The Defunding Antivirus against Digital Fascist Hate
From thefreeonline on 16th Aug 23 by Anna Celma /Images Borja Lozano at LaDirecta translation thefreeonline
Several anti-fascist initiatives around the world use their knowledge of the working dynamics of networks and the internet to prevent the far-right from using it to spread their message
On June 21, 2020, Donald Trump had a public event in Tulsa (Oklahoma, USA) on his election campaign calendar, in the midst of the post-pandemic.
Some interesting facts about the choice of place and date: In 1921, Tulsa was the scene of one of the worst episodes of racist violence in the country, when a mob stormed the predominantly black neighborhoods and caused fires and 36 deaths.
Very shortly before Trump’s rally, in May 2020, the US police had choked George Floyd to death on a public street in Minneapolis, in broad daylight. And it also coincided with the annual ephemeris of Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, which commemorates the end of slavery and denounces the systemic oppressions still in force on racial grounds.
At the peak of covid-19, tickets were flying and the same organization boasted on Twitter that they had a million registered attendees. But this million ghosted Trump.
Despite the forecast of a messianic bath of the masses for the standard-bearer of white supremacism, at the hour of truth only 6,200 supporters of the tycoon-aggressor-neocon-tax evader-media personality who then presided over the United States showed up.
Photographs from that day show an empty stadium, with a meager presence of attendees wearing MAGA merchandise (the slogan Make America Great Again, associated with Trump) scattered in isolation among the 19,000 seats.
Where had all the ticket reservations gone? Had covid-19 forced Trumpism to abandon its denialism?
No, the answer lay on the internet, and in particular, in the digital gathering spaces of the transnational K-pop community.
K-poppers are fans of Korean pop music that has become a cult phenomenon since the beginning of the 21st century, spreading to neighboring countries and then gaining ground around the world. Nowadays, there are ‘stans‘ (unconditional followers) of this genre of all ages and backgrounds.
Despite the fact that popular music is often associated with demobilized young people and with political disaffection, the K-pop fan community has made its knowledge in digital environments available to various social movements.
In particular, the savoir faire when it comes to getting tickets to the coveted concerts or events of your favorite bands, and the expertise to turn something into a trend by flooding the networks with linked content to specific hashtags.
K-poppers and anti-fascists signed up in droves to attend the Trump rally. They prevented the provocation of white supremacism from materializing in Tulsa and boycotted its impact on and off the networks.
Trolling the president extended into a strategy of digital anti-fascism.
In fact, it was not the first or the last time that they organized on TikTok, Twitter or Instagram to do actions beyond their common passions.
The 'k-popper' community, fans of Korean pop, massively reserved seats at a Trump rally so that it was empty
In Myanmar, following the coup in 2021, some members of the K-pop community used Telegram and Signal as safer channels to spread information, disprove fake news and organize protests.
They also collected funds to support mobilizations in the streets or to financially support the legal defense of reprisals, just as they had done in Thailand in 2020.
In Peru, that same year, they responded to the repression of protests against the short government of Manuel Merino, which caused injuries to more than a hundred people and two deaths: the K-popper community appropriated the hashtag #TerrorismoNuncaMás, which wanted to delegitimize the protesters.
Again in the US, they forced the Dallas police to withdraw a citizen complaints app, designed to collect videos of “illegal activities” in the context of the protests promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The app died of success, depending on how you look at it: it received an avalanche of videos, but instead of being recordings of the protesters, they were fragments of music videos and performances of the K-pop groups that idolize the genre’s fans.
They also stifled hate speech on Twitter, such as when they cornered the reactionary tags #WhiteLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter by publishing with this hashtag thousands of content about musical idols and spreading messages that gave advice to ensure the safety of participants in street protests .
And the digital reach of K-poppers is certainly overwhelming: in 2021 alone, they generated almost eight million tweets related to their community.
On many occasions they have demonstrated their knowledge of the mechanics and whimsical logics of algorithms, using them to their advantage.
And in the midst of their tsunami of affection for musical references, this global legion has shown that tools cobbled together by capitalism and the ultra-right can be put at the disposal of the common good on a massive scale.
It is a voluntary, active militancy that requires a lot of dedication, constant monitoring of social networks to identify foci of political struggles that need support or eruptions of hate speech against which a digital barricade stands.
But in addition, it is an activism where humor is the backbone, which reproduces the essence of internet memetic culture and which breaks with the stereotype of anti-fascism: masculinized, white, heterosexual and violent.
Stifle hate speech
“We have destroyed the income of an extreme right-wing media. This is relevant”, summarizes Kilian Cuerda, president of És País Valencian, when we ask him about the campaign “Don’t finance hate”. “No finances l’odi”
This cultural association wants to be a factory of ideas, training and activism from the Valencian left, independent of political parties, to build an alternative cultural hegemony to the capitalist system and the structural values that sustain it.
Stopping hate speech is part of their militancy.
