If you’re on twitter a lot(like I am) you might have heard of this recent trend of people praising Osama Bin Laden.
It’s one of the more popular topics at twitter in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. If you searched for Bin Laden on twitter during that time, you’d have seen pages and pages of people talking about the trend.
This seems to goes beyond just talking about blowback, which is the idea that foreign intervention often ends up making you enemies. Apparently some people are unironically saying that Bin-Laden was right, or even that he was justified in carrying out 9/11. It’s good to understand blow-back, but there’s no justifying what Bin Laden did.
To the casual twitter user, this might seem like a disturbing trend. A lot of people are seemingly defending Bin Laden. But something about this phenomenon is strange to me. If so many people are unironically defending Bin Laden, then why haven’t I encountered any of them in the wild? I have encountered people in the wild talking about blowback, but so far, every post I’ve seen where someone is actually defending Bin Laden was brought to me by someone else.
If encountering an ideologue “in the wild” means that you’re encountered them first hand, then encountering them second-hand is analogous to encountering them in a zoo. If you go to an actual zoo, you can be sure that you’ll see some lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas, and any number of exotic animals. However you’d be hard pressed to find those same animals out in the wild. Even if you go to their known habitats, actually seeing one isn’t always a frequent occurrence.
When people share the posts of their ideological opponents, they tend not to share the more reasonable posts. They’re motivated to share the most outrageous ones they can find so that they make their opposition look bad. They’re also trying to drive engagement, and outrageous posts are good at driving engagement.
The first twitter post I referenced in this entry was brought to you by Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok is a conservative social media personality that’s dedicated to sharing the most outrageous-looking posts and actions on behalf of liberals. Usually they focus on trans issues, but over the past few months they’ve been posting about Israel–Hamas war. Libs of TikTok is a sort of ideological zoo. Just like you can go to a real zoo to see the lions and elephants, you can go to one of Libs of TikTok’s social media accounts to see the people who praise Bin Laden.This is not to say that Bin-Laden-praisers don’t really exist. They clearly do exist. A lot of people have encountered them, and you can probably go track down some of those posts right now if you really wanted. But they might not be as frequent as they seem. Libs of TikTok, and other similar accounts signal-boost the ones that do exist. They present a distorted view of the ideological landscape, and make things like Bin-Laden praising seem more common then it really is.
This an application of Alyssa Vance’s Chinese robber fallacy: There are over 1 billion Chinese people. If one out of every ten thousand of them are robbers, that would result in more than a hundred thousand Chinese robbers. That’s a lot of robbers, and if someone wanted to make you think that Chinese people were robbers, they could easily share true examples of Chinese robbers until your attention span was depleted, even if only 0.01% of them actually were robbers.
No outright fake news is needed in order to have this effect. If given a large enough world, there are almost always enough examples of a rare ideology to cherry pick in order to make it seem like a common one.
There are many other examples of zoos on the internet. Reddit_Lies on Twitter is a zoo. /r/ChoosingBeggars on Reddit is a sort of zoo. The algorithms on the typical social media site, that feed you the most high-engagement content have the effect of a zoo. Even a normal news publication is a sort of natural zoo. The news doesn’t tell you about every day normal events. It tells you about rare, exceptional events. As John B. Bogart said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
I will admit sense-making based entirely on your personal experience isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reason I don’t encounter Bin Laden supporters in the wild is because of my personal internet habits. A lot of the discourse seems to mention TikTok, which I don’t use. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, so relying only on your personal experiences does have it’s flaws. But it’s still better than relying on a source that’s distorted in a particular direction.
It’s perfectly fine to do your sense-making based on second-hand information, but you have to be mindful of the forces that bring that information to you. You should understand how the information might be manipulated, intentionally or even unintentionally. You should be aware of the motivations your sources have, and the ways in which they’re likely to spin information. You should understand how they can cherry pick true information in order to distort the bigger picture. If you don’t, then you may find yourself an easy target for manipulation.
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Notes -
A delightful metaphor, Sam, and I hope it gets picked up in the ratsphere. The nightly news and half-hour headline news, along with the chyron news ticker always running below cable news, are all hand-picked “zoos” from all the millions of newsworthy things happening at any given moment, so bias in choosing ten or twenty is inevitable.
