By Nicolas Surges

On February 26, 2022, Meta began ramping up their on posts about Ukraine, labelling those which originated from Russian state-owned agencies or media groups and banning Russian authorities from running ads on their platform. The following day, the social media giant purged a network of accounts, pages, and groups on Facebook and Instagram under their “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” (CIB) rules. This network, which operated out of Russia and Ukraine, used fake accounts to circulate anti-western and pro-Russian propaganda. Meta also shared information about these networks with other social media giants, such as Twitter.

Meta’s crackdown followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, which has in many ways been a two-front war: one fought on the ground, and one fought via (social) media networks. The Russian Federation has gone to great lengths to craft a state narrative of the ensuing war, which it characterizes as a “special operation”. Western media outlets and social media corporations have responded with a coordinated effort to remove Russian disinformation from their platforms, resulting in an information arms race between Russia and the outside world as both parties attempt to control how the war in Ukraine is reported. Following some of the key moments in this information war can help us in understanding the complexity controlling disinformation and propaganda as each action leads to a counterreaction, effectively resulting in a stalemate.

Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s on how media is mobilized in a wartime context used the term “arrested war” in reference to the then-recent annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.  In this paradigm, participants harness the unpredictability and ubiquity of social media to their own ends by filtering it through professionalized channels (such as state and mainstream media). As the authors state: “Any content that is acclaimed as alternative, oppositional, or outside only acquires significant value when acknowledged and remediated by the mainstream.”  The current war in Ukraine gives us a clear example: while Western media outlets have extensively sourced footage being shot by bystanders on the ground in Ukraine, state media in the Russian Federation have been very selective with their broadcasts, eschewing eyewitness accounts in favour of carefully curated correspondence by reporters.

Television was one of the first media to be affected by the conflict. In Canada, telecom providers Rogers, Bell, and Shaw from their channels. In the European Union, the Council to suspend the broadcasting activity of Sputnik and Russia Today, stating that both are under “permanent direct or indirect control of the authorities of the Russian Federation and are essential and instrumental in bringing forward and supporting the military aggression against Ukraine.”

Simultaneously, Russia cracked down on independent media within the country. On March 4, the Duma added to the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibits “Public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” (as defined by the state). The punishment for violating the new law is up to 15 years in prison depending on the perceived severity, leading western news organizations such as BBC, CBC, Bloomberg, and CNN to temporarily suspend their activity in Russia to protect their staff.  As the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg “The change to the criminal code, which seems designed to turn any independent reporter into a criminal purely by association, makes it impossible to continue any semblance of normal journalism inside the country.”

Russia’s blocking of the BBC’s website prompted the UK-based national broadcaster to harken back to the past, reviving English-language into Ukraine and parts of Russia. The BBC was followed by Austrian broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk. In this manner, some broadcasters were able to circumvent the Russian Federation’s ban on news as reported on the internet. The state of Russian radio within Canada seems uncertain: in a recommendation to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, telecommunications giant Rogers controlled by regimes that the country is currently sanctioning.

On March 4, Russia’s internet censorship agency Roskomnadzor then announced that it would soon be from within the country, stating that the corporation was breaking the law by removing Russian media from its platform and thus limiting free access to information. Perhaps in a retaliatory measure, Reuters then reported that Meta had instructed its moderators to for posts calling for violence against Putin or Russian soldiers currently invading Ukraine. The policy change, stated to be only temporary, does not apply to incitement against Russian civilians and only applies to users from a select number of countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. As Meta’s President of Global Affairs stated: “Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defence to a military invasion of their country. The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military force, which would be rightly viewed as unacceptable.” On March 21, a Russian court made good on the state’s threats by from the country, with Russia’s FSB security service accusing Meta of “creating an alternate reality” in which “hatred for Russians was kindled”.

Tech-savvy Russians have responded to the increasing information blackout in the country by turning to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), a private, encrypted network connection that allows a publicly linked network to obfuscate a user’s IP and bypass firewalls blocking government-censored material. On February 27, monitoring firm Top10VPN reported a from Russian IPs when compared to the daily average from February 16 to 23 (the week before the invasion). On March 14, this peaked at a 2,692% increase in demand compared to the same pre-invasion average, prompted in part by a Russian ban of META platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Because access to paid VPN services have been hampered by Visa and Mastercard suspending operations in the country, some VPN providers such as the Canadian-based company Windscribe, have elected to to Russian users. While the number of Russians querying or downloading VPNs has dropped since mid-March and continues to fluctuate it remains consistently higher than the pre-invasion average, suggesting that Russians are continuing to look for outside information.