“We know Trumpism perfectly: we suffered it at home, before anyone else, twenty or twenty-five years ago. These people know it for ages, just see what they are doing.
If you look at it, Hazte Oír naziz operate quite autonomously, with a huge amount of money, … They are linked to platforms like CitizenGo, which are neither left-wing nor right-wing, supposedly, and suddenly you find them generating a cultural paradigm, training, activism, provocation… to influence the right-wing of all Europe.
Vox (the Spanish fascist Party) is spearheading it. It is a cultural battle to break the social consensus of human rights and freedoms. But beyond Vox, what these groups are interested in is not to make themselves more prominent than they already are, but to drag the rest of us there,” reflects Cuerda.
This activist and her colleagues argue that, in order to counter the current global offensive of the extreme right that naturalises hate speech, flexible tools are needed from the capillary.
“In the end, the far right does the same thing. They mark your agenda, and even when you fight it, it ends up being legitimized because you enter the debate. There is no possible debate with fascism”, she points out.
Through it all, they devised a swarming strategy that was easily accessible to a large part of the population and went to the bone to weaken speakers of discrimination, similar to the simple and effective actions of the K- poopers
“Don’t finance hate” has made it possible to block funding through advertising on the Meditérraneo Digital portal.
Self-described as a means of communication and shielded by the adjectives “politically incorrect” and “uncensored”, its usual vocabulary includes racist, sexist or ableist terms, among others.
Since 2010, it has been spreading xenophobic content, criminalizing the population of foreign origin or the Roma community; it also contributes to the spread of fake news, such as false allegations of sexist violence, or incites to commit violence against trans people, to name a few examples.
The strategy of “Don’t finance hate” is simple: send the advertising companies a compilation of screenshots or links of the discriminatory content.
To come up with it, the organization looked at what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Cuerda argues that the internationalist strategy is very important, because this is how ultra ideologies work. “The lines of action or the ideological currents matter, even if it is a few months late. They share advisors, centers of opinion, experiences… There is coordination between the extreme right in the USA and that of Spain and Europe. So we wonder what is being done there in response. We look at Sleeping Giants, and contact one of its founders, Nandini Jammi, for advice.”
The "Don't finance hate" campaign sends advertisers screenshots or links to media with discriminatory content
Cuerda refers to a digital activism organization that in 2016, with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, activated a pressure campaign against the advertisers of the far-right and conspiracist media Breitbart News – described by the ideologue of Trumpism, Steve Bannon, as “the platform of the alt-right”.
With the initiative, they got more than 2,000 organizations to withdraw their advertising. Similar campaigns under the same umbrella have been launched in Canada, Australia, France and Brazil.
Before, however, there had been other initiatives, such as “Stop Funding Hate”, in the United Kingdom, which in 2015 was organized to counteract the increase in attacks against migrant women or refugees by media such as The Sun, the Daily Mail or the audiovisual platform GB News.
The strategy has forced them to moderate the tone of their content or to remove some of their more extremist signatures.Nandini Jammi acted as a liaison between És País Valencian and the Check My Ads institute, a digital firewall against the global epidemic of disinformation promoted by the extreme right.
Going to the root of fake news, this body plans to build digital advertising standards that guarantee respect for human rights. “They are working to dismantle the advertising income of Fox News, they are big words”, points out Cuerda.
This year, he managed to knock the interview program Tucker Carlson Tonight, an apologist for years of white supremacism, off the grid.
Several experts are aware of the importance of disarticulating voices that spread hate. Talia Lavin, an American journalist specializing in the extreme right, writes in her book La cultura del odio (Capitán Swing, 2022) that “hate always metastasizes.
What happens in channels that for 24 hours a day do not stop proclaiming the most stochastic violence – like megaphones full of testosterone and thirsty for blood – is that, sooner or later, someone will take over […].
The constant dissemination of murderous propaganda leaves a trail of blood”.
Expand the toolbox of digital anti-fascism With the radical change in the media ecosystem following the digital boom, which has exponentially increased the number of news portals and headlines of dubious rigor and easy clickbait, what has not changed is the desire of companies to reach the more eyes, the better.
This is where the radicalization of content to get more visits comes into play: it is no secret that algorithms promote far-right content, generating the effect of the pipe of hate, which facilitates an indoctrination in reactionary ideologies and their spread beyond social networks.
Currently, most companies choose to outsource the management of their advertising. Here, programmatic advertising takes the helm, that is to say, a tangled web of ad managers and brands – such as Google, Tabula, AdRoll, Magnite… – that are guided by the criterion of the volume of visits to a web address and not step by the type of content it promotes.
We are talking about lists with thousands of URLs, which are offered in a catalog to advertising companies, without them checking one by one where their ads will appear.
The websites that host the advertising inserts sign contracts with ethical red lines imposed by programmatic advertising managers, but there is no active monitoring of their compliance and there is a lack of regulation to combat hate speech.
