>This document has been prepared for the European Commission however it reflects the views only of the authors, and the European Commission is
not liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this publication.
Oh the irony, the commission always says that with every report it payed for, or equity free investment made. It's part of a deliberate strategy of feigning ignorance in order to sidestep any question of its competence or legitimacy.
> the commission always says that with every report it payed for
Because when you pay for a report, you are asking a group of people for their opinion on the subject, so you can then read the report and get inform and maybe act.
So by very definition it is indeed not their opinion, and not that ironic.
A certain green website wasn't always full of racism, this was done deliberately.
If you go back further Nick Broomfield did some documentaries in the 90s / early 00s where he went to various white supremacists, even then they were saying their plan was to go mainstream through various tactics, what happened on the green website fits almost exactly with this.
I'm so pissed off that my European tax money is wasted on financing bullshit like that.
But be aware, this is maybe the first sign that "humor" will be the next victim of the "cancel culture" and the current trend in "free speech censorship"...
None of that was the topic here. It is about propaganda and how far left tries to not lose the control of the counterculture, and, it is already gone. Counterculture nowadays does not belong to the far left anymore.
Iran regime just passed a law "to protect internet users", which pretty much censors everythings, makes VPN use even more difficult, etc. They are pretty much using your own arguments: "misinformation on the internet is an actual problem, let's PROTECT our citizens from it". :)
So what? blame the implementation detail and people behind it then
It just shows that the argument stands, becaues it's an actual problem and I'd rather do not have to argue with my parents about Bill Gates creating covid to inject 5G chips
Some spending is "spent this or spend nothing". This isn't one of those cases, this is "spend on this now or spend other money later", because if you don't spend money on limiting how far-right extremists recruit young people, then eventually a bomb explodes somewhere.
Coping with that bomb isn't voluntary. There are proverbs something along the lines of "a penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure", they didn't become proverbs by lacking truth.
If there was less tax and people would have more money to spend, the "far rights" extremists would have less supporters and followers.
If the European institutions and national government would give a better use to the money, like improving citizen everyday life and issues or education, there would also be less "far rights" extremists.
And the funniest and worse point, is that a common complaint of some "far right" extremists is especially that European and international institutions are a waste of their money, and providing in exchange just limitations to what national governments can do. So, on that count also, better spending of our tax money would improve the situation more than this bullshit report.
These aren’t related facts by any terms. Cataloguing as far right young people criticizing the cultural establishment is just a sinister way to censor independent thought. That aside almost all terrorism belongs to far left extremists, even religious extremist believe they are far left.
The extreme left needs an enemy and tries to find evidence somewhere else, they behave like conservative on the 50s did.
What? This has no basis in reality. What religious extremists call themselves left? They are normally radical conservatives and eschew progressive "leftist" ideals.
The left made up with communism and matured, focusing instead on social justice. The right didn't do the same with nazism. When the white majority feels cornered by progressive ideals, white supremacy grows.
We just mourned the 10 year anniversary of the Utøja massacre where a radicalized nationalist killed at over 60 children. Their only crime was being socialists. Several phychologists had to work him until they realized he wasn't crazy. He just believed the far right conspiracies like cultural Marxism, eurabia and white genocide. This is not a game.
Islamic terrorists who want to push a caliphate want Arabic socialism like other African countries already enjoy nowadays with not much economical success or individual freedom. The same could you see in Spanish ETA who identified themselves as left wing “liberation” army that cost thousand of deaths and hundreds of thousands exiled. And I could continue for hours: even if exceptionally you may find right wing organizations, which do exist, these are not the majority.
And I could continue with the rest of things you said but I think refuting your main points is enough and I don’t want to speak more about politics. I made
Some observations which some people seem to not share. I don’t care about the negative vote mafia organized to promote topics and ideas on HN, it happens with everything, to promote blogs, programming languages, services, functional programming…
Some people like to think by themselves and make their own analysis of the situation rather than buy the influencer opinion du jour.
