When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.
I think this is probably because there is a lot less training data for this AI in Arabic than there is in English (or other European languages), so it is more likely to say "hmm, this Arabic post looks very similar to this other Arabic post that's about something completely different, because it's in Arabic", whereas that's unlikely to happen to posts just because they are both in English or German. I bet there's a lot less false positives for the Nazi content. Republicans do use Nazi rhetoric, this isn't like even up for debate.
It's not really something you can debug. The algorithms just work better the more data they have, and if they don't have enough data, they don't do as well. You can try to patch over that manually with heuristics, but that would basically just be going back to the old way of applying dumb exact-match filters that are easily evaded by anyone with a couple of brain cells.
Disclaimer: I work in the area. Not specifically spam filtration (ML for job ad placement) but I work on multilingual NLP stuff.
It's a lot less hands off than you'd think.
First, if it's a model returning a probability this is spam/toxic content, it's likely an "unbalanced" dataset, so you need to fiddle with weighing how much each tweet should count, or oversampling toxic tweets, etc.
Second, it's relatively recent that we have the large multilanguage models that perform well. Even today I wouldn't use a huge LLM for something that reads every tweet, ever, because the costs would be too high.
Instead you'd "fine-tune" a smaller model, and this fine tuning again requires some level of babysitting.
Lastly, pre/postprocessing model output absolutely is common, even with today's models. You generally have a few thousand lines of that (accumulated domain knowledge from bug/behavior reports etc.) For a model in production.
So the fact that ML engineers are typically anglophones living, say, west of Poland, means it'll be an ongoing issue that these systems don't work as well on languages that aren't Germanic or Romance languages.
He'll, even the tokenization itself is iffy on some eastern languages.
Kuusi, kuusi, kuusi. Translated, that is spruce, six and "your moon". Welcome to Finland where meaning of the word is quite dependent on the context, and spoken language sounds nothing like the official.
The upside is that it is fairly difficult to pretend to be Finnish to a Finn.... so bots have really hard time to penetrate the language barrier in social media. Whereas i'm constantly mistaken for a murican online, few sentences may be a bit quirky but then again.. not all muricans write very well. But in Finnish, you will be lucky to write couple of sentences right if you aren't born into the language, or lived here several decades.
Not that long ago possibly a Russian bot managed to get to the newspapers. It spread anti-NATO messages, one of the sentences said something like "NATO saves...". There are two words in Finnish for "save", one is more about "to rescue" and the other is specifically "to save (a file)". The bot picked the latter one. It was hilarious, and of course was meme'd to death in couple of days.
few sentences may be a bit quirky but then again.. not all muricans write very well.
Honestly, I'm not even sure some 'Muricans care about writing... But those are hardly the kind of people you'd see on a heavily text-based site like Reddit. There's a whole bunch that still use txt-speak even though we no longer have to use a numpad to write out texts or restricted by tiny character limits...
Yeah, I hear you. I actually did study this and have a degree in it, but it's been the better part of a decade and I didn't actually wind up working in the field for various reasons. I'm just a little sick of hearing people say stuff like "if OpenAI just hired more trans women I bet you wouldn't be able to get ChatGPT to say horrible discriminatory things" and trying to explain that if OpenAI actually took things like debiasing and content curation seriously they probably wouldn't have made ChatGPT in the first place.
Meh, debiasing is largely an issue of a gap between how people would like the world to be and how the world is.
The models are trained on how the world is, and it's full of shitty people saying shitty things.
Correcting for that is good if what you're correcting towards is worthy. But the natural state of a LM is to represent the world as it is.
Having a diverse team, at least in the culture front, can help, but in my experience less than the proponents claim. Just having a team culture of paying attention to issues, having some level of ethical standard you adhere to, is what matters.
Though I think as privileged western dwellers (Im assuming this for you as well) we're often blind to the fact that people in other cultures sometimes have views we'd find shockingly unnaceptable.
Not just 4Chan or some sections of reddit - a lot of people in China/Russia/Turkey/etc. prefer their dictator to a democracy.
And the ones training foundation models are doing at least a little for it -- they exclude some subreddits from the training data, up/down weigh dataset sources based on what they think the dataset "should" be.
But all of this is based in their english/western culture - they likely don't catch weird subreddits to exclude in arabic/african/eastern languages because they don't speak the language.
And that's before the more philosophical questions like "what are we correcting for, specifically". Concepts like "racism" are too vague to be actionable here, you need specific definitions.
Meh, debiasing is largely an issue of a gap between how people would like the world to be and how the world is.
Right, see, this kind of attitude from people working in the field is part of the reason I don't work in the field. The purpose of NLP is not to give people an accurate picture of "how the world is". No, that's not the purpose of a LM. That's the purpose of a newspaper. The purpose of a LM is to accomplish some particular task, and for most tasks you want debiased data.
Right, but a raw LM isn't used for tasks. They're always finetuned, or their embeddings are consumed by some other model, etc.
Again, it's on the person making the model to make decisions about how the model should be versus the base model. And by doing that you're projecting a bunch of your own biases onto the model.
We've had this issue since 2014 with word2vec embedding models. Fun fact: did you know that if you just cluster the embeddings from twitter-word2vec-50 model (word2vec trained on twitter) you get something that is strikingly segregated by race, even within the english language? Normally we'd just avoid that model. Otherwise you have to ask questions about level of harm if you're deploying that into a product.