Most of the time, multinationals do not know where they have their advertising or who they are sharing space with.
The step-by-step process of these anti-hate campaigns is very simple: just take a screenshot with the discriminatory headline and the company’s ad in turn, then contact them via e-mail or ‘ a tweet politely explaining to them that their products are being advertised on overtly homophobic, racist or sexist pages.
“‘Do you know that your ad appears on a portal that promotes hate?’
And of course, this company discovers that its brand is sharing the screen with transphobic content, for example, and thinks ‘what a bad image this gives me’.
They take away very unpleasant surprises. From that moment on, you can notify your advertising provider and tell them not to hire that service anymore”, sums up Kilian Cuerda.
This is what they have done with IKEA, Filmin, Bimbo, Batiste, Ford… but also with public institutions, such as the Generalitat Valenciana and the Generalitat de Catalunya.
The strategy of deplatforming, of dismantling platform capitalism, creates a ripple effect as more and more companies withdraw their advertising:
By knocking on the next door bringing out the hate speech that accompanies their ads, the campaign it has more accumulated legitimacy thanks to the multinationals or institutions that have previously abandoned that website.
Hate-spreading portals like Mediterráneo Digital are desperately dependent on advertising. Since March 2022, “Don’t finance hate” has managed to banish almost all of its advertisers. Now there are only bookmakers, sexual or Vox inserts, and it has moved its tax headquarters to Malta to alleviate the lack of income.
“It’s a long battle. We are demonstrating that the majority of society and the productive and economic structure do not tolerate or accept these discourses. We do not appeal to the ethics of advertisers, we appeal to the majority social consensus”, says Cuerda.
“On many occasions, companies thank us, because they really weren’t aware of it. Some are scandalized bythe disgusting content they discover”, he adds.
The entity also focuses on websites such as Alerta Digital, Estado de Alarma or Caso Aislado. “If you visit a space of intoxication and intolerance, which imitates the aesthetics of serious conventional media, and you find advertising for brands like Nissan, it gives you a sense of legitimacy.
It looks like a real newspaper, and you can give credibility to its fake news”, confirms Kilian Cuerda.
Talia Lavin points out that “much of the anti-fascist activity goes through research, infiltration and above all, doxing, that is, revealing names, locations and positions that expose members of xenophobic groups”, to generate a cost social to their hatred.
This researcher knows this intimately, because she has infiltrated digital dating spaces inhabited by white supremacists and exposed them through her journalistic work.
Of course, it is essential to take action to stop any public intervention by the extreme right, be it a party political act or a fascist raid against minority groups and activists. But these strategies are not always available to everyone because of the risk they entail, both from extremist groups and from state repression.
At the same time, to find other ways to permeate wider sectors of the population, Cuerda defends that “it is very important, from the left and anti-fascism, to know how to swim and move in the space we are in and to use all the tools at our disposal”.
For this reason, he considers that actions such as “Don’t finance hate” are tools to achieve victories within the capitalist system itself, which contribute to isolating hate speeches and their speakers.
Since it is not a question of calling for a boycott of companies, but of giving them a touch of attention on where they advertise their products and services, the various international organizations that promote them note that it is a form of activism that reaches less politicized audiences.
“It allows us to go on the offensive in a creative way, where everyone can participate”, sums up Cuerda.
Following the electoral results of last May 28, Cuerda thinks that “the panorama in the Valencian Country is obviously very negative because of the entry of extreme right-wing governments. Vox’s toxic speech is infecting what will be the Valencian government.
There are many things that they know they will not be able to achieve, but they are playing this battle of normalizing the public political narrative that aims to persecute people for their identity, persecute the Valencian… these are valid things.
Faced with this situation, the position and role of És País Valencià is the same, and with even more reason. We will continue the anti-fascist battle with all our strength and with the same strategy, because we were already functioning independently in the institutions”, he reflects.
Personal harassment, the strategy of fascism
Doxing is not only in the hands of anti-fascism. “Reports by journalists are often not enough to eradicate hate from sites like YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.
Even more, for the simple fact of reporting, they face constant attacks, death threats and intimidation campaigns, which I have suffered personally”, writes Talia Lavin.
Kilian Cuerda has also experienced it: “As president of the association, Meditérraneo Digital identifies me and begins a personal harassment, publishing false news about me very beastly.
They have also threatened me from their official account. They have the conviction of impunity and privilege, but the moment comes when they stop being so. I have reported them for assault on moral integrity and slander. The complaint has been accepted for processing, and what’s more, the judge has added the crime of coercion. Since they cannot deny the information we have provided to their advertisers, they resort to violence,” Cuerda said.
This summer, the oral hearing of one of the two legal proceedings initiated against the portal is scheduled. Faced with this persecution, Cuerda considers it vital to “report and network, don’t keep silent, explain it to your people, your people and organize yourself”
Article published in number 569 of the Directa
The Free 