This report is the typical lobby crap we see every single day in Europe, and that happens on almost any topic, then it will be later used to make a headline on a news paper connected to a political party related to the ones who financed them. That’s how politics works on Brussels recently and how some ideas are pushed to the mass, and to be honest some people is just too tired of such constant manipulation, independently of the contents or it’s accuracy which is a topic I don’t want to discuss much (in spite of our initial encounter).
Easy, France for example contribute around 26 BILLIONS euros to European institutions.
It is a shitload of money in my opinion.
There are around 70 millions inhabitants in France, only around 18% of households pay income tax. But, in fact, only 10% of the households are contributing for around 70% of the income tax.
My estimation is that my personal contribution to Europe should be between 500 € to 2000 € a year.
Sure, not all money is wasted, hopefully, but still if you accumulate all bullshit jobs and reports like this one over a year, this is still a shit load of money that you be put in better usage.
Note: I don't say that all europe jobs and reports are bullshits, are the opposite, a lot of them are quite good, and most of the time of better usage and quality than european national governments in my opinion.
The other netto of the other link is not "justified", not official documents, but let's suppose it is correct, and that it evolved in proportion, we would be at least, as of today, at 11 Billions NET.
That is still quite a number.
But you don't stop repeating that it is not my money as a French tax payer, can you explicit what you mean? because so far you just say that "as a fact" and it does not make any sense!
Basic history classes should have made it clear that trying to censor sarcasm not only doesn't work, but is counter-productive. All regimes have tried various things to prevent them, but they just gave their opponents even more topics to make fun of. That dates back to drawings mocking the king being circulated in underground newspapers, to using "Non-Playable-Characters" online on Twitter.
Literally nobody is trying to, or has in any way suggested, "censoring sarcasm".
This is a document that describes, accurately, how the far right uses humour. That is a useful thing to document and be aware of when trying to combat radicalisation.
This is the first step: first you put in every policy maker head the idea that there is a problem and that they need to do something about it, then they find "solutions"...
Think about how "internet" and "social networks" become "evil" in policy maker heads.
Now, everything that is happening is the fault of internet. So, internet has to be censored.
I meant putting money into researching how does internet, internet communities, memes, social medias are used to manipulate, radicalize, create misinformation yada yada.
And this is very very dangerous for us, because you are not the only one like that, but a lot of policy maker push for these fake arguments as it is very convenient for them to support their policies.
There was an excellent article in HN that explains why you are wrong:
It's responsible research intended to give police, politicians, and citizens a clue about the new communication techniques of the hard-right.
> Thinking of far-right extremism, we might associate this with backward-looking, stiff and formal zealots who act on the fringes of the political spectrum. Yet, the skinhead image has long been overcome and, in fact, also more recent phenomena like the Identitarians have lost traction throughout Europe. As farright extremists strategically merge with online cultures, their approach changes drastically. In fact, they have learned the lesson that if — in our digitalised societies — a movement wants to be successful, it needs to be entertaining and participatory. In fact, a shared sense of humour has become an effective tool in terms of immersing individuals into extremist ideologies and, as a consequence, contributed to some of the worst acts of violence in the 21st century.
Having people become aware of these emerging memes BEFORE a flash mob of pepe-basement-dwellers shows up in their city is a good idea.
Talking about which, did those "conspiracy theories" (the alt-right killing a cop using fire-extinguisher in the capitol, or Trump being a KGB agent), falls in the category of "misinformation", or is the left somehow excluded from that list ?
Why is this downvoted? Both of the theories this post references were taken up by mainstream sources and both were totally fabrications. The claim about Brian Sicknick was vcompletely fabricated. If you downvoters are unaware, the story about someone dying on Jan 6th via fire extinguisher was a complete lie; the guy actually died of a stroke at home the next day for completely unrelated reasons and was unharmed at the riot.
And people like Maddow claimed for months if not years that Trump was a Russian agent, and we now know for a fact that this was never the case and the rumors were started by the FBI under direction of Obama (this was at the same time the Obama administration declined to charge Clinton, mind you) based on intel they knew was false, and because of the investigation launched based on justification from the same known-false evidence
God I'm so tired of explaining this, but seriously, the biggest conspiracy theories of the last decade were promulgated on the pages of "trustworthy" traditional media, and all you have to do is look into the news stories after they leave the headlines to find out how things turned out when time passed and reality finally came to light
It's downvoted because the issue at hand here is NOT "parity" between left and right conspiracy theories.
