zetsubonna:

“i don’t know anymore, man. i genuinely do not know how to argue empathy at somebody. i don’t want concertgoers and schoolchildren to be routinely slaughtered in hailstorms of bullets. you don’t care. i don’t want some kid’s first memory to be a jackbooted deportation force kicking down their door and ripping their father from them. you don’t care. i don’t want a mother to bury her child solely because she couldn’t swing $600 for a two-pack of epipens. you don’t care. every day you wake up and deflect, but-what-about, twist, bend, contort, and echo whatever vile rationalization keeps you from having to admit that you’re, not just complicit in, but in fact actively facilitating this nightmare of a reality so many people are experiencing. i care about other people. you do not. it’s as simple as that. take your thoughts and prayers and shove them up your ass”

— Rob Whisman (on Twitter)

baku:

game developer: this game is multiplayer ONLY, we want you to play this game ONLY WITH YOUR FRIENDS

me, no friends mcFuck: great

The problem isn’t even really a lack of friends- it’s that the games require each friend you do have to have their own gaming setup, instead of being able to join you on yours.

love-god-herself:

pastelpuddle:

theroguefeminist:

This whole debacle is making me lose what tiny shred of faith I had in tumblr social justice bloggers. People’s response to tumblr reacting to the revelation that fake news was being spread on this site (a fact which had already been exposed over a month ago) is incredibly sobering to me, but I shouldn’t be surprised.

People are either falsely claiming that the Russian government’s fake news op on here is a conspiracy to censor real, progressive bloggers OR, like you, are pivoting the issue to complain about tumblr’s failure to police problematic blogs on here, while framing the issue of fake news as less important. I literally saw someone say that porn bots were a bigger problem than fake news/interference in our democracy and tumblr staff was incompetent for tackling fake news but not prioritizing porn bots! Of all things! 

As my friend kafkinated stated, propaganda doesn’t have to persuade you of anything. It can also “exhaust, distract and demobilize” you from other issues or changes going on by playing into your “pre-existing worldviews.” Misinformation can even lull you into a sense of security that doesn’t exist. Whatever you want to believe or not, the fact remains the same: thousands of people working on behalf of the Russian government impersonated progressive bloggers on tumblr, many of them impersonated Black bloggers. They purposefully disrupted conversation and discourse on this site to sow distraction and exhaustion and appropriated Black suffering and issues to help elect a white supremacist president.

That people don’t care MORE about fake news and these threats is very sobering to me. The fact people want to either sweep what happened under the rug, create some conspiracy theory to explain it away, or downplay its importance is also disturbing. The more people act this way, the more victories you hand to Russia’s fake news campaign. It seems Russia hardly needed even put so much effort into misleading and distracting people when, through your own cognitive dissonance, you’re doing it to yourselves.

If posting facts and realities of police brutality can be compared to insighting naziism and white nationalism (Russian ‘bots’ or not) then you are pretending like these issues are opposite ends of a balance; where center is what exactly???

How did these bots undermine of the election system if, from what I have seen of their posts so far, they are basically echoing actual Americans/non-bot bloggers who have these opinions and concerns about our government?

What/where is the misinformation they spread? How did these bots exhaust and distract? Were there really only bots in the ‘social justice/BLM’ section of Tumblr?

Why can’t there be transparency about the posts by these blogs so we can observe whether there was misinformation? Do we get to know how they specifically found and purged these bots? When are they purging this site of people and bloggers promoting hate and Nazi ideology as well?

I think it’s fair to say this leaves a lot of unanswered questions and lack of transparency. Not sure how these concerns are a cognitive dissonance as they are critical thinking.

Look.

All the questions you pose here are justifiable, but they aren’t unanswered at all? They’ve pretty much all been addressed and are easy to Google. Tumblr staff worked with the Justice Department and found the blogs by tracking their IP addresses back to known Russian troll farms, as well as talking to Americans the Russians had recruited (the Americans did not know they were communicating with Russians) –  here is some information on that. This is the same thing that was done on all other social media outlets that were found to have had this problem. Here is the report from the DOJ, with a link to the actual indictment at the bottom of the page. 

The blogs exhausted and distracted by the same means all heavily circulated media does – by being highly and repeatedly visible. This… is not new information? We see stuff constantly, we absorb it. Consciously or not, we absorb it. Everything from psychology to marketing has confirmed this. It’s literally what the entire advertising industry is built on. As for the specific misinformation they spread, they took quotes and pictures completely out of context to fuel an anti-Clinton narrative among progressives. Here’s an example.

And no, there were not only bots in the social justice/BLM section of Tumblr. You can find the list of the bots, and there are some like “guns4l1fe” that were clearly geared toward a more conservative/right-wing audience. This was a widespread campaign – again, not new information. None of this is an indictment on BLM or progressive efforts in general. And frankly I’ve yet to see a single person actually claim that BLM itself was a Russian operation. I’ve only seen people bending over backwards to deny the Russian campaign existed on Tumblr, and using that as a rationalization to ignore the evidence.

