What’s described in this article is the same online radicalisation as neo-nazis and incels.

  • Being chased by bears

    If you’re trans and talk about it online, people will imply – or sometimes state baldly – that you do it too much or too often. But like many trans people I don’t feel I have a choice: if we don’t speak, nobody is speaking for us.

    CaseyExplosion on Twitter:

    I so very deeply wish I didn’t have to talk about trans issues, and that there was informed media, policy makers, healthcare professionals, and advocates speaking out instead. Trans people aren’t speaking out because it’s some sort of vocation, we’re speaking out in desperation!

    Scattermoon, also on Twitter:

    Got told the other day “you really like to talk about trans stuff on Twitter don’t you” and honestly no, I like to talk about my cat or transport infrastructure or puns on Twitter. I talk about trans stuff because I feel I have to because of how bad things are and how few know.

    Trans voices are so marginalised in official media, it feels like a constant Sisyphean battle against misinformation. It’s left on us to sound to alarm, to say what is happening, to tell our stories, because the newspapers would rather you never hear from any of us ever again.

    So we speak about this stuff out of desperation, pleading, doing our best to try and counter the harmful narrative that is so prominent in this country.

    To put it another way, everyone becomes an expert in animal behaviour when they’re being chased by bears.

    We’re trapped inside a burning building and we’re trying to sound the alarm.

  • Facebook: fighting fascism is bad for business

    There’s a damning section in this NYT piece about Facebook’s ongoing refusal to deal with misinformation and hate speech.

    The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.

    So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.

    “The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.

    Facebook chose to use a weaker algorithm.

    While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent.

    The problem has never been that Facebook can’t police hate speech and dangerous misinformation. It’s that it won’t. Big tech is increasingly looking like Big Tobacco, profiting from a product it knows is doing great damage.

  • Sainsbury’s heats up lots of gammon for Christmas

    It’s hard not to despair sometimes.

    One of Sainsbury’s many Christmas adverts features a Black family; when the supermarket’s social media team posted the video to Twitter, it was immediately besieged by racists. As this is social media it’s unclear whether the racists were proper English racists or Russian bots and trolls. But the language used – banging on about Black Lives Matter, “wokeness”, “virtue signalling” and other right-wing tropes – wouldn’t be out of place in a Daily Mail or Spectator column.

    The only good thing to come of this is that the racists are vowing (again) to boycott Sainsbury’s, which happens to be where I shop; ironically enough I’m planning to go there to get some gammon later on. But while the obvious jokes may be obvious, what’s also obvious is that far too many bigots are no longer ashamed of being bigoted. We’re moving backwards and too much of the press is pushing us in that direction.

  • A slackening grip on reality

    There’s an interesting and disturbing long read by Alex Hern in The Guardian: The story of Facebook, QAnon and the world’s slackening grip on reality. It talks about how Facebook in particular encourages conspiracy theories.

    The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.

    But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour’s?

    The focus on this piece is QAnon, but there are strong parallels with another largely social media-driven movement, anti-trans activism – so much so that I’ve seen a number of people describe such obsessive activism as “QAnon for middle-class women”. Like QAnon its adherents claims there is a sinister conspiracy to target children; like QAnon they are often anti-semitic, alleging that the sinister conspiracy is funded by Jewish people generally and George Soros specifically; like QAnon they believe that there is a secret cabal of people who control the media and politics; like QAnon they include celebrities talking shit to large audiences.

    “The industries that many celebrities work in – film, music, sport – were among the hardest hit by shutdowns. So even more than most of us, they suddenly found themselves with nothing to do but sit on Twitter,” Phillips says. “Not all of them did a Taylor Swift, spending the time recording an album. Some of them started sharing wild rumours to millions of followers instead.” This, then, is how we end up with Ian Brown, the former frontman of the Stone Roses, declaring that conspiracy theorist is “a term invented by the lame stream media to discredit those who can smell and see through the government/media lies and propaganda”.

    And like QAnon, it’s bullshit that can only be perpetuated by denying reality and surrounding yourself with fellow conspiracists.

    It’s not easy to overturn someone’s sense of reality, but even harder to restore it once it has been lost.

    What frightens me most about this – and there are lots of things that frighten me about it – is that we know these conspiracies lead to real-world acts.

  • Too little, too late

    Media companies are finally doing what they should have been doing years ago. In the last few days Twitter has put most of Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets behind barriers that point out that the content of the tweets isn’t true. YouTube has kicked off former Trump strategist Steve Bannon after he called for public figures to be beheaded. And multiple broadcasters cut away from Donald Trump’s live-streamed rambling “remarks” last night on the grounds that he was lying through his teeth and potentially inciting violence.

