What is ... Rage Sharing?

It's been known for a long time that headlines are the most important part of a news story.

Even in the time before social media it was obvious that far more people would see the newspaper headlines (on newsagent shelves, or on newspaper reviews on the TV, or on the canteen table, or on the next week's chip wrappers) than would ever actually read the contents of the article.

But since the advent of social media, headlines have become even more important because there are loads of people out there who will share articles without even bothering to read them first (especially via Twitter retweets), and other people who are so fact-averse that they'll form extreme political judgements based on the headline of the article that they've clearly not even bothered to read.

Some of the most mega-viral articles of 2018 have been astoundingly misleading anti-Corbyn headlines that are completely contradicted within the body of the article, but literally tens of thousands of people became so outraged by the deceptive headlines that they shared without even bothering to read the article and check that the headline is justified.

This behaviour is "rage sharing", and mainstream media publications are cashing in on it big time with absolute torrents of shares and clicks (the currency of online journalism).

Apéritif: Aren't biffers gullible?

I'll come to the two desperately misleading anti-Corbyn headlines later, but just to illustrate that rage sharing articles without reading them is not a new phenomenon, just consider the fact that in 2014 the extreme-right hate group Britain First shared a spoof story about the Essex villages of High Easter and Good Easter being forced to change their names by pesky Muslims and lefties.

Hundreds of Biffers rage shared the article and spewed bigoted badly-spelled diatribes in the comments without even bothering to read the article and clocking that it was a ridiculously obvious spoof which included quotes from people like "Dr Touchi" from the prestigious "University of South Thurrock"!

Independent: Corbyn the immigrant-hater

June 2018 saw a truly egregious examples of rage sharing with over 31,000 people sharing a grotesquely misleading headline in the (supposedly left-liberal) Independent that brazenly cherry picked highly selective quotations from a Jeremy Corbyn speech about trade policy to portray him as some kind of bonkers hard-right anti-immigrant Brextremist.

This outrageously deceptive headline struck a chord with the self-declared "centrists" (orthodox neoliberals to give them a more accurate description) and the ever-reactionary #FBPE Twitter echo chamber.

It was absolutely clear that very few of the people rage sharing the article were actually reading it, otherwise they couldn't have failed to spot the brazenly dishonest selective quotation tactics, or the fact that Corbyn's trade policy speech was actually pretty good.

Guardian: Corbyn the militant Brextremist

In December 2018 The Guardian jumped onto the rage share bandwagon with a brazenly deceptive anti-Corbyn headline of their own that was so widely shared by "centrists" and the #FBPE echo chamber it almost broke Twitter with a mind-boggling 88,000+ shares (at the time of writing).

Literally thousands of people reacted in absolute "never voting Labour again" fury to the headline "Corbyn: Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election" without a single one of them picking up on the crucial facts that:

1. The words "Brexit would go ahead" were plucked out of thin air by Guardian hacks and placed next to Corbyn's name in the headline (amazingly he's not actually quoted saying this anywhere in the article).

2. What Corbyn actually said was common sense. If he won a snap election he'd go to the EU and establish basic stuff like whether they'd consider renegotiation, and whether they'd extend the Article 50 deadline. Anyone who thinks that upon becoming Prime Minister he shouldn't attempt to establish the EU's position on the drastically changed political circumstances as a matter of urgency is quite frankly out of their god-damned tree.

3. If you've got the patience to read all the way down to paragraph 18 of the article you even find Corbyn expressing his view that if there's another EU referendum then Labour's policy would be decided democratically by its members (meaning Labour would back Remain whatever Corbyn's personal beliefs!). Surely an article saying "Corbyn keeps second referendum option on the table" would make a less misleading headline than a phrase Corbyn didn't even use designed to make it seem like he's arbitrarily ruling out a second referendum entirely?

Profit and propaganda

It's absolutely clear that the corporate media are learning that there's a significant market in anti-Corbyn rage share articles with headlines that bear little to no relation to what Corbyn actually said.

In fact the liberal mainstream media and the anti-Corbyn mob seem to be developing a kind of symbiosis.

