You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
On the National Review Online, Molly Wharton warned that “Twitter anti-fatherists” were taking aim at a holiday that they said “glorifies rape, patriarchy, and child abuse.” The Washington Examiner railed against #EndFathersDay as “the latest ridiculous hashtag from the feminist outrage machine.”
On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, antifeminist author and “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton went further:
They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day, they’re interested in ending men. …That’s really what they want.
A similar warning came from the self-proclaimed leader of the self-proclaimed Men’s Human Rights Movement:
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/477679872761135104
The Daily Caller tried to play it a bit cooler, acknowledging that the phony campaign had started with 4chan but contending that “feminists quickly picked it up and ran with it.”
The evidence? The alarmists cited tweets like this one, from “Phoebe Kwon” a self-proclaimed “Lesbian, Korean American, Feminist” from “San Fransico.” [sic]
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/statuses/477262894552195072
Kwon was also responsible for this charmingly subtle Tweet – I’m not sure how the right-wingers missed this one.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/477294012492431362
Had any of these commentators looked closely at the “outrageous” tweets cited as evidence of this feminist anti-fatherite uprising they might have figured out that something was up: They all seemed to come from a tiny handful of Twitter accounts, most with only a few followers, many of them festooned with elaborate Social Justice Warrioresque self descriptions, like this one, from @CisHate11
Polyamorous Pansexual Otherkin (faerie), Marxist Misandrist. Fucker of the patriarchy. I majored in womyns studies and procrastination
Phoebe Kwon, one of the most-quoted of all the alleged anti-fatherites, not only spelled the name of her alleged home city wrong; as one We Hunted the Mammoth reader pointed out to me, her avatar was actually a stock photo:
And, oh yeah, 4channers – at least those in on the joke – have acknowledged her as one of their own.
As the Daily Dot noted, this was not the first time 4channers had angered the gullible and annoyed real feminists with a fake feminist #hashtag campaign. In January they got some traction with a phony “thinspo” campaign “BikiniBridge,” celebrating what one Tumblr blog called “the graceful space created by a woman’s hip bones suspending bikini bottoms from their abdomens.”
This was followed by the even more ridiculous Operation Freebleeding, which denounced tampons and sanitary pads and all devices used to staunch the flow of menstrual blood as tools of the patriarchy.
So, some trolls trolled some people. Big deal right?
Well, not exactly. Because this isn’t just trolling for the sake of trolling. This is trolling with an agenda.
If you scroll back through “Phoebe Kwon’s” tweets, you’ll see that “her” account originated back in August of 2013, in the midst of a Twitterstorm around the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. While that hashtag was a real one, started and promoted by feminist/womanist women of color to critique white allies (and “allies”), 4channers jumped into the fray with fake Twitter accounts in an attempt to poison the discussion and further divide feminists along racial lines.
“Kwon” and other faux accounts also jumped into the more recent #YesAllWomen hashtag with deliberately and sometimes ridiculously inflammatory tweets.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367766686503407616
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367460519776485376
The trolls behind these campaigns aren’t just trolls out to create chaos, though they are that. They’re also racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots out to fuck over feminism.
Indeed, a few months ago, a writer for Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings blog who goes only by Douglas reported that he’d gotten a mysterious message from someone called “Bavarian,” who told him that 4chan’s antifeminist campaigns were all part of something called “Operation Lollipop,” a “black propaganda” campaign to fracture feminism. Bavarian wrote:
I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. …
We manly pose as women of color and argue with white feminists. We “check their privilege” to the point that they are fed up. For example, if they say “it’s not our time to talk, white ladies, it’s our time to listen,” we say “the last time white women just listened, George Zimmerman walked free.”
The campaign began during Hugo Schwyzer’s public meltdown, which Bavarian described as filtered through his own racist lens:
This group started when the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen started trending. It referred to an incident where the feminist Hugo Schwartz [sic] had a mental breakdown and revealed on twitter that feminism was a fraud. He further revealed that WoC were incompetent and only got in the way of the movement. Some white women offered him sympathy and told him to get help. The WoC got angry and started the hashtag.
Bavarian pointed him to a page documenting the phony tweets, many of which come from the same accounts that posted the most outrageous #EndFathersDay tweets. (The site he linked to is now down, but this blog, still available through the Wayback Machine, appears to be some sort of mirror.)
Douglas, for his part, was delighted by the deviousness of it all.
I can only imagine the chaos such an operation would wreak upon the feminists. I look forward to seeing how it all works out. Maybe it will cause the level of mistrust to skyrocket to levels that would hinder the feminist machine. Maybe it will give me more things to laugh at on the internet. All I know is this concept is quite dastardly and funny.
It’s all a bit ridiculously cloak and dagger, but I don’t think we can dismiss it as a joke. The people behind it are trolls, sure, but they are also nasty bigots obsessed with fucking up feminism and “progressives” in general. And people still get fooled by these campaigns.
