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The Horror Show that is My Email Inbox, Because I Dare Be a Public Liberal. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-25
Of course, I don’t know that answer to what Kos deals with in terms of hate. But he is a lot more known than I am, so on a daily basis, I can only guess. But my inbox, as founder of The Claw News, is mostly filled with every piece of junk and hate you could imagine. I have been called at various times in my life names too awful to print here.
I won’t print specifics so as not to prejudice any future prosecution or litigation, but you can imagine, I am sure.
Even though I am not all that well-known, I am on somebody’s list somewhere, because even though I mostly keep a closed loop, they still find me.
I am of course at heart a peaceful man. I don’t own firearms. After 32 years of physical and self-defense training, I don’t feel a need to. And I do all I am able to in terms of being peaceful. But it is unnerving and it does keep me up at night. It is just something else to be aware of when going to the car or my mail box. You can’t know.
From the minute I took my first steps into the world of politics I gave up the certainty that comes with being anonymous. I don’t regret it. What I regret is that discourse in this nation has devolved so rapidly.
One week after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Eric Coomer, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems, was forced into hiding. Angry supporters of then-president Donald Trump, believing false accusations that Dominion had switched votes in favor of Joe Biden, published Coomer’s home address and phone number and put a million-dollar bounty on his head.
Where does all of this come from you might ask? It comes from the normalization of radicalism. It comes from the recruitment of angry, celebate young men. And it comes from the internet. It comes from Meta.
.Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities. These shifts have created a new reality: millions of Americans willing to undertake, support, or excuse political violence, defined here (following the violence-prevention organization Over Zero) as physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life.
This group conducted a test.
An investigation by Global Witness and the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) team looked at Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube's ability to detect and remove death threats against election workers in the run up to the US midterm elections. The ability of Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and TikTok to enforce their own policies on harmful content. We did this by identifying 10 of the worst examples of death threats issued against election workers in the US and then submitting them to the three platforms in the form of advertisements and recording whether the platforms accepted them for publication or not. After (they) submitted the ads containing death threats, TikTok and YouTube suspended our accounts for violating their policies. Facebook, however, behaved very differently. The platform approved nine of the ten English-language death threats for publication and six of the ten Spanish-language death threats. Our account was not closed down despite a handful of ads having been identified as violating their policies.
Early on I used Facebook to market. What I received were Jim’s and Rick’s calling me everything under the sun, threatening my life, and suggesting they would meet me in various parking lots to “whip my ass.” Would you believe my silly male ego found the last part most infuriating? Even at 46 I can clearly, unequivocally promise any solitary would be domestic terrorist that accosting me alone is not the best decision one could make.
My mornings have me go through my mailbox, clean out the junk, document any email threats, then go on about my day. I document them. I can’t do much about them. In some countries they take it seriously, but here, it has to be very specific, very identifiable, and very obvious. Pretty much if it is anybody other than a celebrity making a video, it gets “filed.”
This discussion on Quora sums up my history trying to report threats:
Most large police departments have a few officers to deal with computer crimes, cyberstalking, identity theft, etc. They are backed by the FBI for major cases and interstate and international crimes. But how to tell if a criminal is in your town, or the same state, or even in this country? The sheer volume of these crimes and the difficulty make cyber-stalking and similar crimes difficult to prosecute, and low priority. They are non violent crimes, and unless they become violent, not worth the police effort when they have crimes against persons to pursue. Look as it from the cops perspective: will you chase the car thief or the cyber-stalker? Chase the hit and run perp or the cyber-bully? Address the domestic violence situation or investigate a complaint about stolen on-line identity? It's an either-or situation. To investigate all the cyber complaints would need us to double the police resources, but the “defund the police” mantra wants a reduced police presence, not adding more.
That last part is an opinion, and misguided, as bad message frames led a desire to reallocate police funding to be labelled as “reducing police.” Nevertheless, not much gets done.
It is everywhere. Linkedin, Nextdoor, any source of communication online at all devolves into a right wing pit.
See people like to complain about our messaging, and yes, it is mostly weak, but they seem to forget about what might be going on. Are some talents being intimidated? Is it that they are just meaner than us? The thing is, if I look at where this country was in 2009, and is now, the most devastating social media forces have been Meta, (Facebook) and Twitter. It is not even close.
This makes it hard to market, when it seems there is literally an army of people waiting to attack.
These seem less like social media companies and more like organized right wing rapid response teams. So it is hard to market safely, and it is hard to wake up knowing that there are people scouring the internet for people like me just to harass and threaten them. But I trudge on, despite the violent threats against me, despite the looking over my shoulder, because while it is how I feed my family, the work is bigger than me. I am fighting for a generation beyond mine.
But how many will? And for how long?
-ROC
I need to add to my The Claw News family. I work tirelessly each week to bring useful content that fights for real progressive change. Join me. If you don’t get your $3.99’s worth, I will personally refund you the month and take the loss on the fees. Guaranteed.
Click right here!
Love,
-ROC
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