The issue at hand is that there's a problem with resurgent "alt-right" (or whatever you want to call them) extremist groups that have demonstrated a potential for violence as well as infiltration into trusted organizations like the police. They have taken up new aesthetics, symbologies and memes. It's important for people to recognize these new appearances and what they actually signify.
Violence has been coming from both alt-right and alt-left groups. There is a valid case for countering violent extremism in general, but focusing solely on one side of it is quite unproductive.
The "hard-right" is normally bored teenage boys that are trolling for laughs and don't actually believe any of this stuff.
There is a meme online currently that says "My political opinions are based on who I am trolling".
As for Pepe being a far-right meme. It never has been one. That was misinformation to stir up a moral panic and push for censorship.
The Pepe has also been used by Hong Kong protesters, (IIRC) the yellow vest protesters in france and loads of other pro-democracy freedom groups outside of the west.
I was specifically talking about the memers that are talked about in this document. I've spoken to a lot of the guys that post the memes in this article. They just do it to troll people.
I don't know about the other parties. But UKIP until recently wasn't associated with the far-right at all. I have family members that are were part of UKIP. So I've met a lot of members over the years and most are disillusioned Conservatives. I have no idea what the party is currently doing though.
The reason such parties are growing and gaining interest is because other more mainstream parties will constantly shy away from discussing thorny political issues.
I haven't seen it. Personally I've seen a lot of Pepe's that I've seen posted on Gaming discords was memes about things like bad habits, loneliness etc.
Saying it is part of "far-right" (which is the current boogie man) is frequently repeated, yet I never see any actual numbers regarding this. What I usually see is a screenshot of /pol or somewhere similar. It would be like going to /g and finding a meme of Richard Stallman.
> The "hard-right" is normally bored teenage boys that are trolling for laughs and don't actually believe any of this stuff.
Sure, for a while, until they find themselves in the middle of a crowd of short haired guys holding tiki torches, marching through town and shouting <you-know-what>.
"pepe the frog" showing up in weird contexts is part of "the joke". It's funny to them when people misinterpret pepe as something completely different.
I've heard these sort of arguments before. Pretending shitposting is some sort of gateway drug is a nonsense. They will find one person that might have been sucked in out of 1000s.
It's all just trolling, all just for the lulz, until you it's not any more. This is how radicalisation works. It starts as a joke, but it does not stay a joke.
This is super valuable for the audience it addresses. It’s well researched and easily understandable. This is money well spent. I wished everything that comes out of Europe would be so current.
Totally, counterculture nowadays does not belong to the far left anymore and after oppress popular culture with its ideas (else you are cancelled) now they are making a major effort trying to cancell oppositors from the institutions.
Given that the president of the EU commission and the largest coalition in the EU parliament are conservatives and that the EU is evidently not an extreme left institution, I don’t understand why they should care about the extreme left having lost whatever you think they lost.
Weren’t we speaking about the EU? Anyway, look at the statistics from your own country for example the imbalance between university professors between left and right and how that increased in the last 30 years, specially with the cancel culture (bullying or censorship)
> Totally, counterculture nowadays does not belong to the far left anymore and after oppress popular culture with its ideas (else you are cancelled) now they are making a major effort trying to cancell oppositors from the institutions.
Why do you think the European Union cares about counterculture belonging or not to the extreme left, given that the EU has, at least now, a conservative government and a conservative parliament? If they were cancelling anything, shouldn’t they be cancelling the extreme left?
On universities, I’m not sure I understand how this is related to the topic at hand nor why I should care, but I wouldn’t assume that what may be true for a few American colleges applies to all universities all over the world.
You seem to believe this document belong or represent anyhow any sort of European Institution but it does not, it is an independent lobby trying to influence.
Check the PDF, I think it is the second or third page next to the CC license they wrote that is clearly said the document does not belong or represent the European Union, it is an independent group who posted it there in order to present it.