Outlets like the Guardian and the Independent benefit from absolute torrents of shares and clicks when they use deceptive anti-Corbyn headlines, and the #FBPE echo chamber, Labour right-wingers, and other Corbyn detractors get the instantly shareable anti-Corbyn headlines they constantly crave.

Stuck in the middle

The big loser in the scenario (aside from Corbyn and the Labour Party of course) is the standard of political discourse that is now not only polluted by the lying Brextremists and the absurd unicornist fantasies they've fostered amongst their herd of followers, but also by equally extreme people on the Remain side who have no qualms whatever about sharing desperately misleading headlines, or even just outright lying, if they feel that doing so serves their political purposes.

They're either such gullible dupes that they mindlessly rage share articles without even reading them to check that the headline is justifiable, or they know perfectly well that the headline is deceptive but they share it anyway because they consider their political agenda to be far more important than stuff like truth, honesty, and integrity.

Either way their attitudes are just as bad as the Brextremists who got us in this mess in the first place.

How is rage sharing a deceptively titled article without even bothering to read it first any better than believing a lie on the side of a bus? And if they do know that the headline is deceptive but they're sharing it anyway, how is that any better than actually writing a lie on the side of a bus?

Who needs bots?

We're all aware of social media bots by now. Whether it's dodgy Russian bot farms spreading divisive propaganda, pro-Israeli astroturfing operations, or the bot nets that the Brexiteers ran during the 2016 EU referendum.

But who actually needs bots to spread their propaganda when it seems incredibly simple to just trick a vast army of unthinking, uncritical real life human drones into rage sharing your political propaganda for you?

There's a massive propaganda war going on, and the footsoldiers are an enormous army of absolute dupes who are so intellectually lazy they don't even bother to read the articles they share or think about things for themselves.

Rage sharing is here to stay

Had the Guardian chosen a reasonably fair interpretation of Jeremy Corbyn's position as their headline rather than deliberately seeking to portray his stance as negatively as possible (as some kind of rigidly inflexible Brextremist absolutist) they know for a fact they wouldn't have triggered such a tsunami of rage shares.

As far as they're concerned, if blatantly deceptive headlines create enormous torrents of shares and clicks, then sod journalistic standards and sod what remains of the Guardian's dwindling reputation, let's cash in on the rage shares and grab as much advertising cash as possible as the torrent of hits floods in.

If tens of thousands of people are going to send your article mega-viral by rage sharing it simply because the misleading headline confirms their political biases, and nobody is ever going to hold you or them to account for spreading such a vast barrage of deceitful and deceptive propaganda, then why wouldn't other unscrupulous mainstream media hacks make use of exactly the same tactics?

What is ...? is an occasional Another Angry Voice series. See the other articles here.

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Why are the mainstream media not talking about how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised?

A fanatical extreme-right hate preacher has been jailed for two years after numerous disgusting anti-Muslim rants and a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn.

Jonathan Jennings was jailed by Swansea crown court for his social media postings, and for lobbing a brick at a local police station after he was warned to stop posting vile abuse and threats.

Here are some of the things that Jennings wrote:

• Called for Muslims to be sterilised

• Claimed Adolf Hitler was "born 100 years too soon"

• Promoted the idea of a "bomb a mosque day"

• Threatened to "Jo Cox" Jeremy Corbyn if he ever becomes Prime Minister

• Said that Muslims should be gassed

• Praised a racist thug who kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach as a "national hero"

• Changed his Twitter handle to "Muslim Slayer"

• Called for Gina Miller to be executed as a traitor

• Called for JK Rowling to be hanged

• Called for Muslims to be burned on bonfires

One of the most interesting and important aspects of this case is one that has received no mainstream media coverage whatever is the question of how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised.

This is an important question because we already know that the Britain First hate chamber helped to radicalise at least two murderous extreme-right terrorists, and we also know that the Finsbury Park killer had Tommy Robinson quotes in the hire van he used as his murder weapon.
So who was Jennings radicalised by?

It's actually spectacularly easy to see who Jennings was radicalised by given his (bold/reckless/stupid) decision to not wipe down his social media accounts once it was clear he was facing prosecution for his online ranting.