So my point is: you should do something about it. Your ethical responsibility is higher than "whatever makes the most money".
But if you intend to de-bias a base model, it's on the person asking about the model to specifically state what the problem with the current model is and what the desired output would be instead.
See for instance how ChatGPT deals with it. Not perfect, but they seem to have a list of criteria they adhere by.
If this is the case (I'm betting it's not) the easiest solution would be to feed the ai a whoooole lot of ISIS styled material, and just be like "flag stuff like that, and report back."
You also have to give it a lot of non ISIS stuff for that to work, and it can't be too similar, or else you bias the algorithm. Assembling a dataset like that isn't trivial.
Plus, ISIS members and broadcasters may both be talking about murders or deaths or recent threats or the sides in a conflict. So they may be talking about very similar things.
Like, imagine news outlets even in English, when quoting someone accused/convicted of a crime, or even quoting a right-wing nut job. Messed up things may be literally in their post, but contextually are very different.
Something else that irks me is when people think "Allah u akbar" is a specifically terroristic term, when it just means "God is great". I've interacted with plenty of Arabic people who say that just as much as we say "Oh my God" when something happens.
They will do it in isolation from their main comment but they dont do it to the level that an entire society of people do where i guess for me and my people its like swearing in normal conversation its just comes naturally.
Or i guess its like when we say "oh my god". There is no religious context to it. Its just a natural turn of phase
At first this sounds pretty accurate and you’d think the language is exactly why that would happen but then I thought about it. And I doubt an AI algorithm would be completely useless simply because of the language. Especially such a widely used language. It’s not like a tribal dialect or something. And then wouldn’t it just ban everything Arabic not just certain accounts. Idk I feel like it MUST be more complicated then that. I could be wrong tho
This can happen for any feature, not just language. If most of the ISIS examples you give it have pictures attached and most of the non-ISIS examples don't, it can learn that a picture being attached means it's ISIS content. Arabic is just a more likely trigger for that, given that a lot of ISIS content will be in Arabic. You have to give the model appropriate training data, so that it sees an equal amount of non-ISIS Arabic content in addition to ISIS Arabic content (and non-Arabic ISIS content versus non-Arabic non-ISIS content, as well), and if it is trained with a good and unbiased dataset it will do well and won't assume that something being in Arabic makes it more likely to be ISIS content just because of that. The problem is just that there is less Arabic content available in general, so it's harder to create a well-balanced dataset like that, and if you do find enough non-ISIS Arabic content, it's more likely that that content is also biased in some way than it is that a similar English dataset would be necessarily biased, because you have more choices when curating the English dataset.
No one mentioned translation. If you don't give the AI enough examples of non ISIS content in Arabic, it will tend to assume that all Arabic content is ISIS related.
Again, that’s not how an AI works. Indeed the first quote in the article provides the clue. The system will flag adjacent speech (in whatever language), we just don’t care about it if it’s in Arabic as opposed to English. That’s a human thing, not AI.
Are you under the impression that the AI actually learns Arabic or something? It doesn't, it just sees text and compares it to other text. Text in Arabic is going to be similar to other text in Arabic, just like text in English is similar to other text in English. You have to give the system enough information to determine that those particular similarities aren't relevant to the decision it's making.
The AI doesn't "see" English or Arabic. it makes the same determinations in English as it does in Arabic. It's just that we don't care about the "errors" in Arabic. It says so right in the article!
So it’s less “Republicans are Nazis” and more “the filter spares no one?” That’s why my last Reddit account cannot be unshadowbanned.
Not defending the Republicans mind you. Ever since John McCain died they’ve gone hardcore Trumpist, sycophantic in every sense of the word.
What I do not understand is... why are Neo-Nazis making a come back?! I’m guessing because of the general aesthetic built up around Nazism makes them seem cool and distant?
Also, I heard over half of German school children don’t know what Nazism is. There is a risk to suppressing information about your horrid past.
Edit; so I was wrong about the German school children. Okay then.
It's like 60% of what is taught in history class tbh.
Also it's taught from a political perspective and not so much from a war story perspective. So we don't learn so much about individual battles but more about the politics as well as the state of the german mindset and economy at the time that made it possible and the horrend outcome they caused.
I'm currently watching the documentary "World at War" and am learning a lot about the actual progress of the war and the different battles that were fought but in the classroom, the actual fighting is not the important part.
When I learned WW2 history in Norway as a kid it had some important events but few battles too. It was more about "this event/attack led to X" in those cases.
We probably learned disproportionately more about events in Norway too (of course). Like the Battle of Drøbak sound, the King refusing peace and the government fleeing to the UK or the Norwegian resistance movement and Norwegian special ops sabotaging German Nuclear weapons facilities in Norway.
Edit: Worth mentioning that we went on a school trip to the concentration camps in Polan and Germany in 10th grade.
As a german who is also into history, never knew anything about the situation in Norway. It's funny how one country can cause so much in such little time that you literally can't be educated on all of it.