There’s another type of concentration of unusualities: the circus, in which the best of the “acts” either show themselves off or get scouted and hired to show themselves off. Substack (the Cirque de Soleil of rhetoric) and other more conventional circuses exist across the Internet.
Candidates in a democracy, too, would be a circus, with some being tiger-tamers, some being knife-throwers or fire-eaters, and others being clowns or sideshow exhibitors. (I, of course, will not give examples, because that would be culture warring.)
America, being the homeland of P.T. Barnum, trends toward the showiest kinds of circus acts. It’s interesting that, later in life, Barnum became a legislator himself!
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It's the full circle effect , in which after enough time has passed that it's no longer as socially distasteful reexamine or even praise the legacies of otherwise controversial or loathsome individuals . A similar trend was observed regarding the Unabomber.
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I think you make a valid point but we should be very careful not to abuse the concept of Chinese robber fallacy which becomes the fallacious way to operate. This can be used as a slogan to shut down investigating the reality of things by assuming that negative conclusions are fallacies.
Negative criticisms about various groups can be accurate and those who contest them might have a positive bias, or be misinformed, or just unwilling to admit to what is inconvenient. And you are going to find political partisans at any side promoting different claims, and pointing at bad behavior of their outgroup. And that will include those who act in line with the facts.
It is possible to convince people of negative facts about other groups based on propaganda, but it is also possible for people to pattern recognize politically incorrect facts that are negative about other groups. For example most people don't think the Chinese are robbers but many more think the Chinese in China might follow unscrupulous practices in their manufacturing processes.
There is a finding in psychology research of stereotype accuracy as one of the most replicable effects in it. https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
So, we can't conclude a priori whether we are dealing with propaganda or pattern recognition of pervasive problems by those who pay more attention and such problems. Although some claims might be more likely to be one or the other.
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Have you read the letter? If you take Islam as a given, it is a pretty reasonable argument.
No, it's not. It's actually full of lies. Palestine part being just chock full of it - in no way it happened like it's described there, that the Arabs just peacefully sat there and were unprovokedly attacked. And phrases like "The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews" can't cause anything but a bitter laugh from anybody that knows the actual history of the question - the Jews had to fight the British bitterly to just get the partition agreement (which was basically "the Arabs get all that they managed to capture by now and the rest goes halfsies", except even less fair) - which Arabs soundly rejected and went on genocidal offensive against the Jews, because they thought why share anything if we can just murder them all and take everything? By the time, btw, they had several massacres of the Jews under their belts. I am not implying they may not have some legit complaints - in a multi-century conflict, everybody has something to complain about - but presenting it as "they just attacked peaceful us" is a humongous lie. And anybody who believes it does not understand anything in the history of Middle East and is not qualified to have their own opinion about current or future events there.
Of course, his ethnographical and anthropological exercises are pure ideological bullshit too, but that's expected. What's unexpected is that anybody on the West - who actually have access to the wealth of historic sources - can buy it. But I guess since "education" now means learning each other's pronouns, I should't be too surprised.
The next fallacy is "you steal our oil". The actual picture is exactly the opposite - if not for oil, nobody would care even a tiniest bit what Arabs think or what happens to them. If not for Western glut for oil, none of the rich Arab states - and none of the personal riches of his own family - would exist, and none of them would have even the tiniest bit of influence on the world's events that they have now. The only underlying reason why any of it is possible is because the West is sending torrents of money and resources towards the oil-extracting nations. Now, it is true that most of these nations are shitholes in a myriad of ways, and the torrents of riches are distributed among a limited number of powerful people (Bin Laden family soundly in the middle of it) while the rest of the people are kept miserable and oppressed. But it's not the West who oppresses them - the West gives them, collectively, way more than enough resources to make a good living. It's their own political system that does it to them.
Then there's a magnificent switch - while the West gives us money, which are stolen by our own leaders, it's not any of our fault, it's the West's. However, we on the other hand are entitled to murder anybody on the West, because unlike us, who are not responsible for absolutely anything that happens in our shitholes, everybody in the West is responsible for what happens to us. You can't have any more self-serving and psychotic world view - and yet somehow it's "reasonable argument"? Not in a world where "reasonable" still means anything.