Now Russian censors have turned their sights towards YouTube. In a statement on March 18, Roskomnadzor accused the Google-owned sharing platform of that encouraged the sabotage of railways, stating that “the actions of the YouTube administration are of a terrorist nature and threaten the life and health of Russian citizens.” The agency has since announced that it is against Google for not removing “extremist information calling for violent actions against Russian military” and “false content” that “discredits the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”. too has earned the ire of the state for not deleting content that contradicts the Russian Federation’s state narrative and faces similar administrative sanctions from the Russian government.

Another battlefield in this information war are messaging services. Apps with built-in encryption such as Signal and Telegram have long been favoured by both activists and propagandists because of the lack of moderation. In a Dr. Ian Garner – who researches Russian propaganda – reported that Telegram has since overtaken WhatsApp as the most popular messaging app within Russia. This is in many ways a double-edged sword. Channels on Telegram have allowed those on the ground in Ukraine to report on events as they happen, potentially allowing ordinary Russians to bypass heavily curated state media. And yet, the lack of moderation also means there’s no effective mechanisms to prevent the proliferation of troll farms. As Garner “That’s a lot of Russians with access to non-state news”, but also “a lot of people with access to some terrifying pro-state bubbles”.

In the wake of the invasion Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, Russian-language channel about his concerns that his creation was “increasingly becoming a source of unverified information. He also stated he was worried about Telegram’s potential to “incite ethnic hatred”. When Durov hinted that Telegram might have to lock channels related to Russia or Ukraine, the negative backlash from users led him to backtrack. Activity on apps remains underreported in mainstream media, perhaps in part because there is little way for states to effectively control it.

It is difficult to gauge what percentage of the Russian population supports the War in Ukraine, especially since Western journalists have effectively been banned from the country under penalty of fines or imprisonment. A by Russian pollster Levada found that 83% of those polled approved of Putin’s performance – up from 71% the previous month. Nevertheless, there are some indications that public opinion is shifting. Jeremy Fleming, the head of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has among invading troops, with Russian soldiers disobeying orders or sabotaging their own equipment. And within Russia, there have been multiple anti-war protests even in the face of increasing fines or jail time for those who openly criticize the war effort.

While the Russian Federation’s robust responses to Western interventions and its tight control over domestic media might lead some to declare it the victor in the ongoing information war over Ukraine, the ever-expanding net of Russian administrative sanctions and legislation intended to penalize the dissemination of materials deemed offensive to the state are in themselves proof of the state’s inability to completely control how war is reported. The “digital Iron Curtain” is not absolute: Russians have continued to access information that contradicts state narratives through shortwave radio broadcasts, word-of-mouth from friends and family who live abroad, VPNs, and messaging services such as Telegram.

The permeability of information in the digital landscape is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. While it ensures that censorship and propaganda are never absolute, it also makes it difficult to uphold journalistic standards or to guarantee free access to information.

The post The Information Arms Race: Media and the Russo-Ukrainian War appeared first on Populist Publics.

By: Leslie Rao & Maria Urso

What does it take to be considered “essential” in a pandemic? How is the term “essential” used by small businesses—particularly those deemed as not essential by provincial health orders over the past two years—as they navigated and coped with Covid-19 closures?

The defines essential work as participating in critical infrastructure, which facilitates the “health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians and the effective functioning of government.” The term, however, became a buzzword attached to conversations that addressed which businesses were allowed to stay open during lockdowns versus those that were forced to close during the Covid-19 pandemic. This developed as a measure of importance for the non-essential small businesses who were forced to close while malls, big-box and liquor stores remained open.

We examined the hashtag “WeAreEssential” to understand how businesses reacted to pandemic policy and how the pandemic triggered a re-examination of essential work as an opposition to official government policy. We collected posts on Instagram that used #WeAreEssential between April 1 to June 30, 2021. This timeframe documents the , as well as the aftermath when businesses waited for permission to reopen. It offered the opportunity to explore how the discourse in the hashtag adapted to the different stages of re-opening plans. Our Instagram dataset comprises 1788 posts.

Two Dissent Expressions in Two Industries

“Claiming to be ‘essential’” and “rejecting/redefining the meaning of ‘essential’” are two expressions of dissent in the #WeAreEssential dataset. In particular, the former is the most common compared to all other observed expressions. Among 136 posts from users that argue they are essential by either adopting or rephrasing the term “we are essential,” 125 are businesses—even though they do not provide essential services as recognized by the government and public health authorities. Of the closely related expression, 44 posts involve “rejecting or redefining ‘essential,’” in which 35 are generated by businesses. In contrast to those which claim their businesses are essential, these posts reject the official definition of essential or raise alternative interpretation of essential jobs and are more active in expressing opinions against the pandemic mandates.