I love that about history. You could spend an entire lifetime learning about the history of a single prefecture of Japan and never know it all. And then to think, we've only been recording that history for the blink of an eye compared to how long humans have been making stories worth hearing, and humans ourselves have only been around for the blink of an eye... The mind boggles.
it's taught from a political perspective and not so much from a war story perspective. So we don't learn so much about individual battles but more about the politics as well as the state of the german mindset and economy at the time that made it possible and the horrend outcome they caused.
Which is how it should be taught. In the US it's all events and dates. We don't learn anything about what ideologically drove the nazis and I guarantee it's because it's considered "too political". A lot of people are recycling the exact same rhetoric and they're very mad when people identify that.
My high school history teacher never tested us on dates and event instead all of our reports and tests were about using various sources and interpreting and making theories.
For example we watched a ton of documentaries on jfk and then had to write a 1 page report on what we thought happened. Once we handed that in our teacher read us his version of that assignment. Mine was nothing like his but I got full marks because I used real sources and came to A conclusion
That class makes me look at current events with the lens of cause and effect and not just things happen
In general, teaching about wars as "series of engagements and battles" in grade school is not that useful unless the student plans to go into military history specifically.
If your goal is to actually teach about history as the process of human endeavours and events, the causes and outcomes of wars are much more interesting and salient than knowing how many soldiers each side fielded on a particular battle and what strategies they adopted.
Military history still has an important place and is very useful for understanding history on a deeper level, but it's like economic history - it's a specialised, focused field of history.
thats not an overestimation, its basically anchient history and stuff in 5 and 6, romans rise and fall in norther europe and usually a visit to a local roman digsite if you live in south or west germany in 7, other "cultures" in 8(persians, hindu, china). then 9 is weimar republic and pre war, appeasment and 10. is nazis rise to power, the war, concentrationcamp visit, after war and occupation and early cold war usually until 1970
11 is kaiserreich and WW1 and 12 (and if it exists 13) is Hitlers rise to power, your maybe SECOND visit in a concentration camp and then the war itself and occupation, germanys rise out of the ashes etc. agian.
you also have the topic in civics, ethics/religion class, german(how it affected writers and literature), liberal arts("entartete kunst", nazi architecture), english and french/spanish(you usually take either if you dont have latin) for about 1-2 years each
Meanwhile in America, the GOP is literally trying to ban the teaching about America’s past with regards to the history the enslavement slavery of African Americans and the civil rights struggle so that they can repeat that bullshit.
given the rest of their post they're pretty misinformed and possibly just JAQing off/sealioning and their open ended stuff there is bait. i mean, they could just legitimately be misinformed and be surprised and accepting of being corrected, but that seems relatively unlikely.
Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter.
These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable. (Source)
I feel like these techniques are employed by a huge amount of Twitter posters. It's the Tucker Carlson school of shittery.
Tbf I didn't know much about it until we actually learned about it, which was like 7th grade. It's like saying half of school children never heard of pythagoras.
I've heard it's illegal to even mention it in germany as well. Maybe some schools do that so wires get crossed? It's like how some schools in America ban teaching evolution cause muh bible but pretty much everyone here agrees if you don't know about evolution as an adult, you're perceived as so stupid you might as well be drooling
I mean, that would be pretty fucking hard to do as well, given that we did our level best to commit genocide. And you couldn’t ignore that if you tried - towns everywhere have memorials for those murdered who previously lived there. Usually, they get placed at their last voluntarily chosen place of residence.
Also, the towns in the area that had a synagogue which was burned/destroyed in the November pogrom will have pretty prominent reminders.
American schools teach us that we were the good guys during all of our genocides. It's not that hard if you start the propaganda right away. Lots of southern schools manage to make the Confederacy seem like the good guys in the Civil War.
It’s literally part of their mandatory curriculum that it must be taught. A school breaking this would be sued. I think you may be confusing this with things like the book Hitler wrote, which I believe was banned until it entered public domain. A lot of nazi stuff is banned in Germany, but not learning about it.
...What? Did you get something mixed up? You can talk about nazis in school/media/public/pretty much everywhere as long as it has some educational context. We spend 3 years of history class talking about how nazi germany was formed, it's atrocities and how to prevent it from ever forming again. Germany is literally the text book example of how to educate you population about their countries dark past... every single person in germany is aware of what happend 80years ago.
What you are probably thinking of is the fact that you can get jailtime for promoting nazi ideology/using nazi symbolism like the hitler salute or the cross. It's also illegal to privately collect nazi memorabilia, and foreign noneducational media have to sensor any nazi symbolism before releasing in germany. Talking about nazis in educational context is encouraged, promoting them is strongly prohibited.
It’s literally mandatory curriculum. Denying the Holocaust in Germany is a crime. And we teach about it repeatedly, and in great graphic detail. It’s never like how some USA schools start kids of never mentioning the genocide of the native Americans or whatever. Basically, when we first did the topic, the introduction was “The next topic is the Third Reich. That was the dictatorship we had in Germany that murdered millions of people and led to WWII.”
It was also never from a point of view of “look at those battles” or whatever. It was always - look at this suffering, how could this have been prevented? What could you do if you were living then? The people saying they ‘knew nothing’ why are they lying? These are the justifications used for murdering disabled people, Jews, Sinti and Roma,… - what are the patterns behind it? What rhetorical tricks did they use? Could you recognise them today?