So it's no surprise whatever to find that Jennings is a Tommy Robinson acolyte, as well as being a Facebook follower of several other extreme-right agitators like Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yianopolous, Sargon of Akkad, Mike Cernovich, and Count Dankula.

It's hardly surprising that Jennings follows the Muslim-fearmongering Leave.EU campaign, other Brexity Facebook pages like "Leave Means Leave", and "Get Britain OUT of the EU" and two vitriolic anti-Labour pages too.

The only currently elected politicians that Jennings follows on Facebook are Donald Trump and the Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Just think about it. If a Jeremy Corbyn following leftist had been jailed for issuing an online threat to kill Jacob Rees-Mogg, do you think the mainstream media would have completely ignored that angle?

Even forgetting the threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn, if this vile anti-Muslim anti-Semitic ranter had been following Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook page rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg's, do you really honestly think the mainstream media would have failed to mention it at all in their report on his sentencing?

Given that his Facebook likes are clear for everyone to see, it's not even remotely difficult to find out who this guy was radicalised by. Yet the mainstream media have absolutely failed to cover it for some reason.

Of course reactive defenders of the extreme-right will try to argue that not all Tommy Robinson followers end up spewing vitriolic bigotry, issuing social media death threats, and/or carrying out acts of extreme-right terrorism, but the evidence is absolutely clear now that a percentage of them do.

If the online agitators who inspire disgusting tirades of bigoted abuse and online threats to kill (Jonathan Jennings), and actual terrorist atrocities (like Darren Osborne) had been Salafi Islamist hate preachers rather than extreme-right fanatics, then there's absolutely no way they would be given platforms to spew their hate and conspiracy theories on the BBC in the way Tommy Robinson was on the very day that one of his followers was jailed for carrying out a deadly terrorist atrocity.

In the end part of the blame for this rise in violent and abusive extreme-right fanaticism must be apportioned to the social media platforms that host these extreme-right hate preachers, and another part of the blame falls squarely on the mainstream media outlets like the BBC that actively help to boost their profiles, and inject their extremist politics into mainstream political discourse.

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Don't fall for extreme-right "freedom of speech" victimhood narratives

The extreme-right are once again programming their followers to wallow in victimhood narratives over the wild conspiracy-monger Alex Jones getting his InfoWars channel thrown off multiple free-to-use online media platforms for breaching their conditions of use.

Before InfoWars they were wailing persecution about the extreme-right gay-paedophilia advocate Milo getting thrown off Twitter for his abusive behaviour.

Before that they cried victimhood over the vile terrorism-promoting money-scamming Britain First hate chamber eventually getting chucked off Facebook for hosting an absolute festival of hate that made a total mockery of their community standards.

The extreme-right wail and cry as if being pushed off free-to-use online platforms is the modern equivalent of Nazi book burning, which it obviously isn't.

Back in the days before the Internet you couldn't just go around demanding that people print your book for free, and that they continue printing your books indefinitely, no matter how horrific the things you write in them.

Back in the days before the Internet you couldn't go around demanding that your local newspaper print every single crackpot hate-mongering letter you sent them about your ridiculous conspiracy theories either.

Of course nobody could stop you from writing your own book and submitting it to publishers, or sending batshit letters to your local paper, but when they rejected your manuscript or refused to print your letters, they weren't denying you free speech, they were protecting their own right to publish what they saw fit to.

That misattributed Voltaire quote says "I wholly disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it". 

It doesn't say "I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to demand other people continue publishing your views forever, free of charge".

Nobody is saying that Alex Jones, and Milo, and the Britain First hate mob can't continue spewing their venom elsewhere, they're just saying they can't take advantage of their free-to-use services to do it.

It's simply laughable to imagine that online media companies have some "free speech" obligation to provide a free platform to anyone, to say whatever they like, no matter how extreme, how defamatory, how dishonest, how dangerous, or how threatening to the very financial viability of the online media company itself.