In a clear example of this ‘rejection’ sentiment, a gym owner’s post discusses a form of injury common among older adults: “
let me tell you why my deemed ‘non-essential’ job is actually very much indeed ESSENTIAL. Because this [injury due to slips and falls] can be prevented and or minimized!!!” Although this message of being essential can serve to promote a service and attract clients, the term “essential” is used here not as a branding strategy, but rather to explain how balance training can reduce fall injuries. In this example, more attention is devoted to justifying why the business is essential, countering the government-defined “essential job” as being too narrowly defined and, therefore, unreasonable.

The fitness industry (gyms, dance studios, etc.) most frequently make claims about being essential. This might be a sign that fitness-related businesses tend to more firmly believe their business and services are essential in comparison to other non-essential businesses. The fitness industry generates 101 out of 136 data-posts in “claiming to be essential,” and 17 out of 44 in “refuting or redefining ‘essential.’” In contrast, the personal service industry (hairdressers, beauty salon, etc.) is the second most frequent with 16 posts in the former theme and 18 posts in the latter.

For fitness businesses whose posts are coded into the two essential theme-based categories, many of them address the narrative that “gyms are part of the solution to pandemic.” These accounts argue that exercising is an effective way to strengthen physical and mental health, which would result in stronger immunity against COVID-19. Therefore, in their view, closing fitness facilities defeats the purpose of stopping COVID-19 transmission and they deserve to be recognized as essential work.

Personal service businesses justify their essential service primarily for mental health reasons. For example, a hair salon claims “we are essential to mental health,” saying that “we don’t just cut hair, we are a friend to a lonely person, a confidant, a sounding board, and a connection to how a person feels about themselves!” This argument targets the merits of self-confidence and the familiarity of beauty routines that many people were forced to give up due to the lockdowns, and therefore further exacerbated mental wellbeing during the pandemic.

Normalizing “Essential” in Popular Discourse        

The use of “essential” on Instagram is a snapshot of a prominent clash of interests between small businesses as an economic community and the government as the authority to manage the health crisis. The conversation around essential work has become more popular with the pandemic.

According to , the term essential reached its peak popularity in Canada the week of March 22, 2020, with an increase of 90% from the week of March 8. This increase parallels the introduction of pandemic measures in Canada. Since then, there are spikes in popularity for the term “essential” that correlate timewise with new lockdown policies.

It would be understandable if the claim on essentialism is just a sign of the income struggle among small businesses during the lockdown. However, essentialism has been integrated by many anti-masker and anti-mandate groups. The organization (WAAE) argues for all types of businesses to stay open, positioning all industries as “essential.” WAAE has organized several anti-mandate protests, including a protest in February 2021, where businesses across Canada opened regardless of provincial pandemic policies. , another prominent Canadian anti-masker group, uses “Freedom is Essential” and “We Are All Essential” in their .

Throughout the pandemic, these groups and prominent anti-maskers have been criticized for their connection to the far-right. has outlined the antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia of prominent figures like , amongst others, who represent and propel anti-mandate movements. has explicitly stated that groups and individuals protesting public-health guidelines as having common ground in an “extreme right-wing ideology.” This association between anti-maskers and far-right politics has only been furthered by the , which was host to white supremacists, Nazis, and individuals who wished to overthrow the Canadian government.

It would be inaccurate to assign the label “anti-masker” or “far-right” to anyone who claims essentialism. Many of these businesses may be unaware of the connotations of the phrase “We are essential” beyond its popularity in arguing to reopen their businesses. However, it is important to note how language used by anti-mandate groups is adopted and used in normal populist discourse.

While our focus was on those who took up “essential” to situate their own business as an important service, we encountered 917 posts in our dataset that deployed the term “essential” or “We Are Essential” as a marketing tactic alongside promotional content for their brand. These posts have little to do with either the pandemic itself or essential work defined by the government, but leverage the momentum generated by #WeAreEssential to advertise services and products on the platform. This use of “essential” might potentially contribute to the normalization of the anti-mandate expression in popular discourse.

In comparison to the amount of promotional content, explicit criticism of pandemic policies is rare in our dataset, but it might not necessarily signify an absence of resentment. Rather, by including #WeAreEssential these posts on Instagram, even without making explicit comments towards the government and covid mandates, are aligning with ongoing movements in opposition to closure mandates. Consequently, these posts increase the visibility of #WeAreEssential as anti-pandemic discourse, while the seemingly non-political slogan and content allow the essential expression to be diffused and accepted easier by the wider public.

The current research does not specifically cover businesses’ avoidance of commenting on the pandemic issue, but, hopefully, the current findings could serve as an exploration of businesses’ pandemic discourse in response to pandemic policy and hint for further investigation.

A complete break down of our methodology is available on request.

The post #WeAreEssential – Redefining Essential Work during COVID-19 Lockdowns appeared first on Populist Publics.

