Acknowledging the ambiguity in Musk’s salute is important: not to let him off the hook, but to recognize how much more dangerous things are when they’re ambiguous than when they’re straightforward.

Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.

Taking cues from neo-Nazis is a great look for the GOP ticket.

Quelle honte !

This is just a few words to say that this post that I wrote back in December 2022 has suddenly become relevant. In short, some of my recent work has been on an online Mormon community that has some overlaps with the far-right. In between my collection of the data and eventual publication of our various articles, my co-author and I have noted some prominent accounts’ being suspended from Twitter. Because we work hard to not use identifiable quotes in our writing, and because of Elon Musk’s decision to unsuspend nearly all suspended accounts after taking the platform over, I’ve been checking accounts I knew to previously be suspended as we work on a new manuscript.

Kicked off the family holiday gathering by watching this with my dad last night. This was a good Indiana Jones movie, I (mostly) had fun watching it, and I’m probably being a little harsh in my rating of it. However, for all we live in an era where punching Nazis is shorthand for some very necessary resistance to some very dangerous far-right action, I’ve been reading about non-violence lately, and that makes it hard to enjoy media like this.

Next month, I’m flying to Salt Lake City to attend the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present some of my work about social media, religion, and the far right. I’ll be presenting on three different projects at SSSR—this was biting off more than I could chew, but since two of them connect with Mormonism, Salt Lake suggested the possibility of a larger-than-usual audience for that work, so there you go.

One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.

Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.

I appreciate the way that Masnick uses examples from the news to call out how dumb some of these laws are.

I read Torba’s blog post last week but hadn’t been aware of the context. Interesting read.

Lots of directions to go with this one, but “based” is the red pill red flag for me. Lee is (unsurprisingly) borrowing the language of the far right.

McCarthy isn’t saying the same thing as these Telegram channels, but he’s making it easier for them to say what they’re saying.

So much of modern right-wing politics boils down to concerns about masculinity.

I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter.

I get that some of this is bluster and posturing, but that doesn’t make it any less worrying. This is the same state GOP that leaned into Gab a year or two ago.

Given the aggressively queerphobic language I’ve read on Gab, events like this are worrying but not surprising. More worrying is the way that this queerphobic language is increasingly used in the mainstream GOP. How do Republican politicians and voters feel about these events?

GOP has some reckoning to do.

Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning. I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation.

Like its predecessors, this volume was interesting, and I appreciated what it had to say, but there was just too much that was weird about it for me to really love it. I don’t regret reading it, but I have no plans to buy the physical versions like I thought I might in the past. The story seemed to get more and more speculative over time, and while I appreciated the intent, it just felt like more and more of a stretch, which felt like it weakened the goals of the author.

I read this volume of the series much faster than the last one—perhaps because it was new to me and perhaps because the second round of the election motivated me to finish it—though I clearly won’t finish the series before today’s results were announced. Thematically, I thought the book was stranger. It put more emphasis on how laws and politics established under mainstream parties could become terrifying in the hands of far right extremists.

This matches rhetoric I’m reading while doing research on Gab. We need respectable conservative movements in the U.S., but our contemporary mainstream right is flirting with these ideas instead of denouncing them. It’s troubling

Faut pas oublier ces liens quand-même.

Keeping an eye on France’s elections in April and then Idaho’s in May, I guess.

I have spent a few hours this week reading violently anti-trans posts as part of a research project. My patience for queerphobic dog whistles disguised as feigned concerns about girls’ sports is at zero. So disappointed in the Kentucky legislature.

Worrying stuff here. Right-wing media consumption appears to be the big predictor for QAnon beliefs.

Just explained something I learned from studying far right spaces in Mormon social media to collaborators on a project studying queer spaces in far right social media, which is not an experience I expected when starting grad school in ed tech.

We can prosecute criminals without weakening encryption.

Interesting read on a subject I expect to be following for a while.

Ugh ugh ugh.

Unhappy reading for the holidays.

Looks like QAnon is going to be around for a while. Worrying stuff.

Very worrying. Underlines the importance of local politics.

I have a professional interest in the far right, follow the news pretty well, and still sometimes forget how bad Jan. 6 was just because life is crazy. Shame on those actively encouraging us to forget out of cynicism and self-interest.