Nobody reads the terms and conditions when they sign up as users of online media sites. Nobody carefully reads their "important updates" either. But if you actually do, you'll find that you've entered into a contract with them, and that they reserve the right to deny you access to their free services if they feel they are being misused.

Interestingly the traditional right-wing narratives have been completely reversed in regard to contracts to acommodate these "free speech" victimhood narratives.

It used to be that the political right would defend the sanctity of contractual agreements above absolutely anything else, including fundamental human welfare. But now we've got right-wingers bitterly railing against the contracts they voluntarily signed up to because they don't like the conditions!

Some might argue that Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple hoofing Alex Jones' conspiracy rambling off their free platforms is the thin edge of the wedge, and while I'm naturally sympathetic to this argument (as someone who relies heavily on social media to spread awareness of my work) it's simply incorrect.

I have absolutely no intention of ever posting malicious and defamatory diatribes, incitements to violence, grotesque conspiracy theories about the parents of murdered school children being 'fake crisis actors', calls for ethnic genocide, or hateful abuse - so I'm fairly confident they won't be coming after me with an outright ban.

What I'm afraid of is much more subtle: Tweaks to the algorithms (possibly as a result of government pressure) to dramatically curtail the reach of independent media sites.

One hopes that they wouldn't bend to such pressure, but knowledge of social media companies' history of collusion with spy agencies (as revealed by the Snowden leaks), and the staggering sums of money pumped into targeted ad campaigns by political parties that have never been keen on having their malice, corruption and incompetence uncovered by renegade independent journalists, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility entirely.

The real threat to freedom of speech isn't the upfront high-profile de-platforming of depraved extreme-right conspiracy-mongers for their outright contempt towards the terms of service contracts they all willingly signed up to.

The real threat is that independent sources of information are simply tuned out by the algorithms, with few people ever even noticing that independent non-conformist anti-establishment pages are disappearing from their social media feeds.

If they wanted to crack down on the true rebels (those who use facts, evidence and logic to build their cases rather than rhetoric, conspiracies, and abuse) then why would they use a sledgehammer, when they've got much simpler and subtler means at their disposal to crack nuts?

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The Tory thieves are expecting praise and plaudits for returning stolen goods (but only after they got caught)

In 2014 Theresa May introduced her vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation with only limited opposition from 18 honourable MPs.

Since then this hard-right Tory legislation has been used to deny employment, deny housing, deny social security and pensions, deny NHS care, and deny the right of return to Britain to Windrush Brits who came to help rebuild Britain after the Second World War.

For years the Tories ignored all the concerns, and as the full scale of the horrors she had unleashed started to become clearer, Theresa May actually tried to ignore and stonewall Commonwealth leaders who wanted to discuss the issue with her.

Eventually the Tories relented, Theresa May went to the meeting and they issued grudging apologies for their grotesque treatment of the Windrush Generation, but even now they're still getting it completely wrong.

The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced that Windrush Brits will be "offered British citizenship". 

The problem of course is that Windrush Brits are already British citizens, just British citizens without the paperwork to prove it.

By offering back what they've spent four years trying to forcibly take away from Windrush Brits, the Tories are acting like a pack of thieves expecting praise and plaudits for returning stolen goods, but only after they got caught red handed.

In any sane society the calls for Theresa May and Amber Rudd to resign over this disgraceful scandal would be deafening, but they're being allowed to get away with it because the bulk of the mainstream media are absolutely focused on attacking and undermining Jeremy Corbyn (one of the 18 honourable MPs who voted against Theresa May's anti-immigrant legislation that created the Windrus scandal).

The mainstream media political pundit class know that a Theresa May resignation would plunge the Tory party into chaos, with the Britain First and UKIP backed hard-right Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg as one of the favourites, and a pro-EU candidate likely to step forward too, which would reignite the Tory civil war that has been brewing over Europe for decades. 

So the mainstream media pundit class just refuse to call for it. Not because they can't see that Theresa May is as guilty as sin, but because they fear the political consequences of not allowing her to go unpunished for the barbarity she unleashed.