Now that we know what they’re up to, the trolls may find it harder to fool quite so many people in the future. They may keep trying, to lesser and lesser effect. Or they might come up with something a bit more sophisticated. I guess we’ll see.
EDITED TO ADD: Check out the Twitter hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, devoted to exposing these fake accounts; so far they’ve IDed 200 or so. This Storify is useful, too.
It’s always fun (as in not at all) when some guy decides to mansplain feminism to feminists. And how dare those feminists question his manly knowledge?
But titianblue, if you were just a little bit nicer about making your points… 😉 [/tone policing douchebro]
I’ll show myself out, shall I?
Every article I have read that explains that this hoax was an obvious hoax is met with a number of comments from MRA’s and other everyday misogynists insisting that they “just know” that there were real feminists behind it. Oh, sure, maybe 4chan started it, but there “had to be” actual feminists tweeting the hashtag as well. They don’t have any evidence at all, but they don’t need it, because they “just know!” And, I mean, you can try as hard as you like, but you just cannot reason with someone who bases their world view on emotions like that. They believe hoaxes because they so badly need them to be true so that they can be irrationally hate-filled and still think themselves the “good guys”.
This story just reminds me how lazy and stupid 4chan pranks tend to be. Tricking irrational conservatives by confirming their worldviews is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’re dealing with people who still think that President Obama is a secret Muslim Nazi Communist. It’s also kind of adorable that they believe that this would “fracture” feminism, as if it is a monolith that is not constantly being re-evaluated and reconstructed. *Shrug* all these hoaxes do is make real feminists feel stronger in their convictions, and make anti-feminists look really stupid.
Well, this just goes to show how deep the feminist conspiracy is. 🙂
It’s feminists, all the way down.
Yikes! I was planning on writing something like this, but you beat me to the punch. Or maybe not… *sigh!*
Also works with MRA and feminists/women.
Of course it’s really the Furrinati behind this. Father’s Day? Mother’s Day? Why should humans get days named for them? It should be Furrinati Overlords Day 365 a year. (Those of us who serve them know it’s so for reals, but official recognition is lacking.)
I recall recently reading “Trust Me, I’m a Liar” by Ryan Holiday. In it, he writes about how he got paid to create controversy for Tucker Max’s then-upcoming movie “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”. Here’s how he did it:
-He posted up some posters of the movie.
-Once the glue got stuck, he proceeded to tear them up himself and took pictures of the torn posters.
-He then contacted a small local news-blog, sent it the pictures of the torn posters and said that he heard an unnamed feminist organization was protesting the movie because it viewed it as misogynistic…
…and that was it! The story soon got circulated via social media and other news-blogs, eventually channels picked it up and it got to the point were the posters really were banned and people really started protesting the movie.
The recent trolling runs on the same principle: you start small, you fake data, you start throwing snowballs down a hill. At some point people who want to believe what you write start passing it around, the snowball becomes an avalance, and it’s very difficult to see what’s really going on, who posted to troll and who posted because he or she legitimately supported the twitter (unless, of course there are some obvious clues, like the stockphoto image).
So, the question is… How do we break this circle?
So, anyone want to bet that some “clever” troll will start an “End Mother’s Day” hashtag at the beginning of next May, hoping for more “fun”? It will be interesting to see if their attention span is that long.
It sounds a bit like the worst climate denialism contrarians. They always think that a theory will collapse like a house of cards if only they can find the one key point of weakness and Poof! All fall down.
They don’t, they really don’t get it, that science and all other academic processes are much more like jigsaws than any other kind of puzzle. When something is found to be in entirely the wrong place, or even in the wrong jigsaw, turning it sideways, discarding it or repositioning it waaay over in the opposite corner doesn’t often change the picture a great deal. Sometimes it makes the picture clearer instantly, other times its contribution to the eventual clarity of the picture isn’t really evident until several more pieces have been added or reorganised.
But the idea that one clever turn of phrase — yeah, I know that’s asking a bit much — from some bozo who’s never opened a relevant textbook will extinguish decades or centuries of scholarship is absolutely witless.
So, Fox News, National Review Online and Washington Examiner are all going to retract and apologize, right? And they’re all going to learn a valuable lesson about doing basic research before falling for an obvious hoax and not letting ideology get in the way of doing actual journalism, right?
…Right?
I don’t think we can. It’s a tried and true tactic employed by the political right and extremists. It’s frustrating as hell to see but their target audience is impervious to truth and facts. They’ll glom onto anything that bolsters their world view and ignore anything that contradicts it.
Sadly, it’s listed in the Queue of Impossible Things™. It does come before “MRAs will actually understand feminism”, at least. >_<
I despise that particular form of dishonesty over almost all others. Just…ugh >:( They’re such reprehensible people…
I have to imagine that there are lots of gleeful “No True Scotsmans” flying around the internet right now.
