15
votes
Alt-right homophobes are using 4chan to plan a terrifying cyber attack on the LGBT+ community during Pride month
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- Authors
- Josh Milton
- Published
- May 26 2020
- Word count
- 425 words
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to keep your private info off the net. Jobs are applied for online, items are bought online, services and utilities are signed up for online. Everything's online.
And even trying to keep a separate "real life" and digital persona on social media, well that just doesn't work. Odds are emails and possibly passwords are shared across your digital persona and real life accounts. One leak in any of the sites using your digital persona, and suddenly your real life accounts are identified and possibly compromised. Personally, just my real first name is enough to track down my address, which I've never publicly posted online. Data is bought and sold so much, it's nearly impossible to control where your own data goes without extreme effort.
Good password hygiene needs to be ingrained in people from a young age. These days there are tons of tools that make this so much easier than it used to be. There's a good chance your smartphone has a good password management system built into it. iOS even has decent integration with third party password managers (I use it with a KeePass database).
I'm not saying this will be a big thing, because I don't trust reporting on it to understand the culture and I haven't looked at this myself to judge...but it's a huge mistake to act like these are just harmless dumb kids.
The alt right feeds on the more radical and dangerous ends of it not being taken seriously, while they're busy creating the next generation of the far right. Bannon knew to pay attention to and even pander to those groups, and you can bet your ass that a million other strategists with similar goals are fucking drooling when they see stuff like this.
You see in the article how they want this to look "normie-friendly"? You're playing into their hands by downplaying what's actually going on. This kind of thing is not harmless.
I mean isn't that the same genesis as the alt-right memes and q-anon crap that has infected so many brains?
I think the crux of the issue lies somewhere at the intersection between Poe's law, Baader–Meinhof, and confirmation bias. That is to say, just spreading malicious information online can poison one's mind to think that it's common and/or normal to hold extreme beliefs of a vocal minority.
This seems to but up against the concept of free will if it implies that thoughts alone can be as bad as actions, but we live in a world where free speech and Section 203 are being challenged at the highest echelons of society, so perhaps this is a good time to consider addressing mental hygiene as much as Homeland Security / Disease Control.
Me too.
But the Reddit LGBTsphere is all a-twitter about the forthcoming pogrom, so I thought I'd add to the confusion by posting this here. Why should Reddit and Twitter have all the fun? ;)