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Look which way the praise is going

Nick Griffin is the forgotten man of extreme-right politics. Not only was he deposed as the leader of the BNP, that whole party has now completely collapsed into oblivion after UKIP nicked all their support. But despite the UK political landscape being better off without him, mainstream media hacks have suddenly propelled him back in the limelight after he said he supports Jeremy Corbyn's opposition to airstrikes in Syria.

Interestingly just the day before Griffin's comments, it was revealed that actual members of the Tory party youth organisation Activate had been praising the likes of Britain first and the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, and plotting to use their divisive hate-mongering tactics to win votes for the Tory party.

Any idiot can see that in the case of Activate the praise was coming from inside the Tory party, and being given to disgusting neo-fascist hatemongers who have inspired at least two deadly extreme-right terrorist attacks, and that Nick Griffin's praise was coming from outside the Labour Party.

But somehow one of these things was splashed all over the mainstream news, and the other was only covered on a couple of independent left-wing blogs.

Aside from the fact that it's grotesque for mainstream media hacks to resurrect Nick Griffin from the politically dead solely for the purpose of smearing Labour, there's a massive hypocrisy at play here.

The mainstream media are absolutely fine with actual Tory members praising extreme-right hatemongers, and plotting to use their disgusting tactics in their own Tory propaganda operation. In fact they're so absolutely fine with it that not a single mainstream news organisation even covered this remarkable story.

On the other hand this unwanted praise from the forgotten man of extreme-right politics was exactly the kind of stuff anti-Labour hacks in the mainstream press needed to push their transparent anti-Corbyn propaganda.

If we look at mainstream political parties attracting support from the extreme-right, then who could forget the Britain First leader threatening to attack and intimidate anyone who dares criticise the Tory Brextremist in chief Jacob Rees Mogg?

The mainstream media absolutely refused to cover this story because it didn't fit with their anti-Corbyn agenda, and no pressure was put on Rees-Mogg to condemn Britain First and refuse their offer to serve as his personal storm troopers.

Then there's the fact that the Tories nicked the BNP's propaganda tactics wholesale for their own use in the 2016 London Mayoral election.

Then there's the fact that the Tories had to bribe the sectarian bigots in the DUP with £1 billion in taxpayers' money to cling onto political power after Theresa May threw their parliamentary majority away in her vanity election.

Then there's the fact that the Tory party is absolutely dependent on retaining the support of the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic in order to cling to power. 

Any idiot can see that the Tories have shifted off into the bonkers extreme-right territory, and that any effort by them to move slightly back towards the centre-right territory would drive away the blue-kip demographic and collapse their vote.

Not only do the Tories actively praise the extreme-right and blatantly pinch their propaganda tactics, they know perfectly well that without the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic they nicked from UKIP (who previously pinched it from the BNP) then they're going to get trounced at the next general Election.

Whether the praise is flowing from the Tory party to the extreme-right, or from the extreme-right to the Tory party, the mainstream media ignore it because this growing co-dependency between the Tories and the extreme-right doesn't suit their anti-Corbyn agenda.

Nobody in Labour has ever praised the extreme right or considered using their vile, divisive hate-mongering tactics to promote Labour, but the one time a (near forgotten) fascist agrees with one of Labour's policies, suddenly the press are absolutely up in arms about it.

The reason is absolutely obvious. They desperately want to drive progressive people away from Labour by associating them with right-wing extremism, while they simultaneously give the Tories a total free ride on their ever growing dependency on the extreme-right.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Sajid Javid just baselessly called hundreds of Jewish Labour Party members "neo-fascists"

The Tory government minister Sajid Javid has just stood up in parliament and accused the Labour activist group Momentum of being "neo-fascists". 

Aside from the fact that it's the political left who have always stood in solidarity with the Jewish people to fight against actual fascists from the political right (as at Cable Street where they beat the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, when they beat back the rise of the National Front in Lewisham in the '70s, and the regular criticism of modern neo-Fascist hate groups like Britain First from the political left), there's also the well-known fact that the leader of Momentum is a Jewish guy called Jon Lansman.

Now if we know anything at all about anti-Semitism then surely we know that it's deeply anti-Semitic to baselessly resort to calling Jewish people Nazis just because you disagree with their political views.