— by Nicholas Surges

Meta (formerly known as the Facebook Corporation) has increasingly come under scrutiny for the role it plays in shaping the social media landscape. As the largest social media company, it has set many precedents in how hate speech, misinformation, and manipulated or inauthentic content is moderated online.

This raises an interesting question. Can social media corporations be trusted to act in the public interest, or will their moderation always serve their primary interest of protecting their shareholders?

On October 4^th, 2021, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to argue the need for greater regulation of social media platforms. Haugen had been responsible for leaking internal documents to the Wall Street Journal as part of their ongoing Facebook Files investigation into unethical behaviour by the social media giant.

In her testimony, Haugen defended her decision to speak out against her former employer. As she stated: “The company’s leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world. The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful and polarizing messages, and so much more.” Haugen went on to argue that Meta’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to hold them accountable for unethical behaviour.[1]

According to Meta’s policy rationale, much of Facebook & Instagram’s moderation is automated, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove offensive content as it is posted. This is particular useful for duplicate posts of previously flagged material. Human review teams exist to provide further input in cases where Facebook’s algorithms are unable to determine whether or not a post is offensive. This team of over 15,000 full-time human reviewers review cases flagged by machine-based automoderators and make final rulings.

Of course, beyond what the public has been given through Meta’s transparency centre, the details of their moderation system are vague. While Meta claims that their human reviewers receive over 80 hours of live training, their policy centre has very no information about what credentials are needed to become a moderator or how the company addresses policy gaps related to cultural context, language fluency, and artistic expression.

An October 25, 2021 article by Reuters called attention to the fact that Meta’s moderation has not kept pace with their global expansion: as the giant continues to spread into new markets, the languages spoken in those markets pose a stumbling block to its algorithms and human staff’s abilities to flag abusive content.

A notable example is the lack of functionality in Burmese, the language spoken in Myanmar. As the country is country still rocked by an ongoing ethnic conflict, Facebook’s inability to moderate content spoken in Burmese means that they cannot properly address content stoking ethnic hatred.[2]

India is another case study in Facebook’s failure to provide the language support necessary to police problematic content. The country is home to over 300 million Facebook users – the largest number in the world – and yet Facebook only provides service in 11 of India’s 22 official languages.[3] Given the country’s religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, this seems like a glaring oversight.

These shortcomings are at least ostensibly addressed by the existence of an Oversight Board, which exists as an independent body to whom appeals can be made regarding rulings by moderation teams. The board is made up of experts in human rights, journalism and freedom of expression, and other relevant policy areas. While the members of the board are appointed by the company, they are not accountable to them in the way that full-time moderation staff are.

The Oversight Board allows users to contest rulings by Facebook’s full-time human moderators, who sometimes apply community standards without considering the context of a post. In case 2021-012-FB-UA, a wampum belt titled “Kill the Indian/Save the Man,” was deemed hate speech. The Oversight Board would later overturn this ruling, stating that “in context [the use of the] phrase draws attention to and condemns specific acts of hatred and discrimination.”[4]

Similarly, a post in which a quote misattributed to Joseph Goebbels (“Arguments must be crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect”) was removed because Goebbels is on the company’s list of dangerous individuals. The quote is actually from the forward to British historian Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper’s Final Entries, 1945, which was based on discovered diary entries from Goebbels.[5] While it is thus not one of Goebbels’ quotes, it does serve as a qualified encapsulation of the propaganda policies of the Third Reich.

The user posted the quote in order to make a statement about demagoguery, crypto-fascism, and populist appeals to emotion (specifically in reference to Trumpism in the United States), but in their initial decision Facebook ruled that quotes by dangerous individuals cannot be shared unless the user makes it explicitly clear that the intent is to counter hate speech, extremism, or to share it for educational or news purposes. This is not explicitly clear in Facebook’s public-facing policies.

As the Oversight Board noted when they overturned the decision on the grounds that the quote in itself did not support the Nazi regime or hate speech, there is a gap between what is explicitly permitted or banned in Facebook’s public-facing community standards and the criteria used by human moderators employed by the company.[6] The case is also interesting because the actual provenance of the quote was never in question: the fact that the quote was never one actually said by Goebbels didn’t figure into the ruling, which has troubling implications for historical revisionism and misinformation.

As is probably already evident by the complexity of some of the previously mentioned rulings, the creation of this higher system of appeal has proved imperfect. Some of the reasons are purely mechanical: appeals can only be launched by users who have an active account on posts that have already been reviewed and must be submitting within 15 days of the initial ruling. This means that users who have already been banned or who have deleted their accounts have no means of submitting an appeal to the board. Launching an appeal also requires knowledge of the oversight board, which many users may not even be aware exists.

