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 -
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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