I think you may be getting your wires crossed with Poland, who don't teach about the Holocaust to avoid retraumatizing families, but they don't outlaw speaking about it.
Maybe I'm getting my wires crossed with something else too, then. Thought I saw a documentary a while back about the lack of teaching of it in schools.
Could it have been an opinion about not teaching it enough? It is still an incredibly touchy subject, but it is present in schools (for ages 15+) by ways of discussing memoirs, books and poems from survivors
Sure we learn about the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazis, but barely anyone gets tought what the Nazis actually are besides fascists (which is also never really discussed in deph) and antisemites.
Germany isn't suppressing information about our horrid past. We are actively teaching our children about it in school (and yes, we teach them exactly how horrible it was and that we were the bad guys).
What is suppressed is holocaust denial, nazi glorification, and all that shit because we never want to have that rise again.
The last part is definitely untrue or I would like the source for that. Around 7th grade, Nazi Germany is always a subject in some form. Either reading and discussing Anne Franky Diary in German class(or other novels taking place during that time), talking about the style of propaganda in Music class or just the complete history from Weimar Republic to the rise and fall of Nazi Germany in history class and probably at least one visit of a concentration camp as part of a school trip. Maybe true when it comes to very young school children. But pretty much any German teenager is beaten over the head with that part of German history over the course of their school education.
That last part couldn’t be more wrong. The Nazi time is a mandatory part of history classes and makes up a large chunk of them. I’m pretty sure it’s also mandatory to visit a concentration camp with your class at some point (at least it was where I’m from but maybe that’s just because we are relatively close to one)
In NRW its not mandatory to visit a concentration camp, i actually never seen one and i went to school for 12 years.
But we visited an old gestapo facility where they tortured people and send them away
Don't know where you heard that shit about half of German schools don't know what Naziism is but it's literally mandatory curriculum from 8-10th grade and if you got History as a "Leistungsfach" from 11-13th grade you get to learn every minute detail.
We dont supress information about nazis, we supress glorification in public.
I had classes about the rise of fascism in germany and the allies we had from 7th to 12th grade. We started with the "lighter" stuff and as we got older we learned about more atrocities.
Also because the west has based their entire ideological policy for the past century on fighting communism. Which is kinda how Germany got the Nazis in the first place.
The popular poem starts "first they came for the socialists," but that's only because at the time, everyone hated trans people, so they didn't even get into the poem.
The Nohra concentration camp (KZ Nohra) was the first of the early Nazi concentration camps in Germany, established 3 March 1933 in a school in Nohra. In the few months of its existence, it was administered by the interior ministry of Thuringia and used exclusively to imprison communists.
After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state
Nazi Germany's persecution of homosexuals is considered to be the most severe episode in a long history of discrimination and violence targeting sexual minorities.
And again, mostly forgotten in history until recently.
Looks like they pretty much coincided. My point was that the analog of lgbt in that time didn't even warrant a footnote in the poem about the persecution, and my last line was a reference to today's situation.
I hadn't heard of nohra and it looks like it didn't exist for that long either? Between a month and three months?
Really not sure why you're angry at me. No one is saying that socialists weren't targeted early and for no good reason. You're right that there's a lot of intersectionality. Pre-wwii acceptance was pretty rare, so you're right, my short comment I made on the internet does not tell the whole story.
I was trying to draw a parallel to today and that's it. You've clearly got a lot of WWII knowledge, thanks for filling in the rest.
Actually, the first murders started with disabled people - quite openly as a combination of eugenics AND as a practise run for mass murder at an even bigger scale.
Interestingly enough it seems that the status of trans people was quite complicated in nazi germany, before in the german empire and the weimar republic people could get a „transvestitenschein“ allowing them to basically cross dress in public without getting arrested (it wasn‘t necessarily illegal otherwise but a bit of a grey area), and these apparently continued to be accepted in nazi germany and even some new ones were issued… even official name and gender changes were sometimes authorized. What WAS a problem was if the trans person was also gay, in terms of their biological sex, so funny enough a trans man being with a cis man would likely have been fine but a trans man with a cis woman would have been very illegal.
Oh also in german the poem names communists, social democrats and union leaders in that (historically correct) order but the popular english translation is from the 1950s so it makes sense they left out the communists :)
And keeping in the theme of "everybody hates group x", the poem's longer version actually starts "first they came for the communists", but you rarely see that version.
Yup, this is why the capitalists signed a treaty to partition poland with the nazis, sold them resources for their war machine, and helped them develop their technology.
Fascism is not capitalism in decay lol. It was invented by disgruntled socialists who were bitter the proletariat were not starting the international revolution as predicted by Marx. Every ideology will take advantage of "capitalism decaying". Fascism is not the only ideology who does this. The socialists are just as eager to highjack peoples problems with their agendas as the fascists.
This is absurdly wrong lmao. Fascism in Italy started first after the “Two Red Years” (1919-1921), during which the workers rioted almost non-stop because of the economic crisis, and ‘cause the industrialists systematically refused to improve working conditions and hours despite promises made during wartime.
The first right-wing squads fighting against socialists appeared during this period, and Fascism came to power because the bourgeoisie was scared of the workers and thought they could control Mussolini - the opposite happened, obviously. So they literally preferred keeping control over capital than concede workers even a shred of power.