After the September 13, 2021 report in the Wall Street Journal called attention to hypocrisy by Facebook’s XCheck program, the board was forced to examine whether or not Facebook was consistently applying its professed standards. This system, which deals with high-profile users or organizations who are “important”, “popular”, or “PR-risky”, includes a whitelist system. Users or pages who are added to this list are treated more leniently than ordinary users.

In the subsequent announcement, the Oversight Board concluded that “Facebook has not been fully forthcoming with the board on its ‘cross-check’ system, which the company uses to review content decisions relating to high-profile users.”[7] The board also noted that Facebook does not fully comply with all of their requests for further information needed to inform their rulings, denying some of their requests for further context as “irrelevant” – a judgement that should probably be made by the board.

Furthermore, the board noted in their report for the third quarter of 2021 that Meta was only introducing 9 of the board’s 25 recommendations fully. 4 it claimed to be introducing “in part”, 5 it claimed to be “assessing feasibility” of, 5 it claimed it was already doing, and 2 it rejected outright. This illustrates how the boards recommendations may not always being implemented in full: Meta may take them under advisement but is under no obligation to act upon them.[8]

Taken at a whole, these findings suggest that social media companies cannot, at present, be trusted to act in the public good. Is it time to start pushing for greater transparency and accountability from the social media sector?

*Image used courtesy of  

[1] Statement of Frances Haugen, Before the Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, October 4, 2021.

[2] Elizabeth Culliford and Brad Heath, “Facebook knew about, failed to police, abusive content globally – documents”, Reuters, October 25 2021.

[3] Salimah Shivji, “Facebook has a massive disinformation problem in India. This student learned firsthand how damaging it can be”, CBC News, December 9 2021.

[4] Case decision 2021-012-FB-UA, Oversight Board, December 9 2021.

[5] Joseph Goebbels and H. R. Trevor-Roper. Final Entries, 1945: the Diaries of Joseph Goebbels. Edited and Introduced by Hugh Trevor-Roper. New York: Putnam, 1978.

[6] Case decision 2020-005-FB-UA, Oversight Board, January 28, 2021.

[7] “Oversight Board demands more transparency from Facebook”, Oversight Board, October 2021.

[8] “Oversight Board demands more transparency from Facebook”, Oversight Board, October 2021.

The post “Who watches the watchmen?”: Digital Moderation in the Age of Misinformation appeared first on Populist Publics.

Triangular Hate, a Populist Publics project tracking the distortion of historical memory across social media networks by populist and far-right groups and persons on both sides of the Atlantic, has received support from the Government of Canada in the form of a major grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Contribution Program.

This project analyzes the role of populist memory entrepreneurs in deliberately miscasting “western civilization and history” as a tactic to legitimize a platform of harmful speech and disinformation. Memory activism of this sort aids groups and individuals in building up in-group capability (which is frequently gendered), acquiring adherents, and challenging the touchstones of democratic pluralism.

Triangular Hate analyzes vernacular social media use and transnational connections on the associational level, between far-right extremist and populist groups and actors in Canada, the United States and Germany with a focus on everyday actors. It seeks to understand the traffic and normalization of disinformation about the past as a strategy to disrupt the present, to undermine cultural diversity and pluralism, immigration/migration, gender equality, gay marriage, and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights as fundamental features of the democratic state. The first of its kind to take on a multi-platform critical historical analysis – including attention to algorithmic curation – in analyzing transnational traffic, images, rhetoric, and use of social media platforms for organized hate, this project will provide rich datasets to help politicians and knowledge providers meet the challenge of online populist activity.

By tracking vernacular social media connectivity for the German-Canadian-US traffic in populist online chatter across different platforms and in transnational perspective, this project charts the shifts and changes in rhetoric and reach and analyzes them in the context of gender, hate speech, social technology and historical memory. Parallel projects currently underway through Populist Publics (backed by SSHRC and SSRC) explore exclusively Canadian and US based groups and issues. Triangular Hate traces the transnational connections between users and organizations and the media affordances that make them happen, following sites, profiles, and groups that surfaced in these other studies but which exceed the terms of their research mandate.

We will generate an image and data bank that will allow us to ask three main questions aimed at a broader cultural analysis:

1) how does historical disinformation circulate and gel in moments of crisis, as during the pandemic, and how does this function in the digital mediascape given the specific media affordances of network connectivity?

2) what are the similarities and differences in terms of the civilizational arguments advanced on both sides of the Atlantic, and the role they play in linking groups and users on the level of organization and rhetoric?

3) how do heritage-driven arguments against egalitarianism and pluralism move across platforms and into everyday discourse? Central to this undertaking is the role of platform affordances in delimiting outcomes.

