Joshua Citarella
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Notes on the "Slow Red Pill"
🕑 Added 2021-07-23 13:00:08 +0000 UTCLast week l published a piece in The Guardian. It circulated a lot.
In just over 1 year, we've managed to take these topics from a podcast of ~1500 listeners to the #1 opinion piece in front of an audience of millions. We are successfully building a platform for this research material while putting forward an uncompromising analysis of meme culture from an explicitly left-wing perspective.
DoNotResearch.net, our community blog, is now officially a syndicated publication for The Guardian. We were fortunate to get a byline with a direct link back to the site which brought record visibility to people's work.
Goals
In writing this text I set a few aims that I thought would be useful provocations.
- Arm the Competition
My first objective was to make this meme strategy "open source". The worst political actors are already well aware of it. By publicizing this technique on a visible platform we are leveling the playing field by making the strategy available to all sides.
- Unseat Assumptions
At various points in the text, I chose to spotlight mainstream Republican opinions that may surprise a center-left audience. In our increasingly polarized society, people are often unaware of common tropes on the other side. It's important to draw the distinction that not all Trump supporters are ardent nationalists-- many of them were democrats in the 80's and 90's and somewhere around 8 million of them voted for Obama in 2012.
- Reframe, Reframe, Reframe
Content moderation is a band-aid on the gushing wound of neoliberalism. Attempts to mire us in debates about what speech is or is not permitted online, only serves to burn our resources as NGOs infinitely replenish their funding and further entrench elite control. Keep your eyes on the prize: content moderation is downstream of the political problem.
- Holding Up a Mirror
Not exactly 3D chess but-- I feel the need to point out that describing far right positions is also, by definition, exposing a mass audience to those positions. It should be done tactically and with intention. When I say that the far right believes: "climate change would soon force harsh decisions about the distribution of scarce resources in the global north." I am intentionally forcing this idea into contrast with the readers own belief system-- because this is a very common sentiment among liberals as well. Highlighting this similarity helps to elucidate the ways in which liberalism's inherent scarcity creates the conditions for fascism to arise in the first place.
Responses
I wanted to share some thoughts and discuss a few of the more common replies.
- More moderation!!
Many commenters seem to have missed important paragraphs and misinterpreted this as a call for greater moderation from big tech. It's important to underline-- I am saying that the left should do this too. This is a call to arms for the labor left to take online messaging seriously and to win over hearts and minds.
A few replies mentioned that it was somehow unethical to have watched this process unfold and not to have intervened. This is a bad opinion. Accounts like the one described in the article are happening in many places across many platforms right now. If I did not observe the one that I had access to, you wouldn't have known it was happening.
- Social Media Managers
Another common response came from consultants and NGO professionals; 'hateful and outrageous content is advantaged online'. Years of funding have been given to expert think tanks who index the current state of things and prescribe that we continue using the same failed strategies. No matter how bad we lose, these studies keep being produced and keep offering the same solutions. Platforms claim to solve 'disinformation' and a few months later the situation gets worse. The cycle repeats. In the last few years, my role has been to report back from the front lines and tell them how it's actually working on the ground.
The idea that "the left" (read: liberal morality) is inherently disadvantaged is so deeply ideological it is hard to take seriously. But this passes for common sense among much of the managerial class. Most importantly, to think that any message given to a mass audience would inevitably tip towards hate and outrage *checks notes* literally runs counter to the very idea of democracy.
- Memeing the Revolution
Alternatively, many smaller left-wing meme accounts got in touch to let me know they had already been utilizing a similar strategy. But no one seemed to have more than a few thousand followers and the radical content they sought to promote was militant insurrection. This is part of the problem.
People want less rent. They want to know why they are working harder for less. They don't harbor romantic ideas of revolution. Politics is already unappealing to most people. Radical politics is very unappealing to most people. To have a mass movement, we have to remain scope aware and speak to the shared grievances of a mass audience.
Additional Material
Some interesting tangents that we chose to cut for maximum impact.
- Deplatforming as Confirmation
I first witnessed this strategy while following a 17 year old young man who was, in hindsight, a casualty of bad deplatforming. In 2017, he was flirting with far right ideas and spending a lot of time in echo-chambers: online spaces without pushback or counter-narratives. He made a handful of regrettable posts that were in gross violation of the TOS and his account was deleted. Now, many years later, I have followed this user through 18 different accounts on Instagram (including an IP ban), various other platforms, as well as radical online and offline groups.
The initial experience of deplatforming had the unintended effect of confirming his suspicion that young white conservative men, like himself, were indeed under attack from social media platforms. A few weeks later, he returned to Instagram under a new account. He was more convinced than ever that his beliefs were true. And he was more intent than ever to spread his ideas.
- Scale & Containment
These operations were often strategized through a group DM of account admins who, in steep contrast to the main page, would usually have less than 1,000 followers on their private pages. Sometimes less than 200. So, while the core, radicalized community was much smaller than the at-risk audience, this small group became quite influential — I would be surprised if more than a handful of admins managed any given “slow red pill” page.
One could imagine a social media platform that effectively contained its radical elements in balkanized pockets numbering a few thousand each. This was how much of web 2 operated in the years previous (and perhaps this is what shadowbanning attempts to replicate now). But accounts of the slow red pill variety kept cropping up and extreme content kept going viral. These new memetic tactics were only put into large scale use after these radical users had internalized the idea that the platform was set against them specifically. They felt that they were being silenced while their political opponents were being amplified. This perception transformed social media from a neutral space into an ideological battlefield.
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Next week I'll have a new podcast episode: My Political Journey: Zoe4Revolution
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