Interesting is the mention of Sharon there. As some of us know, Arabs are very salty about Sharon because one Arab faction killed a lot of Arabs from another Arab faction in Lebanon (which is a pretty routine occurrence, but this time there was a way to blame a Jew for that, so it goes into history book as an unique and singular atrocity that the likes of it never happened before). He is also the guy who evacuated Jews from Gaza and gave it to Arab self-government, who promptly elected Hamas to manage it. You can witness how it worked out in real-time now. All this bullshit about "if you just leave us alone with our Sharia we'll be peaceful" was tested by Sharon himself - and as everybody but the idiots expected, it turned out to be a horrendous lie, which cost Israel over a thousand lives, unspeakable suffering and continues to extract its cost, and will cost more lives and suffering inevitably. Of course, Sharon had an excuse that he may have not known that it's what would happen. We do not have this excuse. And yet, some people still call it "reasonable".
I admit I have to skip a lot of drivel about how we're supposed to be good people and then maybe the warriors of Islam won't murder us (lie: they would anyway), but did I miss any other "reasonale" argument? I don't think so, but you are more then welcome to formulate it and point it out to me.
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How do you know if you are looking at a zoo, or if your normal life is just a bubble? Every source of experience is biased even your own.
I know that any person can be in a bubble, but are you suggesting that Libs of Tiktok is a better representative of the political landscape sample than anyone's bubble?
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I’ve often considered the possibility that most people posting such things don’t actually believe them. It’s a weird effect of social media, but it lends itself to exaggerated expressions of belief or statements of support for things that normal people would find abhorrent and absurd.
I don’t see a lot of LOTT’s content as representative of real opinions shared in earnest. I see them as something like what shock jocks used to be when I was a kid in the 1990s. Shock jocks were DJs who got popular by basically saying things that older adults and traditionally minded people would complain about. In fact a key to continuing popularity for this type of DJ was to be repeatedly fired for “going too far”. Weirdly enough, this usually happens when their ratings dip. So they obviously would say and do outrageous things in the meanest possible way, stomp on whatever people got pissy about (Howard stern got in big trouble for Nappy Headed Hos”) because it’s obviously racist to say that. And be clear, these people more than likely never believed a word they said, or thought their cruel phone pranks weren’t mean. They knew that, but they also knew that the kids loved it precisely because it bugged their parents. The radio studios loved it because it sold. It was all fake.
I think a lot of those edgy things are just as fake as Howard Stern. They’re trying to be over the top, be outrageous enough to get conservatives to consider them the downfall of civilization. Being talked about in that way gives them street cred among their followers. So they’re looking for things that are topical and that will get people to talk about it. Since 9/11 was such a touchstone and because Islam is in the news, what better way to piss off their patriotic elders than saying the biggest attack on America since Pearl Harbor was justified. It’s like blasting hip hop in 1990. Pissing off people is the point.
Are you mixing him up with Don Imus?
Possibly, I was doing it from memory. But either way, I think the point remains — being the guy who everybody whispers “can you believe what he just said” is a pretty reliable way to gain recognition.
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This reminds me of a post by another user about most people's utterances being content free and conveying only signaling value. An example that always comes to mind is opinion polling. Consider people who answer "yes" to a question like:
"Do you think $PRESIDENT is a crypto-Muslim/Fascist/Lizardman?"
There's a small chance they actually believe this, but IMO there's a much greater chance that they take the predicate of that sentence and round it up to "is bad?"
I think that's probably what you're seeing when people say "Osama is great and the U.S. deserved 9/11." They just want to signal "U.S./Capitalism/Globohomo bad!" in a really attention-grabbing way and have put approximately zero thought into it beyond that. This is now how I interpret most of the bizarre, isolated of opinions I find floating around the internet.
Yeah I see it similarly, it's not necessarily cynical (though it can be, see geeks/mops/sociopaths model), mostly it's throwing out a claim without much thought with an intensity and a direction. If challenged, they just perform rhetoric after the fact to justify it.
Personally I think this is the default way we think about things we are ignorant and emotional about and it takes deliberate action to avoid it.
I tend to think so more often in online interactions than in real life (unless the person is a known edge lord) simply because it’s much easier to do such things when it’s for an audience you don’t have a deep connection to than it would be to do so in a room full of intimate friends and family members who might disagree.