In addition to more traditional scholarly output, Triangular Hate will test hypotheses about how to think about social media and historical memory in creating affective solidarities that endanger democratic ways of thinking and institutions. In a more applied sense, the data archive will serve as the backbone of several learning modules for NGOs, schools, social workers and government to equip citizens with digital competencies to promote resistance and resilience to disinformation and social media manipulation.

The research will be made public and accessible in a variety of fora throughout the course of the grant from blogs to Op/Eds, workshops with stakeholders and students, and in the longer term, in learning modules and publications.

French:

Triangular Hate dĂ©clarĂ© laurĂ©at d’une bourse du gouvernement du Canada 

 Â«&ČÔČúČő±è;Triangular Hate, Â» un projet du rĂ©seau «&ČÔČúČő±è;Populist Publics » scrutant et suivant la dĂ©formation du souvenir historique sur ces mĂȘmes mĂ©dias par des groupes d’extrĂȘme-droite des deux cĂŽtĂ©s de l’Atlantique, recevra dorĂ©navant un soutien du gouvernement du Canada, ayant Ă©tĂ© dĂ©clarĂ© laurĂ©at d’une bourse importante du Programme de contributions en matiĂšre de citoyennetĂ© numĂ©rique du DĂ©partement du patrimoine canadien. 

Le projet observe les communications de groupes populistes des pays mentionnĂ©s et sur divers rĂ©seaux, analysant les changements dans leur langage et dans leur audience afin d’en comprendre l’effet sur le genre, le discours haineux, la technologie sociale et le souvenir historique. La recherche ayant lieu dans le contexte du projet «&ČÔČúČő±è;Triangular Hate Â» s’aligne avec et complimente le projet «&ČÔČúČő±è;Populist Publics Â» (appuyĂ© par la CRSH et la SSRC), qui examine de façon exclusive les groupes et les questions du Canada et des États-Unis. Â«&ČÔČúČő±è;Triangular Hate Â» identifie les connections transnationales entre groupes et individus, ainsi que les liens mĂ©diatiques permettant ces relations – prenant comme point de dĂ©part les rĂ©seaux identifiĂ©s lors de projets-sƓurs qui ne purent les analyser eux-mĂȘmes sans briguer leur mandat de recherche.

Ce projet analysera le rĂŽle des «&ČÔČúČő±è;entrepreneurs Â» du souvenir populiste lorsqu’ils manipulent de mauvaise foi l’idĂ©e de «&ČÔČúČő±è;civilisation et histoire occidentales Â» afin de donner davantage de crĂ©ance Ă  un ensemble de discours haineux et de dĂ©sinformation. De cela, ils espĂšrent renforcer la position du «&ČÔČúČő±è;cercle fermĂ© Â» / le groupe dĂ©mographique favorisĂ©, qui discrimine souvent sur des lignes du genre Ă©galement; attirer de nouveaux disciples; et aiguiser leurs attaques sur le pluralisme dĂ©mocratique. De plus, le projet analysera l’utilisation populaire des mĂ©dias sociaux faite par, et les connections transatlantiques crĂ©Ă©es par, les groupes et partis populistes et d’extrĂȘme-droite situĂ©s au Canada, aux États-Unis et en Allemagne. Le but est d’ainsi mieux comprendre le trajet empruntĂ©, incluant le processus de normalisation par lequel il passe, par cette dĂ©sinformation historique dans sa quĂȘte de «&ČÔČúČő±è;revirer Â» l’actualitĂ© politique, avec un accent mis sur les politiques multiculturelles, d’immigration, de l’égalitĂ© des genres, du mariage gai et des droits LGBTTIQQ2SAA+. Celui-ci est le premier tel projet performant une analyse historique critique et couvrant plusieurs plateformes (et donnant une attention particuliĂšre aux effets des algorithmes propriĂ©taires) afin de mieux comprendre la place des Ă©changes transatlantiques, des images, du discours, et des rĂ©seaux sociaux dans la haine mĂ©thodique et organisĂ©e. En ce faisant, il offrira aux politiciens et aux professionnels cherchant Ă  contrer les dĂ©fis posĂ©s par l’activitĂ© numĂ©rique populiste de riches banques de donnĂ©es Ă  analyser. 

«&ČÔČúČő±è;Triangular Hate Â» gĂ©nĂ©rera une banque de donnĂ©es et d’images permettant d’élaborer une rĂ©ponse tentative Ă  trois grandes questions cherchant Ă  soutenir une plus large analyse culturelle : 

1) comment la dĂ©formation du souvenir historique circule-t-elle et se cristallise-t-elle en moments de crise, telle la pandĂ©mie actuelle, et comment y contribuent les relations transatlantiques, les liens entre rĂ©seaux sociaux et les autres outils permis par la vie numĂ©rique actuelle? 

