HAPPY UPDATE: Looks like this little bit of hashtag activism despicable trollish smearing has collapsed; the hashtag is pretty much dead as of now. (5/11/17, noonish Chicago time)
On last Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver once again rallied his fans to stand up for Net Neutrality, now under threat from the Trump administration, urging them to visit Gofccyourself.com, a site that links directly to the FCC page for public comment on the proposed change.
And so some of the worst people on the Internet have launched a new Twitter campaign to smear Oliver as racist — and get him fired.
“Er, what?” you might be wondering.
Well, it turns out that Trump’s newly appointed FCC head is of Indian descent. And the FCC site has been hit with a flood of racist comments attacking him.
The Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing rag the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf once described as a “decadent and unethical” part of the “ascendant ‘smear wing’ of the conservative movement” has decided that Oliver is personally to blame.
John Oliver’s “grassroots” activism against Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai is full of bot accounts, fake comments, and death threats against the chairman. ….
However, an analysis of comments to Pai’s Restoring Internet Freedom filing, which Oliver has dubbed “Go FCC yourself,” shows thousands of comments using fake names and bots posing as “Jesus Christ,” “Michael Jackson,” “Homer Simpson,” and “Melania Trump.”
For instance, as of Tuesday evening, there were 1,761 comments filed under the name “John Oliver,” 998 separate comments using the name “Yoni Schwartz,” and 611 comments filed using “1” as the name. …
Pai also received death threats in several submissions. …
Other comments used racial attacks against Pai, the son of Indian immigrants.
Now some of the Internet’s worst people have seized upon this article (and a similar one in the right-wing Daily Caller) as an excuse to attack Oliver as the supposed instigator of this racist harassment campaign against Pai.
https://twitter.com/GasJaredKushner/status/862449448017952768
https://twitter.com/rockie_springer/status/862413212427456517
https://twitter.com/JimMcNulty8/status/862446902398332928
#fireOliver #firecolbert it's obvious who the REAL RACISTS are and these.. the anti Trump democrats!
He is sending Pai threats of violence https://t.co/J4wzxGryb5— American Man (@BrentGrantUSA) May 10, 2017
#FIREOLIVER GO BACK TO THE EU SHITBIRD https://t.co/Hs5Zvho2uS
— John Connor (@JohnConnor0861) May 10, 2017
https://twitter.com/uliw315/status/862396353426731008
So because of John Oliver making multiple accounts to push liberal agenda and attack Trump, pretty much sums up most of Twitter.#FireOliver
— True Patriot (@Common_Sense201) May 10, 2017
https://twitter.com/DeplorableSammm/status/862389346816720897
Could #GoFCCYourself actually be a Russian intelligence psyop on the U.S. Government by Jon Oliver? #FireOliver
— 🇺🇸Jacob Dillon🇺🇸 (@ADudeFromNowere) May 10, 2017
https://twitter.com/RosalynJBurgess/status/862390076596248576
https://twitter.com/dreamedofdust/status/862385631141539841
https://twitter.com/DeportSJWs/status/862386470509658112
I guess staying on message is harder than it seems.
Alongside all the Pepes and Deplorables, the hashtag is currently being spammed by dozens (hundreds?) of egg accounts all tweeting the same thing; it’s not clear who’s responsible for this.
The instigator and main organizer of the Twitter campaign? Alt-right “journalist” and infamous internet troll Jack Posobiec.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/862370548063633416
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/862400904523374592
and these are the same ppl/bots that call us racist, constantly harassing us trump supporters..time for more anti trump karma #fireoliver 🔥🔥
— #TrumpWasRight⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@TrumpChess) May 10, 2017
https://twitter.com/Nik_Kirtane/status/862392588304777216
That last accusation from Posobiec — that Oliver was “making fun of the way foreigners talk” — is especially pungent bullshit, by the way. In the video that Posobiec links to in his Tweet as evidence, Oliver gently chides some of India’s more sensationalistic cable news channels, not by mocking how anyone talks but by pointing out the the ways in which they resemble Fox News. One of the channels he mocks? CNN India, for a misleading headline.