UPDATE:
That’s a common lobby strategy in European countries, to post a report and then mislead public opinion meaning that an EU commission or work group somehow supports their ideals or initiatives. It is really common in all sorts of topics.
Yes it famously did. It would be naive to think the ruling elite of Europe today don’t fear the funny for the same reason
Edit after downvotes: would you downvoting not agree that the rulers of Europe today don’t fear such movements as the identitarians, white native ethno-nationalists, who are currently the counter culture among the young?
"This document has been prepared for the European Commission however it reflects the views only of the authors, and the European Commission is not liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this publication"
Then they shouldn't pretend to represent the European Comission or any of its logos. It's not fun anymore how the far left lobbies pretends to manipulate the public calling names everyone who happens to be at their right: everyone else.
> Then they shouldn't pretend to represent the European Comission
But they don't? Since, as you even cited, the first thing in the document after the title is a disclaimer that this does not represent the European Commission's view.
> [...] or any of its logos.
The Radicalisation Awareness Network is part of the European Commission, so any document produced by anyone there will have the European Commission logo on it.
Nothing in here is "far left". That is entirely your own prejudices that you brought to this discussion, and your own attempts to polarise a discussion that is about fairly objective facts.
The usage of sarcastic humor on the political field has a clear purpose: to disarm oppositors propaganda. And it is by far the most effective weapon against propaganda with no solid philosophical foundations.
And that's why the far left is so pissed off, after so many years of monopoly in the internet and having been infiltrated in all levels of culture, universities, media, actors, political lobbies, corporations, etc now they try to play the same cards conservatives from the 60s used in order to defend their acquired status.
But the world has changed and new young people now on what side is nowadays counterculture.
Yes, there is one mention of microaggressions in the paper
> Not only repeated exposure but also a lack of
resistance within the chan communities reinforces such microaggressions.
What is your comment supposed to mean? Is it mentioned too often/too little so the rest of the paper to loose legitimacy, or what is your point?
Since I've never heard the term before, I looked it up
> Microaggression is a term used for commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.
Seems highly relevant to a paper about extremists use of humor.
It's bullshit concept used as weapon by proponents of victimhood culture to bash anyone they deem "privileged". Don't you find peculiar that this "little aggression" can be unintentional? And of course deciding what are "hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes" depends solely on "offended" party.
Some examples of "microagressions": avoiding eye contact when speaking to someone, telling someone they are articulate, denying that you are racist, color (race) blindness, assuming someone's gender, asking a girl whether she has a boyfriend (she might be lesbian, you bigot), calling undocumented migrants illegals, saying that someone's name is difficult to pronounce, calling your boss crazy...
I really wish people publishing professional documents would spend a little more time on proper typography. It's not hard to avoid justified text for long runs of text (or use a proper typesetting engine like LaTeX), add a little leading, and use a more suitable font (even Microsoft Office has decent serifs available).
I haven't read the whole thing. However in the recommendations for action section of the document (page 13) isn't anything new in my opinion.
> Debunk the harmful content of extremist humour, but only once a certain tipping point has been
crossed
Debunking from "official" sources is already a meme online known as "Deboonking" and is heavily mocked already.
Also Debunking a meme is kinda pointless everyone knows that a meme is exaggerated and is supposed to be humourous. Social media platforms have been "fact checking" memes already. It is like fact checking a joke. It misses the point entirely.
> Quarantine extremist humour — and therefore extremist ideas. The first priority is to not amplify
messages that might harm broader communities or even directly benefit far-right campaigning.
So basically censorship.
The issue is that thorny issues aren't being discussed. Censorship will make things worse as it will make it "forbidden knowledge".
> Understand the motivations behind why people are sharing certain toxic content, in order to determine points of intervention.
Because even good faith discussions around thorny political topics are frequently conflated, obfuscated or censored by governments in Europe.
> Build up effective partnerships with social media influencers and progressive communities, which
have a strong influence on the views of their followers and supporters. Such alliances serve as much
more effective multipliers of their message than trying to inflate content on its own.
This is already the norm on social media.