2) comment se comparent les arguments «&ČÔČúČő±è;civilisationnels Â» utilisĂ©s de chaque bord de l’Atlantique, et comment ces arguments sont-ils maniĂ©s par les groupes et leurs membres? 

3) comment les arguments cherchant Ă  miner le pluralisme dĂ©mocratique au nom d’un hĂ©ritage inventĂ© font-ils le saut des rĂ©seaux sociaux Ă  la vie et au discours quotidiens? 

Une comprĂ©hension approfondie du rĂŽle jouĂ© par les rĂšgles appliquĂ©es par les mĂ©dias sociaux est clĂ© afin de bien rĂ©pondre Ă  ces questions. En plus des papiers et produits dĂ©coulant typiquement d’un tel projet de recherche, «&ČÔČúČő±è;Triangular Hate Â» mettra Ă  l’épreuve des thĂ©ories portant sur le nexus entre mĂ©dias sociaux et souvenir historique, un nexus potentiellement nocif et nuisible aux philosophies et institutions dĂ©mocratiques. Un impact plus tangible sera la crĂ©ation, Ă  partir de la banque de donnĂ©es, de plusieurs modules pĂ©dagogiques qui seront rendus disponibles aux organisations non-gouvernementales (ONGs), aux Ă©coles, aux travailleurs sociaux et au gouvernement afin de les aider Ă  Ă©quiper les citoyens des outils et des compĂ©tences numĂ©riques requises afin de se protĂ©ger de la dĂ©sinformation et de la manipulation des mĂ©dias sociaux. 

Il est clĂ© de noter que les chercheurs Ă©tudiants bĂ©nĂ©ficieront en Ă©tant formĂ©s en les techniques et les aptitudes dernier-cri de la visualisation et l’utilisation des logiciels d’analyse de donnĂ©es. En certains cas, ils gĂ©nĂ©reront des programmes indĂ©pendants afin de mieux cataloguer et interprĂ©ter les donnĂ©es. Au cours de leur participation, ils contribueront de l’analyse liĂ©e intimement au moment prĂ©sent, contribuant de façon importante Ă  la formation du dĂ©bat civil portant sur les pratiques numĂ©riques et la place de l’ingĂ©rence populiste dans les traditions et institutions dĂ©mocratiques. À plus longue Ă©chelle, ce projet de recherche mĂšnera Ă  une sĂ©rie de modules pĂ©dagogiques que gouvernements, ONGs, travailleurs sociaux et enseignants pourront utiliser pour aider leurs audiences Ă  mieux repĂ©rer et contrer la dĂ©sinformation.  

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Using conspiracy theories that include child sex traffickers and restaurants serving human flesh, QAnon has unleashed a modern-day moral panic.

It is now more than 30 years since sociologists proposed moral panic as a way to understand the incitement of fear around a perceived enemy. In the opening paragraph of his canonical study of popular media from 1972, , sociologist Stanley Cohen outlined his basic thesis:

In President Donald Trump’s America, those people are queers, racial minorities and Jews.

At the time Cohen was writing, his focus was on popular media and the manipulation of mods and rockers as moral degenerates. He argued that those in positions of authority used sensationalized headlines to enforce what they saw as threats to social order.

We find ourselves in a similar place today. The media in question is social, but the targets are as old as journalism itself.

Rights and recognition

When Trump refused to call out QAnon in his Oct. 15 town hall, preferring to show sympathy for its purported fight against pedophilia, he tapped into a moral panic with deep historical roots. The danger that QAnon poses is not that it’s endorsed by the president. It’s the way it speaks to long-festering hatreds that transcend political affiliation.

QAnon was born digital in the age of “,” where social media breathes new life into racist stereotypes. But its appeal owes to a longer history of animosity towards sexual and racial minorities at critical points in their quest for rights and recognition. It does this through the use of the .

Murder, matzo and mayhem

Charges of ritual murder were frequently waged against Europe’s Jewish populations as an effort to reinforce the exclusionary logic of ethnic nationalism. Jews were accused of kidnapping and murdering gentile children so as to boil their blood and make matzo. Ritual murder accusations could result in mob violence, as it was in 1901 in the case of a local in the West Prussian town of Koenitz.

Jews were also slandered for their role in the so-called white slave trade, the luring of young white women into prostitution. This mix of sexual excess and ritualistic fervour went hand-in-hand with Jewish emancipation, visibility and new-found claims to equal citizenship.

and conspiracies in QAnon share roots with the blood libel accusation.