Posobiec, who works for Canada’s Rebel Media, was recently granted a White House press pass. Because that’s the kind of world we live in today.
Now, there are just a few teensy problems with the #FireOliver campaign.
John Oliver is not actually racist. He said nothing even vaguely racist in his Net Neutrality segment on Sunday, nor did he in any way encourage his viewers to launch racist attacks, or even personal attacks, on Pai.
There is absolutely no proof that Oliver has any connection to the troll accounts or the hate campaign, nor does he have any history of using trolls or bots.
You know who DOES have a history positively overflowing with trolls and bots?
Jack Posobiec.
You remember the massive leak of hacked emails from the campaign of current French President-elect Emmanuel Macron? Posobiec was the key person responsible for spreading the hacked data on social media in the West.
Sandy Garossino, writing in Canada’s National Observer, notes that Posobiec has been identified by cyber-security experts
as the origin of the first tweet linking a massive cache of Russian-hacked documents dumped onto the conspiracy website 4chan. He attached the hashtag #MacronLeaks. …
The #MacronLeaks hashtag, from the moment Posobiec tweeted it, was the primary social media propellant of the hacked Macron data, according to cyber-intelligence analysts at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. They also concluded that bots played a significant role from the outset. Some 40 minutes later, Wikileaks tweeted the link with Posobiec’s hashtag, and the Internet erupted.
The appearance of bot activity, observed independently by both the DFRL and Belgian academic Nicolas Vanderbiest, from the first minutes after Posobiec’s tweet, strongly suggests a planned and coordinated campaign.
(For what it’s worth, Posobiec says he had nothing to do with the bots.)
As Garossino goes on to point out, Posobiec was also heavily involved in promoting the #Pizzagate nonsense as well as on last month’s #SyriaHoax campaign. Working alongside internet troll and steroid enthusiast Mike Cernovich, Posobiec helped to promote the
Russian-led social media propaganda campaign that claimed footage of children dying from Assad’s chemical weapons was a hoax.
Analysts expert in propaganda and social media at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague identified the #SyriaHoax as “a clear example of a Russian influence campaign designed to undermine US credibility.”
Both [Posobiec and Cernovich] picked up the hashtag early and propelled it through U.S. social media … .
You may also recall the “Rape Melania”sign that appeared at an anti-Trump rally last year. Though most assumed it was the work of anti-Trump protesters, Buzzfeed later uncovered text messages proving that the sign was in fact the work of, yes, Posobiec, who was attempting to make Trump’s opponents look bad
Huh. That sounds … familiar, huh?
Oh, and one other thing about the supposed pot by Oliver to bombard FCC boss Pai with racist comments and threats: Not only is there no evidence for it, but the very idea makes no sense. Why would Oliver, whose last campaign to protect Net Neutrality was a notable success, decide this time to launch a racist harassment campaign that would only serve to make him and other supporters of Net Neutrality look bad?
And while I’m playing Colombo here, there’s one more thing about the FCC thing that seems a bit off: The FCC says that on Sunday night, the night Oliver’s show aired, it was hit with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks intended to overload the FCC’s comment system.
The Washington Free Beacon story seems to insinuate that Oliver was behind these as well. This of course would be absurd. Oliver’s campaign depends on people being able to reach the FCC site so they can leave comments there. Why would he launch a DDoS attack that could knock the site offline, or at least make it harder to reach?
My guess is that whoever is behind the harassment campaign is also behind the DDoS attack. And that it’s not Oliver.
So is Posobiec the secret mastermind behind the harassment campaign? There’s no evidence — at least none that I know of — for this. But he’s certainly working overtime trying to blame Oliver for it, and spreading demonstrable lies about Oliver in the process.
I guess this is just what right-wing “journalism” looks like in the age of Trump.
