White Nationalists Are ‘Highly Engaged’ With GOP On Twitter

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar said:
If you are Republican it's up to you to close the door on these morons. Being an apologist for them is not going to help.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/28/1785301/right-wing-social-media-gop/?mobile=nc


Report: Right-Wing Extremists Are ‘Highly Engaged’ With GOP On Twitter
By Hayes Brown on Mar 28, 2013 at 1:15 pm

A new report out Thursday finds that right-wing extremists on Twitter are “highly engaged” with the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party and highlights the role the GOP has to play in countering their more violent fans.

The report — titled “Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, Evaluating Content and Countering Violent Extremism in Online Social Networks” — originally sought to examine the way that extremists use social media to interact among themselves, in this instance focusing on white nationalists’ use of Twitter. But throughout their investigation, the study’s authors, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation associate fellow J.M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, inadvertently discovered something interesting.

They began with 12 “seed” Twitter accounts for their unambiguous status as white nationalists. The authors then created a dataset of 3,542 Twitter users who interacted with those 12 seed accounts, of which 44 percent self-identified as white nationalists. After analyzing the interactions between the 3,542 users and the 12 seed accounts, the authors identified the 200 top-scoring accounts, of which 83 percent self-identified as white nationalists (for the top 400, the self-ID rate was 74 percent).

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.

The authors of the study determined that the usage seemed to be “driven more by white nationalists feeling an affinity for conservatism than by conservatives feeling an affinity for white nationalism.” They were also quick to note that the data were pulled during a period of time surrounding the Republican National Convention, potentially providing a boost in references to the GOP. However, a comparison group — composed of left-wing anarchists — did not yield similar results linking them to progressive ideals or the Democratic Party.

This seemingly unidirectional engagement, however, has a potential upside. Due to their influence, the GOP could help reduce the affect that violent extremists have on the national stage, the report says:

Since the data suggests white nationalists are actively seeking dialogue with conservatives, CVE [countering violent extremism] activists should enlist the help of mainstream conservatives, who may be considerably more successful than NGOs at engaging extremists with positive messaging. Further research may also suggest avenues for engagement between other kinds of extremists and other mainstream political and religious movements.

The report comes out on the heels of a Southern Poverty Law Center report identifying a spike in far-right anti-government groups, with their number having reached an “all-time high” in 2012. As the Republican Party is desperately seeking to rebrand itself from being seen as a “scary” party of primarily white people, it would do well to listen to the ICSR’s recommendations and not those of people who would defend slavery.
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Very interesting article and report.
 
Well a few things

You can't hold the GOP leaders responsible for what people tweet at them. And if you have thousands of followers it's not like you can do a background check on every single user and look over their tweets to know if you should respond to a person

Secondly, just because someone is a white nationalist, (lol.... I can't believe I had to start a sentence that way) it doesn't mean the specific things they might have been saying were objectionable or wrong. Maybe the white nationalist wants lower taxes. So on it's face if you are a GOP politician you may not know anything beyond that.

Lastly, if we sift through what I said above, it boils down to "Racists like the republicans" to which I say: noooooooo shit.

Republicans: Not racist, just the party preferred by racists.
 
WinterBorn said:
I hate to bust your bubble, but 7 of those accounts are Darla, 1 is Howey and 1 is Tom. The rest? Mostly former AOL posters watching who Darla follows.
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I only follow Grind. Most of my stuff on Twitter is personal and not suitable for trolls on here.
 
Stone Pig with Wings said:
Well a few things

You can't hold the GOP leaders responsible for what people tweet at them. And if you have thousands of followers it's not like you can do a background check on every single user and look over their tweets to know if you should respond to a person

Secondly, just because someone is a white nationalist, (lol.... I can't believe I had to start a sentence that way) it doesn't mean the specific things they might have been saying were objectionable or wrong. Maybe the white nationalist wants lower taxes. So on it's face if you are a GOP politician you may not know anything beyond that.

Lastly, if we sift through what I said above, it boils down to "Racists like the republicans" to which I say: noooooooo shit.

Republicans: Not racist, just the party preferred by racists.
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Did noBRAva hijack your account? It seems you just skimmed. I am not even sure what the hell you are talking about with a few of your points, but read the sentence(s) in bold. The emphasis was mine.
 
NOVA said:
Irrelevant...I didn't say they did any study....
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Your attack on think progress is irrelevant. It's not an opinion piece or even an article that depends much on the author. It is simple and straightforward reporting of a study.
 
Stone Pig with Wings said:
I think you are way more confused than you should be
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I am not confused.

You went off on a rant that was covered by the authors of the study and emphasized by me. This study does not show Republican engagment with white nationalists but the reverse. I made that clear because I knew some little whiney twit like noBRAva, pmp or patriot66 would cry if I did not.

Your other points about GOP leaders doing a background check on their followers has nothing at all to do with the study. I don't know wtf you are talking about. Did you read something different?
 
Sir Digby Chicken Caesar said:
I am not confused.
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Sir Digby Chicken Caesar said:
I am not even sure what the hell you are talking about
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You went off on a rant that was covered by the authors of the study and emphasized by me.
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I was mainly addressing this op ed of yours:

If you are Republican it's up to you to close the door on these morons. Being an apologist for them is not going to help
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In any case I was mostly agreeing with you, so your responses are really defensive and unneeded. Take a powernap, you are a bit tantrum-y.
 
Stone Pig with Wings said:
I was mainly addressing this op ed of yours:



In any case I was mostly agreeing with you, so your responses are really defensive and unneeded. Take a powernap, you are a bit tantrum-y.
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No, I am good. It seemed you were offering a counterpoint. It's okay we can disagree.

I did not mean you should unfriend/unfollow Nova. I was talking in a more general sense.
 
Sir Digby Chicken Caesar said:
The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.
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So they are highly engaged with conservative websites... ie... they read conservative websites. So they really aren't engaged with the GOP... they just read websites that are conservative. Thanks.
 
Superfreak said:
So they are highly engaged with conservative websites... ie... they read conservative websites. So they really aren't engaged with the GOP... they just read websites that are conservative. Thanks.
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You are in denial.

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.
 
Superfreak said:
Which again, that report was a lot to do about nothing given that it lumped conservative groups in with 'hate groups' and it talked about the number of groups increased without much to say about the number of members etc...

Now you have a new 'report' where they created 12 'white nationalists' on Twitter and they are surprised that they encountered other white nationalists? To be shocked that 'white nationalists' are not Democrats should also not shock them. How prevalent are they is another question.

Also... saying they are highly engaged with the GOP is nothing but nonsense.
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and your proof?
 
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