The fascists weren’t disgruntled socialists lmao, the movement was beating up and killing rioting workers from it’s birth. They were useful idiots used by the bourgeoise to keep control over country and capital, only they eventually managed to oust the bourgeoise itself. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
It is far more likely that the blackshirts and Mussolini was an unknown rather than a known to the liberal goverment. Keep in mind this was in 1918-1921. The Russian revolution is just happening with its own civil war as a consequence. The socialist parties of Italy would be a percevied greater threat than anything else.
And your description of fascism comes off as if fascism was invented to preserve capital for the bourgeoise, and nothing else. This is loopy. Fascism had its own internal perspective on capitalism, socialism, etc. To say that it is incorrect is one thing, but you are denying its existence as if the fascists were only interested in taking power like a usurper king.
Hey, yeah, my description is certainly limited though mostly in the sense that I wanted to rebuke the idea that fascism arose from disgruntled socialists. Have my upvote.
Anyways, I meant to say that it isn’t true. Simple as that. And the fear of the Revolution still doesn’t justify what the bourgeoise did - they made promises to the workers - then soldiers- during wartime; they reneged on those promises and the workers rioted, as was their right after all they had given the previous years.
Furthermore, neither Mussolini nor the black shirts would’ve been an unknown to the liberal government of Italy during the early Twenties. The phenomenon of war veterans engaging in radical politics after the war was pervasive - to say the least - Mussolini himself was a rather known journalist. Given that the Fascists were able to mobilize 15.000 to 40.000 people for the March on Rome within a year from 1921, they were in no way unknown elements.
And while certainly Fascism is a much more complex movement than I have described with its own internal view of capitalism, socialism, the nation, Man and whatever else, any serious analysis of the movement needs to understand the role that Fascism exercised in support of industrial capitalism - it wasn’t created by the bourgeoise, but the bourgeoise did see in it a way to oppose the proletarian movements. Where the fascists only interested in taking power? Perhaps not, but they did at the first chance they had, and ruthlessly so.
Neo -Nazis were one of the first ostracized groups to build an echo chamber in the early Internet. As a result they've spent decades honing recruitment strategies for other people who feel ostracized IRL and are looking for a place they belong on the Internet. The rise of figures like the previous president gives them new hunting grounds to try to radicalize people.
Though that’s also still lasting simply because we don’t place such a huge importance on “patriotism” as many other countries. It, frankly, weirds me out a bit, the way some people seem to revere the concept of their country like it’s some religious figure, or think it’s the best ever. I like my country just fine, so I’m okay with paying taxes, and I feel comfy here, but I know that if I’d been born in France instead, I’d feel that way about France. Does that make sense?
If someone here has a German flag hanging out outside of football events, first assumption is they’re at best some stupid right-of-the-middle dude and, at worst, some sort of real neonazi. It’s not like I see a flag and go “oh no! A nazi!” But if I see someone just show off a flag all the time without any good reason, I’m gonna pay more attention to their other actions and words than I would to some random person
German school kids not knowing aboit Nazis is (I would say nearly impossible) -
In history class it is a huge huge topic - we learn what lead to the nazis rise, all the awful things they did and how we can learb from the mistakes made.
Every student visits a concentration cam at least once.
In Germam we read literature wroteduring the 1930s and early 40s. One that stuck in my mind is Bonnhöfer (I believe a priest who got sent to a KZ)
In "Politics/Society" we discuss how parts of our current constitution/structure is the result of trying to prevent what lead to the Nazis gaining power.
To be a Germn student and not know about the Nazis you'd have to actually put in effort to not know. (My guess is, the statistic you've quoted counted all students - including the ones in elementary school and low grades - and I think ot is reasonable to only start educating students on the Nazis once they reach a certain lvl. of maturity - nothing is won by telling a 6 or 10 year old about Nazis
Slight correction: not every student visits a concentration camp - in NRW that’s not mandatory, likely because of the distance, but many schools seem to take alternative trips - we didn’t go far, but I’m pretty sure we went through all the important memorials in our own town, and we were fairly young and talked about the graphic details, so that left enough of an impact. I heard other schools visited places where the gestapo tortured people and talked about that. And obviously, if your school trips for other classes went anywhere it’s possible - be it Berlin or a neighbouring country where camps used to be - you’ll visit those.
So it’s less “Republicans are Nazis” and more “the filter spares no one?”
It's both.
The filter is designed to target content that reaches a predetermined level of similarity with Nazi Content.
Republican content meets the criteria for the filter to flag their content.
Republican rhetoric is Nazi rhetoric, and all the filter does is follow its programming.
You know how kids will sometimes call out the hypocrisy of their parents because they don't understand nuance and are simply reminding Mom and Dad that one of the rules is not to do X?
Same thing. The filter is a program. It's innocent and isn't designed with nuance in mind. It just does its job.
So the fact that Republicans trip it is purely because Republican content meets the unbiased, uncaring criteria to be flagged as Nazi propaganda.
It's more about where they're willing to draw the line. I'm willing to bet that Arabic speakers wouldn't see the blocking of legit Arabic broadcasters as an acceptable price to pay, even if those Arabic speakers were vehemently anti Isis. Whereas they probably would be fine with blocking Republicans if it also got rid of Nazis. But Arabic speakers aren't in a position of power at Twitter.