“No, see, the people using the #endfathersday hashtag *weren’t actually feminists*….”
“MWAH-HA! ‘No True Scotsman’! I win!”
Reblogged this on Dreams of the Shining Horizon and commented:
Just wanted to pass this on, help debunk the latest bit of misogynist misinformation.
A particularly interesting quote in the comments that I don’t want you to miss:
“(Right-wing people) seem to think calling someone “racist” or “sexist” is meant to be a gotcha to shut someone up, which is why they’ll happily come out with the word themselves the moment they come under attack for an unrelated topic (e.g. saying Sarah Palin was a victim of misogyny for being slurred as a bimbo is legit; saying she’s a victim of misogyny because she got criticism of her policies which were FUCKING TERRIBLE is stupid and detracts from honest-to-Dog sexism, but this is what I saw a lot of GOP mouthpieces doing when she was on the VP ticket).
When everything is just a game of Us vs Them, it’s easier to just reduce any charge of prejudice to a set play, and use it to your advantage, rather than actually making sure it’s appropriate to whether or not prejudice is actually involved.”
Great, another zombie lie on the right.
You see a lot of them in denialist spheres. No matter how many times they get disproven, they just get back up and shamble on. Nothing quite so resilient as a falsehood that people want to believe.
I find it hilarious when they get all grandiose like this. Much activism. So supervillain. Wow.
Srivingally,
<blockquote.Also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism-as-monolith if they don’t think feminists already argue with each other about the relative value of different oppressive structures.
The frustrating part is they do understand on some level, because they’re deliberately posing as WoC to fuck with white feminists. Sadly, I suspect this is because they don’t take nonwhite feminists seriously.
ZEL,
Sadly, the mainstream (at least int he US) doesn’t understand feminism, especially not when you get into the various schools and debates within it. When even liberal women are afraid of the “f” word, it probably won’t be too hard to confuse people by saying shit they already associate with “teh feminazis”.
Wolverine,
Even /b/? That’s almost impressive, in a sick sort of way.
Maude,
Ugh, yes. I’m skeptical about treating social media memes as “news”, anyway, but they definitely shouldn’t be covered by journalists who (a) aren’t familiar with the issue being discussed and (b) don’t know about trolling.
Opium,
Yep. It’s just like the MRM and those “death threats” against the conference: they believe feminists did it because it’s exactly what they would have done.
Thanks for the research, the tweets were so egregious that it could only make one pause. No doubt, some were taken in, but the vast majority of feminists did not take the bait. This trend was obnoxious and totally unfair to feminists. You had me until you started bashing the “right wing media.”
Trust me, the tea party has been trolled as racist, complete with their own “infiltrators” who tried to find others to take the bait. That characterization is also totally unfair, even though it has made it’s way into the mainstream, sickeningly.
I don’t have to agree with the basic ideology of “feminists” to see that this was unfair to them.
Renee, but the media outlets that bought the story, at least the only ones i saw that did, were all right-wing. I mean, National Review, Fox? They’re not centrist or liberal or lefty. All the feminist and liberal sites I looked at pointed out the hoax.
In the Fox and Friends interview, Tucker Carlson says, “There’s a reason there are more women living in poverty now than any time in my lifetime—it’s because there are fewer married women. When you crush men, you hurt women.”
Must be nice to be able to get away with saying something like that on television without anyone else present immediately pointing out what an idiot you are.
Interestingly, I think feminism has every reason to support father’s day celebration since below the shallow commercialism, it has the potential to deconstruct gender essentialisms by acknowledging the fathers’ role as caregivers, challenging the macho-masculinity and exploring men’s emotional side, thus freeing women from the burden of being considered the sole natural caregivers.
Maybe exposing the trolls while pointing out how real feminism contradicts their straw-BS can make the whole operation backfire and make the fake feminists publicity work for the real ones 🙂
Snarky political comments are not doing feminism any favors. Tucker Carson is right. Marriage confers economic benefits on women and gives them legal rights they wouldn’t otherwise have. Men are our husbands, fathers and sons.
I wouldn’t get so bent out of shape by a stupid hoax Twitter campaign. But I don’t spend much time on Twitter because so much of what is said is trivial. And people are still free to think as they please, on and off social media. So let them and move on.
This is now the second comment in the past couple asking us to not be mean to the tea party wing (now the main wing) of the GOP. Fuck that! They get no benefit of the doubt from me. A sampling (by no means complete) of the things they’ve done:
1) Questioned Obama’s citizenship. Yes, that’s racist.
2) Pictures of Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose
3) Cheering the prospect of an uninsured patient being allowed to die
4) Booing a gay soldier
5) Forced vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions
Are these a group of people who have earned any respect? Nope. None at all.
That is a sentence that should never be uttered.