> Civic education should also play a key role in terms of dispelling and confronting many of the myths that circulate within these online communities — and beyond.
This reads like propaganda. The worst thing you can do to people is propagandise them. If they find out the propaganda is false (and that typically happens sooner or later) they will resent you for it.
80 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadBecause when you pay for a report, you are asking a group of people for their opinion on the subject, so you can then read the report and get inform and maybe act. So by very definition it is indeed not their opinion, and not that ironic.
A certain green website wasn't always full of racism, this was done deliberately.
If you go back further Nick Broomfield did some documentaries in the 90s / early 00s where he went to various white supremacists, even then they were saying their plan was to go mainstream through various tactics, what happened on the green website fits almost exactly with this.
But be aware, this is maybe the first sign that "humor" will be the next victim of the "cancel culture" and the current trend in "free speech censorship"...
It affected shitton of people about covid/vacciness related stuff
It's one of the biggest challenges nowadays
So what? blame the implementation detail and people behind it then
It just shows that the argument stands, becaues it's an actual problem and I'd rather do not have to argue with my parents about Bill Gates creating covid to inject 5G chips
and no, it's no joke and it's sad.
Coping with that bomb isn't voluntary. There are proverbs something along the lines of "a penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure", they didn't become proverbs by lacking truth.
If there was less tax and people would have more money to spend, the "far rights" extremists would have less supporters and followers.
If the European institutions and national government would give a better use to the money, like improving citizen everyday life and issues or education, there would also be less "far rights" extremists.
And the funniest and worse point, is that a common complaint of some "far right" extremists is especially that European and international institutions are a waste of their money, and providing in exchange just limitations to what national governments can do. So, on that count also, better spending of our tax money would improve the situation more than this bullshit report.
The extreme left needs an enemy and tries to find evidence somewhere else, they behave like conservative on the 50s did.
The left made up with communism and matured, focusing instead on social justice. The right didn't do the same with nazism. When the white majority feels cornered by progressive ideals, white supremacy grows.
We just mourned the 10 year anniversary of the Utøja massacre where a radicalized nationalist killed at over 60 children. Their only crime was being socialists. Several phychologists had to work him until they realized he wasn't crazy. He just believed the far right conspiracies like cultural Marxism, eurabia and white genocide. This is not a game.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-u...
Islamic terrorists who want to push a caliphate want Arabic socialism like other African countries already enjoy nowadays with not much economical success or individual freedom. The same could you see in Spanish ETA who identified themselves as left wing “liberation” army that cost thousand of deaths and hundreds of thousands exiled. And I could continue for hours: even if exceptionally you may find right wing organizations, which do exist, these are not the majority.
And I could continue with the rest of things you said but I think refuting your main points is enough and I don’t want to speak more about politics. I made Some observations which some people seem to not share. I don’t care about the negative vote mafia organized to promote topics and ideas on HN, it happens with everything, to promote blogs, programming languages, services, functional programming…
Some people like to think by themselves and make their own analysis of the situation rather than buy the influencer opinion du jour.
This report is the typical lobby crap we see every single day in Europe, and that happens on almost any topic, then it will be later used to make a headline on a news paper connected to a political party related to the ones who financed them. That’s how politics works on Brussels recently and how some ideas are pushed to the mass, and to be honest some people is just too tired of such constant manipulation, independently of the contents or it’s accuracy which is a topic I don’t want to discuss much (in spite of our initial encounter).
I hope I made my point clear.
It is a shitload of money in my opinion.
There are around 70 millions inhabitants in France, only around 18% of households pay income tax. But, in fact, only 10% of the households are contributing for around 70% of the income tax.
And this 26 Billion, is this 'netto' or 'bruto' ?
(in 2019) https://www.statista.com/statistics/316691/eu-budget-contrib...
(in 2017) https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
My estimation is that my personal contribution to Europe should be between 500 € to 2000 € a year.
Sure, not all money is wasted, hopefully, but still if you accumulate all bullshit jobs and reports like this one over a year, this is still a shit load of money that you be put in better usage.
Note: I don't say that all europe jobs and reports are bullshits, are the opposite, a lot of them are quite good, and most of the time of better usage and quality than european national governments in my opinion.