Google A Night at the Garden. They're not making a comeback, they were always there. Americans were actually quite sympathetic to the Nazis until the Japanese attacked pearl harbour and triggered a war with Germany because of Japan's treaty with the Nazis. A massive propaganda campaign kicked off to foster hatred for the Nazis but there's a reason America didn't exactly volunteer to join the war but was instead dragged into it.
Fun fact: the British Royal family were also quite fond of Nazism until, of course, Hitler's parachuting club started shooting at people.
There's a documentary you'd enjoy. Don't feel like digging up the name, but it's about former Neo-Nazis, what it was like, what was going on, and how's it's been since they got out. Quite a support group among (some of) the former members. Probably came oit in 2019-2020.
edit: Ah, turns out Neo-Nazis just went underground because mainstream America demanded it. Trump caused them to feel safe coming out, but they were always there.
I think part of why nazism came back in such a big way in the US was because we learned it at such a basic level it sounded almost as interesting as becoming an astronaut, a thing of yore, a mystery.
I'm thinking this has to be a regional thing. My school district had us visit the Holocaust Museum in Middle School. US Government and US History (two separate classes) were mandatory in High School. We watched Schindler's List in 11th grade. Nazism didn't get glossed over. It was never seen as mysterious, it was pretty well described as monstrous, but it was a scarier than "monstrous" because it was conducted by proud, nationalistic humans.
Real talk, if your school district barely covered WWII and Nazism, you might also have learned that the Civil War was about state's rights, and not predominantly the state's rights to own slaves........ It's almost like ruining the education system is a coordinated effort to create a specific type of "American." Hmmm 🤔
Probably because US history classes spend a huge amount of time focusing on the pre-colonial, colonial, revolutionary/civil war and then its a speed run through the early 1900s to get through the Civil rights movement in time before the year is up. Most of the WW2 stuff taught focuses on why we got into WW2 and the American side through the depression. Doesn't really talk about the situation in Europe nor the effects of the war on Asia. Then when you watch a lot of the documentaries made by Americans it just focuses on the battles and the tech used which if you focus on only that you get a glorification of the German warmacht which ain't a good idea.
why are Neo-Nazis making a come back?! I’m guessing because of the general aesthetic built up around Nazism makes them seem cool and distant?
They seam cool and distant!?! That's what comes to your mind when you think of Nazism? No dude, there is nothing cool about Nazis.
They are not making a comeback, they have always been here. They just feel safe coming into the light - like cockroaches coming up through the floorboards, because certain political and media figures have told them it is acceptable to be horrific hateful people. It is not.
What I do not understand is... why are Neo-Nazis making a come back?!
There are lots of replies answering this question already, but many of them blame capitalism, blame Republicans for being evil, but I feel as though this isn't true.
It's important to understand that nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, "I am the bad guy, I do bad things, my enemies are good and I am bad and this is what I want to do and be." I know this might sound obvious, but if you don't understand this mindset, you'll always be making incorrect assumptions about why people support certain things you find repugnant.
None of these people think they are evil.
As to the actual reason, since WW2 there has been a large social push award from nationalism. This was a reaction to the ultranationalism displayed by Nazi Germany. This push, coupled with dissatisfaction over the state of the USA during the Cold War, meant that it became fashionable, certainly in the 60's and 70's during Vietnam, to be intensely critical of one's own country and to display understanding, sympathy, empathy, and tolerance toward other countries and cultures.
This process has also come at a time of unparalleled connectedness across the USA. The Internet really united the country, and the world, in a way that previously would have been impossible; no longer were the states disconnected from each other, it is now common, even trivial, to have conversations with Americans from other states with wildly divergent views. Further, this is not a regional conversation but a global one, and everyone has a voice. I am posting from Australia for instance, but in other comments there are contributors from Germany, the UK, South America, etc. Everyone is shouting all at once for their perspective to be heard.
The unintended consequence of this is that with everyone shouting to be heard, is that the voice that gets heard is whoever shouts the loudest. This means that if 50 Californians voice their opinion about Trump, the loudest shouting one — the one holding Trump's bloody, severed head for example — is the one who gets heard. Similarly, when one looks across to red states, the voice they hear is the one with Joe Biden tied up and kidnapped in their truck.
The vast majority of Democrats support democracy, love America and only want the best for their country. The vast majority of Republicans support democracy, love America and only want the best for their country. But In both scenarios I outlined above, these two "voices", it is easy to look at the one that supports your bias and think it's clearly just a joke, but to look at the one that doesn't, shake your head and go, "Wow, those motherfuckers really are crazy."
Another factor is that currently, in 2023, Americans have the lowest trust in the media in all of its history, to the extent that half of all Americans believe that news organisations deliberately and actively mislead them, a tend that extends over the political divide. Left, Right, Authoritarian, Libertarian, Centrist, gay, straight, white, black, latino, north, south, east, west, centre, doesn't matter. Nobody trusts the media.