M’aiq’s rule of the internet: unless it’s a private conversation among friends, it’s a performance. I don’t think it’s cynical to say that. It’s likely been true forever, as humans are wired to seek the praise of peers as well as power.
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Do you have suggestions for a course of action?
Personally, I recommend not being on Twitter.
This is the correct response.
Back when the common excuse was "it's just a couple of kids on college campuses", the wrong response would be "Personally, I recommend not listening to kids on college campuses".
What do you mean by “listening” here?
I don’t think that knowledge of contemporary college trends would have given you an edge on knowing which would be mainstream in five years, let alone twenty. It certainly wouldn’t give you leverage to edit or steer them. At best, you’d have the opportunity to speculate by catering to one or another trend.
So I’ll stand by my statement. Having a firehose of the worst, most outrageous, engagement-optimized opinions in your pocket? It would have been a bad idea if they were coming from campuses, and it’s a bad idea now.
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Actually it would have been. I think a lot of trouble could have been avoided if we as a society listened less to the opinions of the over-educated
You're mixing up two different kinds of "listen". Society listening to campuses or Twitter means "consider them to be saying worthwhile things". You listening means "consider them influential as a social force".
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Tangentially to this, toward the end of the bush years, there were media reports on msnbc and cnn that basically questioned whether or not bin laden even existed.
No one else remembers that, but good to know people still believe that he existed.
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It's hard to gauge what people in the West really think about bin Laden. For obvious reasons, most Westerners who support bin Laden's actions are not going around saying this in anything other than anonymous contexts. I'm not saying that there are many such Westerners, but there might be more than it seems.
The younger, TikTok-using generation do not remember 9/11 and the American emotional reaction to it. To them it probably might as well be Pearl Harbor, or at least the Vietnam War. So they are probably more likely than previous generations to both have dissenting views about it and to feel comfortable sharing those views openly.
Is it really hard to gauge? I don’t think I know anyone who thinks bin Laden was pretty cool. That includes my zoomer siblings and their friends. Maybe they’re just hiding it? If so, we’re back to asking why it’s showing up on the not-particularly-anonymous TikTok. I have no reason to believe that this fad, out of all of them, is the moment the mask comes off.
Radical Islam never got the same level of countersignaling cred as communism. In part because Che and friends had some mystique, because of the limited information reaching the West, and because of that promise that the reds were totally going to win out any day now. But Real Sharia has, in fact, been tried, and it kind of obviously sucks to most Westerners. That’s not very fertile ground for the casual teenage rebellion.
So I really wouldn’t expect bin Laden to become a positive figure in any enduring sense. Even among edgelords who think the US deserved 9/11.
Well, I guess that at minimum, probably a very large fraction of Westerners who support Hamas against Israel also support bin Laden against America, that is if they even know who bin Laden was. I don't see why they wouldn't. In both cases it would be supporting a daring resistance group that launches a successful raid against both the military assets and the civilians of a white-coded power that they view as oppressive.
There are also Westerners who might not support Hamas or even care about Israel/Palestine, but who hate America for various reasons.
I think there are some people who support Al-Qaeda, but most of the pro-Hamas crowd sees them as acting legitimately to defend themselves which doesn't apply to Al Qaeda.
You might be right. I think a lot probably depends on where you live. Here in the US, 9/11 seems more of an immediate attack and what Hamas did seems more distant. If you lived in Israel, it would be the reverse.
I'll also note that, here in the US, if you went around praising bin Laden, you'd have a pretty good chance of getting punched, whereas you would have a much lower chance of being punched if you praised Hamas. However, if you lived in Israel and went around praising Hamas, you'd probably have an extremely high chance of getting punched. This might subconsciously and/or consciously affect people's willingness to support one group or the other.
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My instinct is to say that the even the pro-Hamas crowd doesn’t like bin Laden or the Taliban. But I recognize my model of why someone would support Hamas—and not just Palestine—is pretty lacking. Do you know of any decent polling on the subject?
Off the top of my head, I don't. And it might be a bit hard to find meaningful data, since 9/11 was over 20 years ago, whereas the Hamas/Israel war started just three months ago.
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I'm reminded of Shamus Young's old post about Twitter:
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