I want to help them with their research, so chapos of the "post hog" and pigpoopballs poster variety, what are your thoughts on counter trolling the fash and the terf? What techniques do you use to identify the foe when they try insidious entry into a community (e.g. how norse mythos got stolen by nazis but witch aesthetic is repelling them)? What level of engagement do you use? Do you know of any other academic writing on the topic?
THIS. if you're arguing with a troll, play dirty. They're here for a fight and used to the civility libs just lying down and taking it or getting upset. So don't get upset, just laugh at their pathetic arguments and keep making fun of them
Yes. Absolutely refuse to engage with their arguments on the facts, just get personal and rude. Call their arguments boring, tell them they've all been tried before, heck, even predict what their next argument will be. The goal is to make them look silly and bully them out of the space, fighting the Gish Gallop is a losing battle. You want people to desire to avoid taking their side because they don't want to appear silly too.
I always roll down my window point and laugh furiously whenever i drive by trump sign people, it gets under their skin so much
I like to ask why they sound exactly like the last guy, and then needle them for repeating shit verbatim that they heard on the TV/radio. Their "hurr u hear that on CNN libral?" routine is projection just like everything else, and they hate it.
edit: wanted to add that you should always laugh at them make them feel pathetic and small instead if scary and a threat, even if you feel they really are. they wanna be the boogie man, you gotta make them feel like the pathetic larpers they are....nonpolitical/civil libs however you gotta play softball imo.
the best if you figure out they are an incel amd target their insecurities i.e. wristcel.
they wouldn’t wait a second to bully a trans person or be mega racist in person so I won’t wait to bully the fuck outa them. period.
the post-hog thesis, at least as I see it, is that if someone isn't acting in good faith it's unproductive to treat them as if they are since it allows them to get a foothold
You don't have to say Chapos "of the pig poop balls and post hog variety." A mere "Chapos" would suffice.
If you're in a community with strict and enforced anti-fascist moderation, report and move on. Fascists use public arguments to try and make more fascists. Not out of the people they're arguing with, but out of the people watching it. If it can just be nipped in the bud, that's the best way to handle it.
If you're not in a community like that, you might reply to them. Don't actually engage in an argument with them. They're not coming to the table in good faith, they don't actually believe a lot of what they're saying, and you'll end up running in circles in the same arguments. You want to embarrass them. They give you a lot of the tools to do this themselves. They obsess over their masculinity, but they aren't the perfect masculine figure in their head. That's why post hog and post wrist work so well; they're already embarrassed of themselves, that's part of why they're fascists. You're just bringing it out into the open. Another way, and this works better for the fascists who try and put on a veneer of respectability that were more popular when Richard Spencer was going around trying to do a speaking tour, is to preempt what they say and point it out as bullshit before they say it. Once you've seen a fascist's talking points a few times, it's pretty easy to do. After they say some bullshit, skip to the talking point after that with "Are you a dumbass that believes x?" or "Don't tell me that you believe the conspiracy theory that x." Also, for those types of fash, getting them to admit that they're further right than they're trying to appear to be can push away the more apolitical or moderate people that they're trying to attract. A fascist "just asking questions" will draw people in that a fascist talking about Blood and Soil and Clean Wehrmacht will not.
Identifying them is easy, even though they think it's not. They're not clever. Usually, when you've got anti-trans memes being posted regularly and positively engaged with by a group of the same people all of the sudden, you've got the start of fash trying to do entryism in your online community. It'll be night and day. One day, you'll just be shitposting in a forum about a TV show, and the next there'll be like ten anti-trans posts. And they usually start with anti-trans posts. They'll play coy, saying that they're just jokes and you don't need to make everything political. But come back a couple months later, and if they weren't banned, there'll be just Nazi shit.
If you all haven't already, you should really watch Innuendo Studios' series The Alt-Right Playbook. It explores a lot of what fash and reactionaries do online, and why they do it.
when i countertroll i always make sure my word count is lower than theirs. i also might dig into their post history for laughs and quote it randomly to throw their nonsense even more offtopic and get them flustered. bots like the nwordcountbot are great at that too
What techniques do you use to identify the foe
This is pretty easy on a board like this, since we're naturally calling each other out for reactionary thinking all the time via constant struggle sessions, it almost doesn't matter. So the first thing i'll do is try to act in good faith, because honestly some comrades still have reactionary thoughts that just need to be discussed in an open venue. The easiest way to tell if someone is a troll and not just a leftist with reactionary brainworms hard to explain, but basically just based on morality. Do they think any one group of people is 'less than' others? Are they showing signs of entrenched Individualism - thinking their needs should come above others? Are they refusing to budge even after being presented with evidence? Are they being cruel?
What level of engagement do you use?
Depends on my mental spoons for that day. As the One True Leftist that has read theory, i actually find it pretty easy to disarm right wing arguments and question their reactionary thinking to the degree that i often have them concede to some of my points or they'll simply stop responding. I prefer to take the time to disarm their arguments with facts and logic because it gives people reading along the tools to respond to those arguments in the future, even though i know i'm not gonna get through to the person arguing with me.