All of this is happening at a time of great, and growing, micro and macro economic stress for your average American. Wages are stagnant, jobs are shrinking, the opiate crisis continues and worsens; in rural red states people struggle. They struggle to find work, they feel that cherished rights (gun ownership, religion) are a hair's breadth away from disappearing, and they feel that the Democrats have a grip on the media in a way that threatens them; they feel detached from the cities, looked down upon and patronised, treated as "rural illiterate racist hillbillies whose opinions don't matter". They feel that their suffering is deprioritised by the Democrats, who care only for ethnic minorities, criminals, and illegal immigrants. They feel that the Democrats hate white people, especially white men, and that if push came to shove, the Democrats would rather deport them than the non-citizens. They feel the anger and rage against "the cis white man" is boiling over soon and that things will get very bad very quickly. Something must be done.
By the same token, Democrats feel under siege by the Republicans. They feel that a tiny minority of people control a disproportionate amount of society; they feel that the oft-toted "hold on the media" that Republicans like to talk about is actually a mirage because Disney doesn't really care about LGBTQIA+ rights, they just like money, and Disney is insincerely pandering to "corporate pride". They feel that "pride month megacorps" would happily put gays in camps if that made them even richer. They feel that the real power in the country is not with the President or Congress, but instead in the hands of largely unelected extremely rich private citizens, whose power and wealth and influence allows them to escape the consequences of their unethical actions. They see things like the revocation of Roe vs Wade as undeniable proof that if the Republicans get a foot in the door, that door will be thrown right open. They fear that same-sex marriage, and even interracial marriage, are next. They see society acting with kid gloves to white supremacists and feel a real threat is looming. Something must be done.
All the while, the average American sees the real value of their wages fall, they see homelessness growing on the streets, they see the opiate crisis worsen, they see their rights be stripped away, they see looming war on the horizon with Russia and China. They see a changing society that's getting worse not better, one that neither of them has really adapted to survive and thrive in. They see that "the enemy" are actively working against them while their side does nothing to prevent disaster. They blame the other. They blame their own politicians.
They know, deep down, that realistically... nobody is going to help them.
Additionally, there's been an unfortunate trend of political figures of late campaigning on "hope and change". In Obama's case, this was his literal campaign slogan; for Trump, he heavily marketed himself as a political outsider, someone who "told it like it was" and was capable of and willing to speak uncomfortable truths to power. However, in both cases, the result of this was broadly speaking, profound disappointment. If one divorced themselves from "pet projects", rhetoric and spin, Obama's two presidential terms were not fundamentally different from George W. Bush's in terms of the policies implemented and the day-to-day lives of Americans, and again if one excludes "pet projects", rhetoric and spin, Trump's one presidential term was not fundamentally different from Obama's. And Biden's term, so far, has largely maintained every single major policy of Trump.
Case in point, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre is still open and in significant use, despite all three men pledging on multiple occasions to close it. No change, so no hope.
Accordingly, there is a growing feeling, in both the extreme left and extreme right — shown in the BLM riots and January 6th — that there is no democratic answer to this divide. Both sides are starting to feel that the only option, the only chance of getting justice and even simply surviving in this hellscape, is through direct action. It's not enough to simply sit back, the enemy are there and they must be confronted, indirectly or directly. Both sides are saying, "We tried to talk, but they're just hopeless. They're full of hate, openly and secretly. We tried. We really did."
Combine all these factors, and we have the perfect storm. Nobody trusts the media. Nobody trusts the other side. Across class and socioeconomic lines, racial lines, gender lines, generational lines, geographic lines, and in every way that someone can be divided, we are divided. And in that environment, moderate voices are being drowned out and the centrists are being pushed to either side.
So when you think your enemies are lying to you, and you can't rely on the media to give a truthful impartial account of any situation, it makes perfect sense that a growing body of people would simply say, "What other option do I have? Who will listen to me?".
These modern Nazis are listening. They have their finger on the pulse of this dissatisfaction and they, surprisingly, recruit from both isolated right-wing young men and dissatisfied leftists as well. "Beefsteak Nazis" have always been a thing. Trump himself described himself as a "reformed Democrat" and on places like 4chan's /pol/ board, a common discussion thread is, "so what radicalised you?".
In brief, we are in the absolute eye of the most perfect storm possible for the return of humanity's biggest villains, and things are getting worse rather than better.
Nazis are making a comeback because of the upper class making an extremely successful push to divide people around gender/sexual identity issues.
Most people think its a bit gross to put your pp in a butthole. Not everyones cup of tea. Using some good social engineering, planting a seed of doubt among the less intelligent examples of our species through trusted outlets like Fox News and CNN, it creates a very easy line to divide lower-class people. People who just didnt give a fuck before get shoved on either side of that line, being labeled "woket***s" and "nazis" by the people on the "other side" of the line, and all of a sudden a proper labor movement like OWS becomes a shitshow of infighting and extremism on either side of this "line"
Its why r/antiwork got destroyed, OWS went fucking nowhere and any attempt to unionize gets busted within a few weeks. People at the top laugh as people at the bottom worry about whos fucking who and what color their skins are.
I think about almost everything you just said on a daily basis. Just imagining how little people would fucking care about the stupid shit they care about, if their needs were met and they were receiving the true value of their labor.
Most people think its a bit gross to put your pp in a butthole.
Uh, yeah I don't think that's necessarily true. That "most" is doing a little too much work. The amount of dudes who are into anal sex is huge.
Edit: damn bro, you're just shooting yourself in the foot with your responses. That is not the way to convince other people.
