By: Paola Molina 2/12/2020

The Current Political Climate Plays a Big Role in the Rise of the Alt-Right, but is Not the Biggest Factor

And what about the current political climate? One person listening to the talk asked if the current political environment was yet another spark that makes these groups even more aggressive and determined to stay online. Dr. DeCook said yes and no. First because we have to remember that these groups existed before so it is not like the extremist right is a new thing. What is new is that their presence online has been so solidified by the algorithms that exists. But Dr. DeCook did want to detail that the fact that a leader with great power, in this case the president, can embolden these groups specially if that president in a way legitimizes their ideology. Daniels highlights another example of this in the past administrations as far back as the 1920’s. She explains that in 1915, D.W. Griffith released Birth of a Nation which was a film that started the KKK clan. At this time, film was a new and emerging technology. When it premiered, the clan celebrated the phenomenon and marked it as the start of the “White Recovery” after the loss of the Civil War. The film was even screened at the White House under then president Woodrow Wilson who said of the film, “”history writ with light”” (Daniels, 2018). After such recognition, other KKK members started to build their own film companies and screened movies which featured their hateful rhetoric, and by the middle of the 1920’s, they had 5 million members (Daniels, 2018). Thus, this has been done before with another form of media. It definitely aided the right extremist that such films were screened in places where there is a lot of power, but Daniels says that, “This growth was aided by White Supremacists’ recognition of the opportunity to use the new technology of motion pictures to spread their message” (Daniels, 2018).

We can compare this to today, after the events of Charlottesville in 2017, Daniels quotes a former White Nationalist who told the New York Times that, “’I think Tuesday [meaning the day that the rally took place] was the most important day in the White nationalist movement…Tuesday just took my breath away. I was sitting in a coffee shop and I thought that the news from this was done when I read that he [ Donald Trump] had come back and he said there were good people in the White nationalist rally and he salvaged their message’”(Daniels, 2018). Indeed, when someone with power sends the message that it is okay to do bigoted things because he exerts that same behavior, it will give these groups all the more reason to keep doing their malice because they know that someone with power has their backs and will not do anything about it. More importantly, their beliefs are reinforced because someone with great power essentially thinks the way they think, so the White Supremacists must think that they are doing the correct thing. Consequently, our culture has gravitated to a society where we think that ALL speech should be right to say. It has become the “there is good people on both sides” speech society, because there is so much protection geared toward the free speech argument repeated over and over again by the extreme right and the administration. But as we went over before, this type of “free speech” is actually killing innocent people and our society has to snap out of the hypnosis that the alt-right has created where they claim that they are untouchable because of free speech. The current political landscape that dominates our government has created a world in which social justice and sane people are questioned. But this does not have to be this way. We know that the KKK is bad, we know that saying “You will not replace us” in reference that the White population will not be somehow gotten rid of is bad, and we know that separating small children from their parents when they are fleeing for their lives is bad, so what happened? What happened is that their message has taken hostage our social justice beliefs and we need to get that back by denouncing these wrong doings not being scared of “All speech is free speech” because that “free speech” is actually hurting lives. I think the first amendment is the most important right we have because it protects the people’s voice from persecution from the government. I support the first amendment because it is not right to be arrested or physically punished from exerting our concerns, thoughts, and civil liberties. But we have to understand that certain speech should not be protected or shielded away from consequences because if that speech is causing people to commit physical harm to other citizens like death, then that speech is not just speech but a tool to facilitate harm to the public. 

Thus, the current administration does play a big part in why these groups have gained so much strength despite their views only being followed by small numbers. But, technology has been a greater,  easier, and more effective way for these groups to gain that strength, Daniels says, “The rise of the alt-right would not be possible without the infrastructure built by the tech industry…The rise of the alt-right is both a continuation of a centuries-old dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms” (Daniels, 2018). While we need to work on dismantling the hateful rhetoric that is coming from places of power, we also need to focus on what these social media platforms need to do to stop being megaphones for the alt-right message just like I talked about before.

Possible Solutions?