Suggestions that Hillary Clinton and financier George Soros have long permeated social media networks. In 2018, these claims morphed in a new direction: children were not just being lured into a sexual underground, , a chemical with hallucinogenic qualities harvested for satanic rituals. A cabal of elites didn’t just harvest children’s blood, they consumed the flesh itself: as proof, conspiracy theorists pointed to a website that falsely claimed that Raven Chan — Mark Zuckerberg’s sister-in-law — was involved with a fake restaurant called the Cannibal Club.

, it’s alive and well on social media, surfacing most recently in the hashtags used by Twitterers in the wake of the Trump town hall, linking Hollywood to human sacrifice, secret societies and pedophilia.

Panic at the movements

Similar moral panics accompanied the pursuit of equality by gays and lesbians, with fears around the seduction of minors frequently used as an argument against criminal justice reform. The new-found visibility of the and lesbian, feminist and Black power movements unleashed a preoccupation with adolescence, childhood sexuality and age of consent.

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — used to define and classify mental disorders — , for what they saw as a sea change in societal values. “Protect America’s Children” campaign .

The AIDS epidemic, scandals within the Catholic Church, trans rights and, most recently, have all cast renewed attention on the history of changing social and sexual mores brought about by the .

At its core, the preoccupation with pedophilia and childhood sexuality is an attempt to protect the heterosexual family as the bedrock of society, a salve against degeneration and excess. There are too many examples to list, from Pope Benedict blaming for the general collapse of morality in the late 20th century to opponents of the , a cause célÚbre in the conservative media linking gay, lesbian, and trans rights with pedophilia as a .

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci — a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force — was not immune from conspiracy theorists who .

The QAnon conspiracy theory draws together anti-Semitism, sexual excess, homophobia and race-baiting in a modern-day moral panic. They resonate because they have a place in the contemporary zeitgeist as products of long-standing animosity against change.

De-platforming QAnon is not enough. For while Trump is proving himself to be conspiracist-in-chief, the culture of folk devils and fear is of our own making.

, Professor of Modern European History,

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

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–Dr Laura Madokoro

Over the past few decades, the idea of Canada as a multicultural national has been celebrated in popular and official culture alike. The introduction of an official multiculturalism policy in 1971, elaborated in the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, with funding support to promote the culture and history of ethnic communities in Canada, gave substance to the idea of Canada as an inclusive nation. The promotion of multiculturalism in curriculum materials and its incorporation into the language of Canadian Citizenship tests have further advanced the notion that Canada is a place where diversity is cherished and celebrated. It is a message conveyed to those born in Canada, as well as to those newly arrived.

Although it is celebrated, multiculturalism in Canada is deeply contested in terms of its history, its scope and application, as well as the lived experience of diversity. There exists a real tension between officials discourses of multiculturalism, and the manner in which they are meant to foster diversity and inclusion, and the way in which multiculturalism has been experienced in real terms. As Neil Bissoondath in Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2004), “government-sanctioned” multiculturalism has been strong on simplicity and less responsive to complexities, and in some cases to seemingly irreconcilable differences as evidenced by the wearing of niqabs at Canadian citizenship ceremonies. To what degree was, and is, multiculturalism in Canada an imposed idea? To what extent does it provoke antagonisms? To what extent does it suppress dissent and difference in the interest of suggesting a happy whole?

These questions offer a different starting point for engaging with the history of race, culture and difference in Canada. Rather than presuming a utopian ideal where hate speech represents an extreme reaction and opposition to the ideals advanced by the language and framework of multiculturalism, this project understands that the very roots and origins of the discourse of multiculturalism in Canada are fragile and contested. Instead of a binary therefore, this project understands the discourse on multiculturalism as a spectrum where hate speech resides at one extreme. This framework enables the project to think about the foment of hate speech as part of an iterative process and one that cannot be readily dismissed. In the fomenting of hate speech, particularly when historic phenomenon are repurposed, hate speech proponents sometimes root their views in contested realities that shaped the original discourses and debates on race, desirability, and inclusion. In order to understand the pervasiveness of hate speech therefore, the debates at the core of multiculturalism policies and discourses must also be understood.

Similarly, this project understands that the history of human rights in Canada is not one of solid foundations but one where the notion of rights, and particularly, their universal application was similarly built on unstable terrain. Often, notions of rights emerged from the violation of rights as evidenced by the residential school system in Canada, the oppression of labour protests during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War and the persecution of gays and lesbians during the cold war, to name a few. Although progress in the protection of rights in Canada is now celebrated, with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms regularly referenced as a source of pride, it is important to consider how progress in the domain of human rights rested on original violations of rights, liberties and freedoms. Here too, attending to fragilities in the human rights framework in Canada, enables us to consider the extent to which rights discourses around hate speech in Canada are simultaneously aspirational and redolent of original debates around the scope and application of rights issues, including free speech and freedom of expression.

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