I think 4chan is a shit hole and do not in any way approve of them mocking BLM or the movement.

The reason I share this however is to point out the generally harmful group think of people being activists right now, to the extent it is hurting the movement.

4chan consistently has success in these matters. Right now its Bald for BLM which seems to be catching on, and not that long ago they managed to trick everyone into thinking the OK hand gesture was a white supremacist hand gesture and even managed to get it on a list of hate speech.

When 4chan is this successful at manipulating people simply by making something look popular, when that is the only criteria for success, its time to reevaluate the underlying mentality driving our activism.

@freemo Side note, but the whole "👌" debacle is often represented in a way that doesn't quite reflect the reality accurately. The people who started the claim that it's a white supremacist thing were in part also white supremacists. I don't know what the exact proportions of just-for-the-lolz trolls to alt-righters were obviously, but there was enough of the latter, that I think this story can be described relatively accurately as "white supremacists adopting new symbol" rather than "trolls convincing journalists that white supremacists adopted a new symbol". I mean the trolls definitely thought they were doing that, so the truth is somewhere in between. And confusingly the white supremacists also thought they were trolling, as evidenced by the NZ mosque shooter -- he seemes to flash this symbol in some photos "ironically". But if you adopt a symbol "ironically" or "for-the-lulz" you still adopted the symbol...

@timorl @freemo I mean, if I'm not mistaken/am remembering this correctly (I pretty much watched it unfold in real time from inception), it was a prank literally brainchilded on /pol/ specifically to dupe journos—and thereafter legitimate white supremacists started doing it ironically after it got popularized by media trying to sensationalize it.

@kino

The number of cases of legitimate white supremacists using it is very very small. Wikipedia has a complete list of times it was legitimately used by white supremacists and I dont think the list even hits the dozen mark.

So not sure I'd call that valid IMO.

@timorl

@freemo @timorl Yeah, I can't really cite any times it was used by real white supremacists outside of maybe the NZ mosque shooter. I just remember *being on 4chan* when this was being shilled into existence by anons for the specific purpose of fucking with journos. And then like 3 months later it was being widely cites by journos as meaning "white power".

@kino

And now everytime someone is caught in a picture making the OK handgesture, without any other context, everyone goes "yup, look at this racist fuck"

@timorl

@freemo @timorl The joke is only funny if you know it was a joke. Unfortunately it went over the heads of the normies who were not in on the gag and the journos therefore sort of won.

@kino

In my mind BLM isnt really something to mock overall. Its an important voice.

But as I said in their mocking they did manage to reveal a disurbing thread of group think that ultimately makes them easy to manipulate as a group. And its not really even a BLM specific thing, its activists as a whole right now.

@timorl