But sometimes, especially on the reddit where we had a lot more neolib trolling, i DID just call people fucking neolib ghouls or tell them to post hog. But usually in conjunction with also explaining WHY they're being a fucking ghoul like "Oh so the plan to leave 3 million people uninsured is good enough for you? Fuck you, people are going to die because of policies like that, you soulless monster."
MAGA folks are extremely easy to troll and spot and are usually banned on sight tbh. But if we somehow get to them before the mods do, basically just mass downvoting them and bullying them for being cucks for capitalism or bootlickers is enough. They expect us to get 'triggered' by seeing a slur but then immediately freak out when we actually attack them back, it's p funny ngl. There was some right wing brigade on here and they kept doing homophobic slurs like it was some "own". And they would choose the she/her pronoun like it was supposed to hurt us somehow, lol. Hilariously easy.
But yeah overall, it takes constant vigilance on the part of a community to keep the trolls out, and they have to WANT to keep the trolls out, not be those "i want to hear BOTH SIDES" of the story libs, who tacitly let racism/transphobia/etc be allowed because they want it to "be a space for everyone". or those Freeze Peach ghouls that decry any form of moderation even when it's to keep people from being exposed to triggering or harmful content.
If they are willing to discuss in good faith then you can talk to them. But otherwise just shitpost and bully them. Fascists are very good at constantly being on the attack and making opposing party constantly need to defend themselves, so don't waste your time trying to argue against them when it won't work.
I don't have any good tips but it's something that you get with more experience. Usually you can assume good faith in the first comment (unless it's obviously bait).
Fascists take advantage of the corruption of a power dynamic that was previously maintained on good will. Closeted fascists like to pretend they're representatives of the winning side in the global political and economic struggle because they benefit as a matter of coincidence, what they truly to believe is a consequence of their actions, politics, race...all that noise.
When we argue back it validates that world view. We give them that status. At that point we can't win because the outcome has already been decided. So it's best to fuck around the duck instead of fucking the duck directly.
Hide their posts without telling them. When they get no engagement, they'll move on.
Edit: By the way, it's hard to find out whether someone's a troll or just a 13-y-o who genuinely doesn't understand politics or anything yet. You can have a convo with them in private messages to figure it out before shadowbanning them.
Post wrist is a good one because it's not an unrealistic thing to do unlike post hog, but it still angers the fuck out of the white nationalist losers that usually do the trolling.
On social media sites the algorithm typically rewards interaction. So as much as one may want to fight back by "debating" or counter trolling, you're typically only going to give their opinions more views to naïve minds. On such sites, the go to move is typically to use a bunch of accounts or get a group together to do report brigading and/or downmodding/downvoting while positively interacting with the content/comments that fit the narrative you want to popularize. The bonus is that these fucks hate being ignored and they'll typically become more unhinged.
I've thought about this good and hard but the struggle session was winding down and I didn't want to stir it back up.
I think srs is a good model for what you're talking about. It was easily the most despised subreddit, constantly under attack, but an aggresively sjw safe space.
There's a reason they did things the way they did. And they actually used academic research in informing their strategy if I remember.
The proximity of bigots is triggering. They don't even have to say anything. So a user posting their rant calling out the unspecified transphobes who might be on the site is a problem.
The ONLY engagement a bigot should get is the mod notice of their ban.
Another way counter trolling hurts the safe space is by making the user's fight against bigots on the site louder than the mod's. Picture a vulnerable person leaving reddit because everything about their person has to be a controversy and then they come here mid-struggle session and see 'oh I'm going to have to fight for everything here too'. Do they have reddit-tier mods? Why do the posters have to do all this? I'm trying to get away from fighting for myself.
Meanwhile a mod action says the opposite "you will never have to defend yourself to this person". We should not drown that part out. We actually have mods who ban people for shitty ideals and that needs to be audible
But we've got like a different mission than srs. Trolling is part of what makes us us. Is the safe space the most important thing to us?
idk like i dont feel the need to defend myself here, if transphobic shit happens yall lambast it and fuck with the person who did it. thats entertainment to me, not a violation of a safe space or something. though it is an issue if theres no downvotes on it at minimum. comments just make it better
yeah chapo boards have really been about entertainment value than anything else. that's why we have memes like "post hog". But I'm just telling you all how it is. Say you're post traumatic and you wander on the site when a bigot pops up to argue. You're not in a frame of mind to appreciate the irony of asking the bigot for pictures of his penis. That's one way clear way the site isn't an entirely safe space.
I'm not saying it's wrong to like the site how it is because it is also cathartic to rage at them, but if we were interested in maximum inclusivity, there would be zero engagement with bigots. Not even on hypothetical to-the-bigots-who-might-be-reading-this level.
oh ive got a ton of trauma but i mean i guess people process it differently
ideally you could just filter certain phrases out