So where is the tide of outrage about this hard-right government minister deliberately and offensively tarring hundreds of peaceful anti-fascist left-leaning Jewish people with the vile ideology that resulted in the mass genocide against their ancestors?

Aside from the blatantly anti-Semitic nature of his revolting smear-tactics, there's another thing to realise about Sajid Javid:

When Zac Goldsmith and the Tories used vile extreme-right propaganda tactics copied straight out of the BNP playbook to attack Sadiq Khan during the London Mayoral election in 2016, guess who remained absolutely silent on these disgusting tactics?

Then there was the blind eye that Javid turned when the actual fascist Britain First leader Paul Golding recently threatened to violently intimidate anyone who dares to oppose or criticise right-wing politicians like Rees-Mogg.

Then there's the fact that Javid refused to criticise his fellow Tory MP Bob Blackman after he shared extreme-right Islamophobic propaganda on his Facebook page just a few days before he hid behind parliamentary privilege to shout his offensive slurs at Jewish Momentum members.

When his own political party used neo-fascist tactics copied straight from the BNP, Sajid Javid remained silent; when the Britain First neo-Nazi thugs threatened to act as a violent enforcement militia for the Tories, Sajid Javid remained silent; when his fellow Tory MP shared disgusting fascist propaganda on Facebook, Sajid Javid remained silent.

And then after all of that silence he resorts to full bore anti-Semitism by slurring every single Jewish member of Momentum as neo-Nazis.

Will Theresa May do anything to discipline her own government minister for debasing parliament by resorting to anti-Semitic smear-mongering? Doubtful

Will the Tories like Brandon Lewis who was promoting his "respect pledges" on social media just a few weeks ago call his fellow Tory out on his hyperbolic and offensive slurs? Doubtful

Will the mainstream media call Sajid Javid out for baselessly smearing hundreds of Jewish Labour Party members as Nazis just days after the whole anti-Semitism furore? Doubtful

Just like Javid's own personal attitude to Zac Goldsmith's disgusting use of neo-Nazi propaganda tactics, his fellow Tories will doubtless turn a blind eye and refuse to hold their own to account.

And given the blind eye the mainstream media have turned to half a dozen other bigotry and bullying scandals within the Tory ranks this week, few would expect mainstream journalists to call him out either.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Facebook have finally banned the Britain First hate mob

It's taken them years to do it, but Facebook have finally acted to close down the Facebook page of the Britain First hate mob.

Of course the alt-right and neo-fascist political commentators will howl that it's unfair and that their fellow extreme-right fanatics are being "censored for their political views", but the reality is much simpler. The Britain First page has been shut down because they repeatedly and egregiously defied Facebook's community standards.

Aside from inciting hatred towards Muslims and immigrants, they also spread outright lies and shockingly ignorant misrepresentations, desecrated the poppy symbol, promoted misogyny and anti-intellectualism, attacked the minimum wage and low income workers, scammed money out of vulnerable people, routinely censored all criticism to create an extreme-right echo chamber, and encouraged a lawless lynch mob mentality.

Then there were the comments: The outpourings of undiluted glee at acts of genocide against Muslim refugees, the celebration of right-wing terrorist atrocities, and even plots to raise a slush fund to incite more people into carrying out acts of right-wing terrorism.

And then there's the fact that Britain First's leaders Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding have been jailed for harassing and defaming innocent people, including shouting abuse through the letterbox of a pregnant woman who had a miscarriage in the following days.

And then there's the fact that two extreme-right terrorists have been radicalised by Britain First:

The extreme-right fanatic who murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 was yelling "Britain First" as he did it, and was photographed at a Britain First Northern Brigade event earlier that year.

And the extreme-right terrorist who carried out the deadly Finsbury Park attack was also radicalised by Britain First in the days before he plotted to kill Jeremy Corbyn, then drove a hire van into a crowd of Muslim pedestrians.

The surprising thing isn't that Facebook have banned this vile terrorist-inspiring extreme-right hate group from their site, it's that it's taken them so damned long to do it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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