Saturday, August 8, 2020

Narrative Warfare: It Makes Sense When It's Seen As A Power Move

The Supreme Dark Lord noticed something in the Establishment today. Specifically, this:

The Covid-19 pandemic has only helped the movement expand: Hundreds of thousands of people with nothing else to do have been exposed to the fringe fulminations. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London think tank, says that from March through June, QAnon-related posts surged on Facebook and Twitter. While its believers were far from the only ones trying to discredit the use of masks or cast doubt on vaccines, they were among the largest groups.

Twitter took action on July 21, announcing measures targeting “so-called ‘QAnon’ activity” across its platform. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm,” the company tweeted as it detailed the crackdown. Twitter is suspending accounts for breaking existing rules and will no longer highlight as “trending” or recommend content and accounts associated with QAnon. It will also try to stop the movement from being played up in search. Users will no longer be able to share URLs associated with it.

Twitter’s plan has parallels with an earlier crackdown by Reddit in 2018 after its forums became QAnon hotbeds. The most prominent subreddits associated with the movement came down, and new ones even hinting they had something to do with it could not be created. Reddit’s move is considered to be among the more significant blows against QAnon.

But the tactics so effective on Reddit in 2018 may not work for Twitter. The QAnon movement is now a very different beast from the one that used to populate now-deleted subreddits such as r/TheGreatAwakening.

To which the SDL said: "It's really rather remarkable that the most reliably dishonest group of people in the West have the nerve to try to silence millions of people on the purported basis of passing on misinformation. But then, they seem to regard hubris as a virtue. If they were actually members of Western civilization, or even understood anything at all about Western philosophy, they would know that Nemesis always makes an appearance, sooner or later."

It's simpler than that. It's literally this.

They are saying as a display of power that they--and they alone--get to decide what is true and what is not. Conveniently, those they deem false are not part of their group, their tribe. (Literally, in many cases.) It's literally nothing more than signalling who is a Friend and who is an Enemy, and Enemies are Free and Fair Game prey upon as you or your Friends see fit.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. A lot of other things about Narrative Warfare fall into place because now a bridge between Normieville and Wooland is established that gets the point across. In short, this is a flex first and foremost, and a means of discerning whom and how to punish second. This isn't about maintaining MSM credibity; this is about signalling in-group identification first, discerning out-group threats second, and intimidating outsiders third. The credibility claim is cover, nothing more.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Anonymous comments are banned. Pick a name, and "Unknown" (et. al.) doesn't count.