EDITED TO ADD: I added the stuff about Posobiec and the infamous “Rape Melania” sign after being reminded of the incident by @EyesOnTheRight.
Making post after post after post after post in short succession does not constitute a conversation and don’t delude yourself that it does. It constitutes you having a massive axe to grind and not bothering to wait to grind it.
From what I’ve bothered to read of you, you’re not the standard troll, but you a spammy spammer who spams and you may as well be pissing in the wind for all people like myself are going to read you.
Strangely (or not) Petra reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.
Have you ever washed your head at anyone, Petra?
“Strangely (or not) Petra reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.”
Yes! Make that two people here with culture and a sense of humor. Thank you. My third son used to walk around talking like Marvin after I showed him the Disney movie. (I grew up on the Radio show).
————–
Good, because you’re not qualified to teach.
I know you’re not as stupid as you pretend to be, but fine, if you want to play it that way, I’ll dumb it down for you: You insulted me before I you, therefore this is consensual metaphorical spanking. Comparing exchange of insults over the internet to “rape and abuse” puts you in the class of people who say shit like “intermarriage is worse than the holocaust.” I’ll thank you to not fling rape and abuse around like it’s the butt of some joke. That’s my grave you’re dancing on.
Petra not only is attempting to define what philosophy I ascribe to, but is obviously mixing up nihilism with what I am actually doing, which is snark:
“an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm”
It’s right in my nym FFS.
And that is a part of a broader philosophy, which, again, cannot be gleaned from snarky posts.
Your analysis of my personality has failed. Please do stop trying. It is not your calling.
More fucking manipulation.
Weir lies about what I said, and quotes Darwin-knows-what in an apparent pretense that I said it.
You fucking liar. I said nothing of the sort. I said I’d seen less than 10% of Karen’s stuff. If she said that, I’ll denounce her when I see it. But since you have a history of lying about what I’ve said right here, I don’t credit what you say about Karen either.
I never said that, you sadistic child-eating pimp.
@IDH Ardipithecus
Thank you for calling that out. I had referenced it in my lengthier response to Petra that was eaten, specifically that the statement/insinuation (that no one here cared about men or boys’ issues, simply because we were here) was laughable.
WWTH provided you with a link, dipshit. Are you incapable of clicking on it? Does your browser not work properly?
A hearty LOL.
This person is certainly very loud for being so very far out of their depth.
@wwth is not claiming to quote you, you plonker, but the woman you are hero worshipping.
Then applying the same logic YOU applied to the film review, and people here referencing unrelated articles from the same publication.
Here, lazy fuckhead, I pulled out a direct link for you since clicking twice and doing a ctrl-f is too much damned work for you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/37q4rh/i_am_karen_straughan_girlwriteswhat_ask_me/croxavb/
@Petra
All of this is really quite fascinating, but shhh….it’s grownup speakytime now and you really are up way past your bedtime.
Ah .. you thought the pain I references was being molested decades ago? That’s a reasonable mistake, and I can certainly understand why you would be disgusted with me if you read it that way.
I apologize for failing to make it more fucking obvious that my statement about people here WAS the “pain” I was referring to. And if you knew me, you’d know I’m honest when I say I don’t mind being laughed at.
dreemr, is that how you took what I said?
Oh please do FUCK off!
Are you fucking kidding me??
This shit right here proves you have no fucking idea of the community you are attempting to denigrate.
None whatsoever.
You need to stop, do some more research, look more into the goddamned people you are fucking championing, and then maybe you can carry on a conversation with the regulars here, who have been through every kind of horrific abuse imaginable.
And perhaps, perhaps you’ll stop aligning youself with the actual rape apologists instead of shitting all over the ones that don’t.
Please desist with the nonconsensual scat play.
If it says what he says it says, then I’m not in a state of mind to see it, you fucking cannibals. I’ll not talk about Karen again until I see it, but I’m sure as fuck not going to see it while I’m exhausted and demoralized with your bullying and weir trying to molest my inner child. If you don’t understand, then fuck you. You’d understood if you thought I was human.
