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 -
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.
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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