France 'contributed' ~ € 7.5 Billon netto to the EU.
Which is something totally different than € 26 Billion. And it still isn't your money.
Here is a link in French, but at least you will have an evolution graph with 2021:
https://www.ifrap.org/europe-et-international/contribution-d...
The other netto of the other link is not "justified", not official documents, but let's suppose it is correct, and that it evolved in proportion, we would be at least, as of today, at 11 Billions NET.
That is still quite a number.
But you don't stop repeating that it is not my money as a French tax payer, can you explicit what you mean? because so far you just say that "as a fact" and it does not make any sense!
memes have strong power, especially if you can vote them to the front page
there has been shitton of them before 2016 election and during Pandemic they were used for both - good and bad.
From looking cost efficency perspective memes are insanely good.
edit Trump -> 2016
This is a document that describes, accurately, how the far right uses humour. That is a useful thing to document and be aware of when trying to combat radicalisation.
Think about how "internet" and "social networks" become "evil" in policy maker heads.
Now, everything that is happening is the fault of internet. So, internet has to be censored.
As said in other comments, the guys are trying to create "a case" from simple and innocent trolling.
We have seen that a lot before:
- Persons become violent because they played violent video games in their childhood: The proof? Some mass murders played video games.
- Messengers/chat are the root cause of terrorism: the proof? Some terrorists used SMS and email to discuss.
Are you willfully or unwilfully ignorant? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
* "innocent" trolling like 5G/Covid/magical cures conspiracy theories that literally cost lives ?
* "innocent" trolling like what resulted in people getting together to try and overturn the latest US presidential elections ?
* "innocent" trolling like what helped drive the point for Brexit ?
It's hard to draw a line between a shithead teenager memeing and an astroturfing or at least organised campaign that brings together terrible things.
Is that innocent trolling as well: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/17/covid-misinfor... ?
And this is very very dangerous for us, because you are not the only one like that, but a lot of policy maker push for these fake arguments as it is very convenient for them to support their policies.
There was an excellent article in HN that explains why you are wrong:
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/disinformation-its-histo...
(Discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27923933 )
You're falling for the pretext that it's all just a joke. And it is, for a while. And then it's not any more.
And people like Maddow claimed for months if not years that Trump was a Russian agent, and we now know for a fact that this was never the case and the rumors were started by the FBI under direction of Obama (this was at the same time the Obama administration declined to charge Clinton, mind you) based on intel they knew was false, and because of the investigation launched based on justification from the same known-false evidence
God I'm so tired of explaining this, but seriously, the biggest conspiracy theories of the last decade were promulgated on the pages of "trustworthy" traditional media, and all you have to do is look into the news stories after they leave the headlines to find out how things turned out when time passed and reality finally came to light
The issue at hand is that there's a problem with resurgent "alt-right" (or whatever you want to call them) extremist groups that have demonstrated a potential for violence as well as infiltration into trusted organizations like the police. They have taken up new aesthetics, symbologies and memes. It's important for people to recognize these new appearances and what they actually signify.
Source?
There is a meme online currently that says "My political opinions are based on who I am trolling".
As for Pepe being a far-right meme. It never has been one. That was misinformation to stir up a moral panic and push for censorship.
The Pepe has also been used by Hong Kong protesters, (IIRC) the yellow vest protesters in france and loads of other pro-democracy freedom groups outside of the west.
e.g.
https://www.ynetnews.com/PicServer5/2019/10/03/9521875/95218...
You should tell the actual hard right parties like RN, AfD, UKIP and co. that
I don't know about the other parties. But UKIP until recently wasn't associated with the far-right at all. I have family members that are were part of UKIP. So I've met a lot of members over the years and most are disillusioned Conservatives. I have no idea what the party is currently doing though.
The reason such parties are growing and gaining interest is because other more mainstream parties will constantly shy away from discussing thorny political issues.
Feels Good Man is exactly about this. ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11394182/ )
It wasn't originally, but you're kidding yourself if you think that it hasn't become one
Sure, for a while, until they find themselves in the middle of a crowd of short haired guys holding tiki torches, marching through town and shouting <you-know-what>.