Listen, I got the email. That means I reblogged some of this shit. I get that it’s unpleasant and uncomfortable to realize you got played, but we did. Because this was masterfully done. They undermined the system by being thoroughly convincing. These blogs were very well designed to look legitimate, partly by not being only political – they peppered humor, popular culture references, etc. into the political posts. They knew how to imitate Americans and American political/ideological concerns, gain followers, and get traction. And the fact that a lot of what they posted was true added to the effectiveness of the campaign. If it had all been obviously fake, we would not be here. 

This is not a smear tactic for progressive bloggers or causes. It’s a crucial acknowledgement of what happened during the 2016 election, and even more to the point it’s an acknowledgement of an ongoing threat. Russia’s still doing this, and it’s another election year. And these mental gymnastics to avoid facing something that could very well affect us again in November is disingenuous and irresponsible. 

reallycoolsoup:

botprince:

afloweroutofstone:

I wish there was a way to tell companies that I dislike an ad so much that I will actively avoid buying anything from them because of it

So slightly unrelated but still relevant, generally when I come across an ad that just really fuckin annoys me for whatever reason I’ll go into Google and just type different variations of “I hate ‘x’ product” like 5 times until googles algorithm picks it up an I never see an ad for that product again. It’s amazing.

Use that cooperate spyware to your advantage

caustictickingoftheclock:

i’ve seen a couple people today reblogging posts by IRA accounts, and basically insinuating that something sketchy is going on because ‘could a russian spy blog make a post this concerned with social justice?’

first of all, the answer is yes. these aren’t bots, they’re real human people paid to discover what appeals to people on this site and capitalise on it (so their coherence and proper grammar doesn’t mean they aren’t IRA accounts, just that they aren’t bots). if all they posted was the disinformation they want to spread, no one would follow them. 

there’s a number of reasons you might think tumblr deleted the wrong blog. i’m not saying this couldn’t have happened (god knows this site is a mess), but here’s why a lot of these reasons don’t check out: 

• you may have seen these accounts sharing a bunch of fairly normal posts, both informational and humorous. again, they’re just imitating regular bloggers on this site. it’s not hard to learn what’s popular and share it.
• you may have seen them make sj-related posts. they were probably still trying to imitate regular users, but they’re also framing the info to suit their needs. take this post, which explains the issue really well: an IRA account made a post about a popular topic (hidden figures) but framed it so as to inspire anger. this is a good way of making people share without thinking. making sj posts is useful for the IRA because a, it lets these people influence what and how you think about sj issues and b, the language of sj is a language you know and, in a way, trust (in the same way those old racists on fb we’re always making fun of know and trust the language of us patriotism), so you’re more likely to share sketchy posts if they’re couched in sj language.
• you may have seen tumblr users you’re fairly sure aren’t IRA employees acting in the same way: encouraging anger or manipulating people to provoke emotional reactions. the fact is that these strategies are shitty and you should be wary of them, no matter who is using them. the ubiquity of emotional manipulation on this site probably made it really easy for the IRA to use it undetected. this is why we should push back against anything from ‘watch (x demographic) ignore this lol’ to ‘SAY THEIR NAME’ (in reply to headlines which don’t use people’s names because that’s not how newspaper articles work). these attitudes are meant to tug on your emotions (shame, anger, sadness), and if you let them do that you are way more likely to spread bs or unsourced claims. if you know a post is legit but it has some anger/fear-mongering bs attached, reblog a version without that bs or find a different post with the same info.
• another thing you might have seen non-IRA people do (or done yourself, i know i used to all the time) is spreading info that is…not always fake, but maybe presented really inaccurately. i’m sure you can think off the top of your head of an informational post (not necessarily sj-related) that was widely spread and then thoroughly debunked or at least corrected. this is another problem with the way we use social media that the IRA was able to exploit. if you’re not sure something is true, don’t share it. if you doubt the source’s objectivity, don’t share it. if it’s unsourced but turns out to be true, please post the sources you find. 
• finally, tumblr is pretty big on ingroup/outgroup mentality. people who ensconce themselves in a corner of tumblr (ace-in/exclusionists, anarchists, whatever) tend to form groups based on opinions, meaning anyone who vocally shares these opinions is in the group and has a disporportionate amount of our trust, whereas those explicitly outside the group we are a lot more sceptical towards. this lets people use social signalling to earn unwarranted trust and spread misinformation or their baised af opinions, so it’s also something to watch out for. evaluate posts based on the content, not just on who is posting them.

anyway, i think a lot of us (and i am absolutely including myself) need to do some thinking about how we share stuff on this site. i feel like the culture on tumblr (like on many other social media) makes it easy to spread misinformation, so we need to reexamine that culture and work on not letting certain social signals override out scepticism