Fuck off, enabler. Weir repeatedly accused me of being OK with rape. This is a virtual gang bang. Weir goes all accusatory over one word –spanking, and then goes out of Weir’s way to intentionally trigger me. What sort of person uses the dialogue of healing from sex abuse to intentionally victimize someone. Sod off Dr. Mengele.
“Your analysis of my personality has failed”
I never analyzed your personality. I simply assessed your communications with me, and produced a warning label: Toxic, do not open. You have yet to say anything in front of me that wasn’t calculated to destroy.
Your decision to make, but if you’re not going to look then you need to stop calling WWTH a liar and whatever else your thesaurus coughed up for you. Proof is in front of you and if you decide you’re not up to looking at it, you can’t say it isn’t real.
And you know what about me again? I’m not the one who came into your living room and took a closely-spaced series of giant dumps on the floor in literally every single room, the way you’ve decided to do here. If you want delicate and sympathetic treatment, you might try not calling everyone around you cannibals.
@Petra – please do try to make some fucking sense.
I said:
I was referencing several insinuations you had made in previous comments (not all in this particular thread) that commenters here were boy-rape apologists and turned a blind eye and/or willfully endorsed the abuse and rape of boys and men, among other unsavory things. I pointed out that, if you were at all familiar with the commenters here, you would realize that such insinuations were absurd to the point of laughable – and I did not mean that they were humorous, not in the least. I meant ABSURD as in unbelievable and incredible. Laughable as in risible, as in so far off the mark that one would have to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the assertion.
If you’re trying to say, in your slimy, slithery, circular way, that that – viewing your assumptions of us as absurd – caused you pain? I really, honestly, completely, without a doubt, don’t give a rat’s ass. Because that is totally nonsensical.
I figured, like many things you’ve written here, it was some pain you hadn’t bothered to mention previously yet still expected everyone to know about.
Add enabler to the list of words Petra does not understand the definition of.
And a refresher on Petra’s inglorious entrance:
And then claims victimization of bullying for themself? Sublime.
So we’re clear, @Futrelle using a Salon piece is evil and misandry, cos a different Salon contributor wrote a movie review which trivialized the rape of a dude. But, also, @Petra being a Straughan groupie is OK, even tho she herself is a raging rape apologist, cos they didn’t care enough to find out. Seems legit
Why are they not banned yet? I go to sleep, go to work, and now my whole inbox is just fulla this bullshit. I get that all trolls are tedious (they wouldn’t be trolls otherwise), but fucking hell…
So we’re clear, @Futrelle using a Salon piece is evil and misandry, cos a different Salon contributor wrote a movie review which trivialized the rape of a dude. But, also, @Petra being a Straughan groupie is OK, even tho she herself is a raging rape apologist, cos they didn’t care enough to find out. Seems legit
Why are they not banned yet? I go to sleep, go to work, and now my whole inbox is just fulla this bullshit. I get that all trolls are tedious (they wouldn’t be trolls otherwise), but fucking hell…
Haven’t finished perusing the Reddit (I think someone’s confused the red pill group with the totally different source on the movie) but you’re wrong. I don’t need to know about Karen to know that Weir is lying about my position. I’ve been up front that I’ve read very little of Karen’s stuff, that I was still looking into it. It’s nice for someone who’s been abused by the woman that taught you to read, and abandoned by another to feel like a strong woman is standing up for my boys. But I’m quite open to that being an illusion. Heaven knows I’ve been wrong about other heroes. If you’d brought this to me hours ago, I’d have been right on it, but after wearing me down, I’m going at it, but unenthusiastically.
@Axe just one teensy tiny addendum:
Ta-da! Yeah, you missed…something?
Destroy WHAT? It’s okay if you use words that you do not know the meaning of, but I’m not trying to destroy you in any way.
And, for what it’s worth, snark does not equal toxicity, either. You honestly need to learn the definitions of the words you use.