Comment by ooobit2
6 years ago
NowThis and that entire network of brands collaborating on radical politics. There has to be way to make this more obvious to people.
I've watched VICE and NowThis alone radicalize perfectly decent people. I knew someone for over 10 years who was always highly observant, emotional but self-aware, would drop what he was doing to sit in my car with me in a dark parking lot and let me go through the wild ride of emotions I have about my ex. He knew we wouldn't ever be a thing. I sat with him one evening in a dark parking lot and let him go through his emotions on us just not falling into place, the existential crisis of seeing something desired within reach and being able to touch but not keep it. He's the person who taught me every second is independent from the next, that a bad feeling toward someone can be isolated, compartmentalized, only exist in a moment in the front of our minds. That if we're aware of that independence, we can turn off an emotion so quickly we hardly notice the effort. And today, I could be thoroughly enraged by someone's comment online, turn off my screen and be in a great mood before I even realize the transition occurred.
A few years back, he started watching the VICE documentaries at work during his free time. And then he started watching the clips and cuts made by Buzzfeed and channels like NowThis. Then he started sharing them on social media. And the clips got more and more incendiary. It's like VICE news could do a 30-minute special on LGBT in Brazil, but he'd watch and re-watch the few seconds of Bolsonaro saying gays are bad and that's just his view. And then he'd repost the clips. And then he started posting them on people's timelines to make sure their friends saw the clips and his comments too. And it eventually spiraled out into him posting clips of Nazi propaganda and these detailed comparisons to the Trump administration. And then he got verbally abusive toward his family.
My last conversation with him was me asking why he posted what read like a manifesto that white people, Nazis/KKK, cisgender people should be put into training programs and if they refused or didn't show rapid progress then they deserved to be dropped off somewhere remote and left there. I thought he was joking, but he said he was serious. He ranted for almost an hour at me, even after I closed Facebook. I got 13 or so message notifications on my phone.
Just to clarify, his posts on Facebook and Twitter included his belief that 'cisnormativity' is a product of 'white mafias', that we're all accomplices and own a blood libel for the deaths of the poor around the world, that ISIS wasn't homophobic and only executed cishomos, that he'd force cishomos to have sexual intercourse with trans people even if it didn't fix them. Just insane, insane shit.
These sites are the gateway drugs to violence. For all the talk about violent video games and movies, these indie (corporate) 'news' channels are the real danger.
>There has to be way to make this more obvious to people.
I've always been of the opinion that the reader needs to be on guard towards content which teaches people to hate, much moreso than "hate speech" that's just someone screaming their head off like an angry paranoid fool.
It's easy for everyone to identify and contextualize someone talking trash; even if they happen to agree they can still see it for what it is. It's much harder when a reporter (someone branded as a smart person) uses high-status language, slick production value, and an almost disengaged tone of voice to seduce you into a comfortable but dishonest explanation that turns people into cartoonish monsters to lay blame at their feet.
> content which teaches people to hate
It's called "critical race theory".
I'm sorry that happened to your friend. Unless I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, I didn't think vice was that bad? Not always substantiative, and definitely a ways left of center, but I wouldn't stick it in the same vein as something like Infowars or breitbart.
But probably you don't have any actual metric or system for deciding "badness".
PC goodthink is that Breitbart is terrible in every way and the worst possible source of news. When I've compared its European edition to outlets like the Guardian, it's pretty similar in tone, style and content (obviously with political polarity reversed). If anything it's actually less extreme, for instance, it's very clear about the separation between illegal immigrants (i.e. a class defined by choice) from race (a class defined by immutable characteristic), whereas the Guardian does publish pieces talking about 'white people' or 'white men' quite frequently.
Also, Breitbart uses links to primary sources much more heavily than most news sources do. A lot of papers only link to other stories they published, to keep you in-site.