    It would have been good if they’d done this five years ago. But they didn’t. Given the choice of doing the right thing or platforming the far-right thing, they did the latter.

    I hope the ad revenues were worth it.

     

  • If Trump goes

    I’m writing this before the US election result is called; right now it looks like a narrow win for Joe Biden.

    I hope so, although I fear the aftermath amid the warlike rhetoric coming from Trumpists right now. And I worry about the longer term too. Despite everything he’s done and everything we know about him, Trump nearly got elected again: a huge proportion of the US electorate saw kids in cages, election rigging, racism, anti-LGBT+ discrimination, blatant corruption, criminal activity and the avoidable deaths of more than 200,000 people and thought “yep, I’d like four more years of that.”

    If Trump goes, that sentiment remains. Think of him as a trial balloon for the next, much more dangerous Republican president.

  • Barefoot and pregnant

    This powerful photo is from Poland, where women and LGBT+ people are protesting truly awful anti-abortion legislation. The government was elected partly because of its anti-LGBT+, “family values” stance; as is always the case, “family values” also means restricting women’s rights in order to keep them barefoot and pregnant.

    Here’s another family values politician, the US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, speaking this week.

    I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow traditional family structure. That you can go anywhere, young lady.

    As in Poland, the family values here are of the barefoot and pregnant variety.

    Cas Mudde, writing in the New Statesman:

    Most far-right politicians take a traditional view of gender that sees women first and foremost as mothers, discouraging them from working outside of the household. The idea that women are “virgin-mothers” points to a kind of benevolent sexism where women are vulnerable and dependent upon (and deserving of) protection from strong men. Such politicians view gender ideology as a threat to the fundamentally different and “natural” roles that men and women play in society.

    Women’s reproductive and sexual freedom, gay/bi/pan women and trans women are at odds with that worldview.

    the global far right converges on one thing: they all denounce contemporary feminism and “gender ideology”, and see women, first and foremost, as the “womb of the nation”. Consequently, far-right men believe it is their right (and even duty) to control and police their women. After all, as the Hungarian Speaker of Parliament recently said, “individuals’ decisions on having children are public matters.”

  • Lockdown and mental health

    Like many people I’ve been struggling this year. Lockdown and COVID restrictions have been hellish for many people’s mental health.

    The promise of lockdown was that it was a necessary evil: we did it to save the NHS and to buy time to create an effective contact tracing system. That time was squandered, and England is about to go into lockdown again.

    This, by Owen Jones for The Guardian, is very good.

    This is purgatory, a barren parody of real life. We’re living in monochrome, an existence bedevilled by tedium, stripped of spontaneity, robbed of little joys but defined by ever greater stresses. This relentless assault on our wellbeing will only intensify: those left fearing for their imperilled jobs in a nation with a shredded safety net in place of a welfare state; the young being deprived of their best days; the old, denied the dignity and support they deserve in their later years; the millions who were already struggling with their mental health even before the old world collapsed; those imprisoned with domestic abusers, or LGBTQ people locked away with bigoted relatives.

    This is a conversation we need to have. As things stand, talk of the mental impact of the world’s greatest crisis for three quarters of a century has been monopolised by corona deniers and anti-lockdown agitators.

    Being sad and lonely is clearly lesser than being dead, or causing the deaths of other people. But nevertheless the damage to people’s mental health is much more important and will cause much more misery than the damage to corporations’ profits. To date the UK government has been much more concerned with the latter.

    the deprivation of our liberty was not supposed to be an endless cycle of outbreaks and national lockdowns; it was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed so it could continue to function, to stop needless deaths and to buy time to establish a functioning test and trace system. Its failure means our mental wellbeing has been needlessly tossed on a bonfire – not because of partying youngsters but because of a government that relied on shambolic private contractors and sought to put the economy ahead of human life, with terrible consequences for both.

    I’ve written before that while our COVID death toll is already in the tens of thousands, others are in the low single digits: Vietnam, which has a long land border with and extensive travel to and from China, has had just 35 deaths. Vietnam took COVID seriously. Here, we bribed people to go to Wetherspoons.

  • They’re here

    TIME magazine:

    Twenty-eight U.S. Christian right groups have spent millions of dollars pursuing conservative agendas that threaten LGBTQ and women’s rights in Europe, a new investigation by British news website openDemocracy found Tuesday.