"pepe the frog" showing up in weird contexts is part of "the joke". It's funny to them when people misinterpret pepe as something completely different.
Same as extreme conservatives did on the 60s.
> Totally, counterculture nowadays does not belong to the far left anymore and after oppress popular culture with its ideas (else you are cancelled) now they are making a major effort trying to cancell oppositors from the institutions.
Why do you think the European Union cares about counterculture belonging or not to the extreme left, given that the EU has, at least now, a conservative government and a conservative parliament? If they were cancelling anything, shouldn’t they be cancelling the extreme left?
On universities, I’m not sure I understand how this is related to the topic at hand nor why I should care, but I wouldn’t assume that what may be true for a few American colleges applies to all universities all over the world.
Check the PDF, I think it is the second or third page next to the CC license they wrote that is clearly said the document does not belong or represent the European Union, it is an independent group who posted it there in order to present it.
UPDATE: That’s a common lobby strategy in European countries, to post a report and then mislead public opinion meaning that an EU commission or work group somehow supports their ideals or initiatives. It is really common in all sorts of topics.
Edit after downvotes: would you downvoting not agree that the rulers of Europe today don’t fear such movements as the identitarians, white native ethno-nationalists, who are currently the counter culture among the young?
Then they shouldn't pretend to represent the European Comission or any of its logos. It's not fun anymore how the far left lobbies pretends to manipulate the public calling names everyone who happens to be at their right: everyone else.
But they don't? Since, as you even cited, the first thing in the document after the title is a disclaimer that this does not represent the European Commission's view.
> [...] or any of its logos.
The Radicalisation Awareness Network is part of the European Commission, so any document produced by anyone there will have the European Commission logo on it.
And that's why the far left is so pissed off, after so many years of monopoly in the internet and having been infiltrated in all levels of culture, universities, media, actors, political lobbies, corporations, etc now they try to play the same cards conservatives from the 60s used in order to defend their acquired status.
But the world has changed and new young people now on what side is nowadays counterculture.
So...it's that kind of paper.
> Not only repeated exposure but also a lack of resistance within the chan communities reinforces such microaggressions.
What is your comment supposed to mean? Is it mentioned too often/too little so the rest of the paper to loose legitimacy, or what is your point?
Since I've never heard the term before, I looked it up
> Microaggression is a term used for commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.
Seems highly relevant to a paper about extremists use of humor.
Some examples of "microagressions": avoiding eye contact when speaking to someone, telling someone they are articulate, denying that you are racist, color (race) blindness, assuming someone's gender, asking a girl whether she has a boyfriend (she might be lesbian, you bigot), calling undocumented migrants illegals, saying that someone's name is difficult to pronounce, calling your boss crazy...
> Debunk the harmful content of extremist humour, but only once a certain tipping point has been crossed
Debunking from "official" sources is already a meme online known as "Deboonking" and is heavily mocked already.
Also Debunking a meme is kinda pointless everyone knows that a meme is exaggerated and is supposed to be humourous. Social media platforms have been "fact checking" memes already. It is like fact checking a joke. It misses the point entirely.
> Quarantine extremist humour — and therefore extremist ideas. The first priority is to not amplify messages that might harm broader communities or even directly benefit far-right campaigning.
So basically censorship.
The issue is that thorny issues aren't being discussed. Censorship will make things worse as it will make it "forbidden knowledge".
> Understand the motivations behind why people are sharing certain toxic content, in order to determine points of intervention.
Because even good faith discussions around thorny political topics are frequently conflated, obfuscated or censored by governments in Europe.
> Build up effective partnerships with social media influencers and progressive communities, which have a strong influence on the views of their followers and supporters. Such alliances serve as much more effective multipliers of their message than trying to inflate content on its own.
This is already the norm on social media.
> Civic education should also play a key role in terms of dispelling and confronting many of the myths that circulate within these online communities — and beyond.
This reads like propaganda. The worst thing you can do to people is propagandise them. If they find out the propaganda is false (and that typically happens sooner or later) they will resent you for it.