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Lol, no one’s putting a gun to people’s heads to make them act bigoted. If your response to being accused of racism is “Oh, yeah? I’ll show you racism!” then you’re just showing your true colors.

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squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

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t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The media focusing on these fringe groups lends legitimacy to them and puts a spotlight on them, which in turn draws people on their side but unaware of them, to them.

“This thing is making people I don’t like mad, so I’m going to support this thing, because I like making those people mad.”

By attacking it when your attacks can’t actually harm the group per se, all you’re really doing is giving it visibility. No one’s saying it’s creating racists/ bigots, but it is giving them a more powerful platform, since they’re no longer just a bunch of bigoted individuals, but are now Gamergate™, whose dumb ideas the media will publish articles about.

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- Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I mean the flip side of this is that by doing nothing you’re letting them write the narrative. I feel like whatever this mess is, it’s starting to grow, so a more legitimate source calling it what it is can be helpful
  
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  - millie@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m not sure that’s the danger you think it is, or that arguing against them is a panacea.
    
    Arguing with them or loudly pointing at them makes a spectacle, bringing people to the issue on both sides. Just an argument isn’t super likely to bring people around if they’ve already made up their minds, but it will certainly organize the opposition.
    
    In the mean time, unless you’re actually able to sway the thing you’re arguing over, there’s now just a big visible and time consuming turf war going on over things that nobody in the discussion has any ability to change, because they all pertain to the opinions of others.
    
    Compare this with disengaging. Suddenly the loud opinion has nothing to reverberate off of. It’s alone, yelling into a void that doesn’t care. It’s not even a blip.
    
    The right knows this, which is why they DARVO. We need to learn this, but to use it honestly instead of using it to become better manipulators. Disengaging doesn’t just prevent the triggering of massive opposition organization, it saves energy for where it can actually be useful. Then you can just go do the thing without making a spectacle of people with shitty opinions who otherwise wouldn’t even matter to the progress being made.
    
    Stop giving them something to fight about day in and day out and they’ll get bored and go back to looking at big trucks instead of paying attention to politics.
    
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  - t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    These Right wing campaigns don’t have a platform on which to advance a narrative. 4-chan and Truth Social and 8-chan and Parlor/Gab/whatever aren’t frequented by most ‘normal’ folks, and the only reason these campaigns reached mass audience is because news media puffs them up for clicks.
    
    There are many more hundreds of right-wing troll/ hate campaigns that go nowhere, because they never manage to catch the attention of the media.
    
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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Think about it this way - those 248k people who respond to seeing an article accusing a group of racism with “sign me up”, are not the same people being accused to begin with.

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