Many others, as well as I, were feeling a bit hopeless because we saw how easy it was for these groups to continue their propaganda without no one or anything stopping them. So, the first question we all had was, what do we do? How do we stop extreme, hateful, and dangerous messaging? Unfortunately, Dr. DeCook told us the hard reality that it would be almost impossible because it would mean that we would have to look at the internet and unravel it from its roots and from the people who created it. Easiest thing would be to completely shut off all digital material, but that is impossible. Banning them would be the first solution people can think of when it comes to combating people who are causing harm. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds. Dr. DeCook did research on how these groups responded to bans. What she found was that, again because online networks are vulnerable and easily manipulated, these groups used loopholes to overcome the bans. They did this by changing spellings in hashtags so that algorithms can’t detect them, they make new accounts, move to different platforms, or even go as far as having their websites in different countries’ servers so that we cannot monitor them in the US. And if we remember, these groups will still exist but just in a different form like previous groups have done such as the KKK. She said that we have to, “look at the community offline first,” because the “online world mirrors the offline world”. Thus, part of the solution could be to look at why these groups can organize so effectively, how are young men radicalized before they even jump to the internet, and what consequences can be implemented for them to stop spreading their ideology offline.

The fact that it is not as easy to shut these groups out is even more upsetting because they just reappear. One of the suggestions the ADL mentions is that we can become active and report such messaging to, let’s say, social media companies. But, like DeCook outlines, this is only a temporary fix, eventually these groups find their way back. Additionally, when Dr. DeCook mentioned that we have to, “look at the community offline first” I immediately thought of a Frontline/ProPublica documentary called “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville”. In this documentary, they revisit what happed in 2017 in Charlottesville and they investigate who was behind the Unite the Right Rally. They identified certain individuals who were participating and released their names to the world. This was effective because when newspaper articles started to publicly shame them, they lost their jobs, and they were heavily criticized for their hateful ideology – which they should. Some people involved did not want to further become “too public”, so said types of demonstrations and show ups died down. They are still visible, but not as much – just recently far-right groups gathered in Portland. This is only small progress, although these people will not show up in real life, they can still be active online and continue to contaminate other people over the internet who can take that information as an excuse to commit mass injury.

I found this talk quite informative about the many ways the alt-right functions digitally. I get very upset when all of this content is free from the public and it gets into the hands of young people who have caused harm, especially now more than ever. Acknowledging the strength that the alt-right currently has is a scary thing. It amazes me that the extreme right’s hateful ideology has gotten even to the minds of powerful people like congress people, senators, and even the presidency. But I think we need to hit the pause button and reanalyze how we got here and what we need to change. The reason why the alt-right has gotten to where they are is because of their manipulation of online networks. Without such tools, they would not have been so prominent as they are. It does not help that social media sites are multiplying their growth because these alt-right groups are manipulating their algorithms and being rewarded. As we have seen, as new technology emerges, so does the new ways that the alt-right can manipulate it at their will. We will never know what the future brings and how these groups will adopt future technology, but that does not mean we are defeated and cannot do anything. First, we have to regain society’s social justice sanity and call out/not accept hate speech. We also have to de-platform these extremist ideologies, with the help of social media companies, because they have caused casualties, and, now that we know how these groups operate online, we should be mindful of these tricks and incentivize tech industries to watch out for these manipulations and do something about them.

Bibliography

Daniels, Jessie. “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right.’” Contexts, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 60–65, doi:10.1177/1536504218766547.

DeCook, Julia. “The Infrastructure of Hate: How Online Networks Are Manipulated and Exploited by the Right-Wing Extremist.” Research Talk Conference, October 16, 2019, School of Communication – Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL.

“Documenting Hate: Charlottesville.” Frontline and ProPublica, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/documenting-hate-charlottesville/. Accessed Oct. 16, 2019.

“Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018.” Anti-Defamation League, https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2018. Accessed 24 Oct. 2019.

Svrluga, Susan. “Jury Awards $450,000 to Father of Sandy Hook Victim in Defamation Case.” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/10/16/jury-awards-father-sandy-hook-victim-defamation-case/. Accessed 22 Oct. 2019.

“The Alt-Right Are Savvy Internet Users. Stop Letting Them Surprise You.” Wired. www.wired.com, https://www.wired.com/story/alt-right-youtube-savvy-data-and-society/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2019.

Thomson, Keith. “White Supremacist Site MartinLutherKing.Org Marks 12th Anniversary.” HuffPost, 16 Jan. 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacist-site-ma_b_809755. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.