You're both missing the point. Petty squabbles for plebians to worry about while wall street magnates make billions off our backs.
Just calling someone a "christofacist" means you're completely blind and doing exactly as your plebian ass is told. Fight the christofacists, not the people destroying your buying power, your ability to thrive and your ability to live without worrying about a broken bone destroying you for the next century.
The thing that makes the culture war work is that the fascists actually get to make real stakes. Eroding access to abortion, access to Healthcare for trans people, the right to stable homes for trans people, all while eroding the power of unions. The christofascists are the people destroying Healthcare and buying power.
Do you think "christofascist" is just an insult for the religious right? It's a specific thing. Christian Fascism is a real, specific thing that the rest of the religious right is patsy to.
It's a fucking tool used by the goddamn machine to crush down the little guys. The faster people realize that joe-bob Trump supporter is just the other side of the same coin as Jane the superlesbian, the faster we can get to the bottom of the real problem, which is everyone is fucking broke and looking to blame the wrong fucking people. Toss the blame upwards, not to the side.
What I do not understand is... why are Neo-Nazis making a come back?!
Lots of reasons, namely: The failure to combat white supremacy or even acknowledge systemic racism especially in settler colonial countries such as the US, poor education systems that don't give accurate information on who the Nazis actually were or how they came to power, the historical welcoming of former Nazis into high positions in NATO (e,g, Hans Spiedel) as well as operation paperclip, the inherent link between anti-communism and fascist politics.
In short, it's not really a come back because they never actually went away fully, and ultimately our capitalist society enables fascism to flourish in times of political and economic crisis.
Wow, you're full of shit, I got curious and looked up Hans Speidel, he didn't agree with Hitlers racist policies and was part of a plot to remove the nazis from power. Yet somehow he's a nazi.
If you want other Nazis that got involved in NATO look up Adolf Heusinger, Johannes Steinhoff, Johann von Kielmansegg, Ernst Feber, Karl Schnell, Franz Joseph Shulze, Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, etc and etc.
Participation in the July plot does not negate the fact that these were Nazis who were an integral part of the fascist killing machine. The July Plot itself had no intentions of ending this killing machine either! Simply put they wanted to retain the fascist power structure, they just didn't want to completely lose the war.
The last one is definitely not true. Source: Am German, went to German school. All sixteen states teach about the third Reich in multiple points of your schooling in multiple classes - there’s no escaping it. It’s a big topic - many classes will visit a Holocaust memorial or similar site. There’s no home schooling in Germany, and private or parochial schools are still bound by the curriculum in their state, so you can’t avoid teaching your kids about it.
When I mean it’s everywhere, what I mean is also this: My German classes were totally normal language classes - analysis, poetry, writing essays, studying different epochs, reading exemplary novels from a few genres,…
One huge topic in my last few years of school (the most relevant ones) was exile literature, and mostly focused on refugees from Germany during WWII.
There’s also statues everywhere. Plaques in the ground. Every town I have lived in so far had some sort of memorial for the people from that town who were murdered.
I took the minimum amount of history classes, and I think I learned about Nazis at least two, maybe three separate times? At different ages, with different angles.
I asked my mum just to be sure, and according to her, by fifth grade at the latest, I’d learned about it.
Also, I vividly remember a presentation I had to give in sixth grade or so, where some of the materials (and some of the photos) included piles of dead bodies. I think we also watched documentaries back then, similarly graphic - I know we watched one in a later grade that turned my stomach, and I know that around the same time we watched one about slavery that had kids actually leave the room or they’d throw up, so it would be logical we’d also watched one on the third Reich while that was a topic.
You heard BS or more likely just made that up yourself. In German schools in history class 2-4 years are just about the Nazis, WWII and the Holocaust. Greetings from Germany you liar.
I had the topic 5 times when going to school/s. 5 times dude. There is no fucking way you don’t learn about our history in German classrooms. You heard bs.
Also, I heard over half of German school children don’t know what Nazism is.
The only way this can be remotely true, is of you count pre-school, and day that the 2-10 years old (one half) don't know about it, and the 11-18 years old ones do.
The reuse and cruelties of the Nazi regime is the core of history class, and is also massively present in other classes, like literature or even come up in domestic geography
One major reason is the populist aspect of Nazism. Just blame someone else for all your problems (real and imaginary) and hate them for it. No need to work on yourself and improve your situation .
The hated group is preferably a minority with relative weak support in your society, so they can easily be attacked.
Hate and easy answers to complicated problems are very attractive to most people.
Also, I heard over half of German school children don’t know what Nazism is.
If this is true, it must be a very new development. I think it's highly unlikely.
I'm German and I can assure you, that information about Nazis is everywhere. And at least when I was in school it was a large part of education, not only in history and politic classes.
Also, I heard over half of German school children don’t know what Nazism is.
Yeah, the younger half. We don't have dedicated History lessons for the first four years and Nazi Germany usually doesn't get taught until grade 7-8, when the kids are old enough to understand it.
So stop claiming we're suppressing information. The only thing we're suppressing is pro-nazi lies like holocaust denial.
To my understanding, Neo-Nazis are making a come back in America because of implementation of race based policies. Because of the existence of policies such as affirmative action, recommended employment quotas, race based scholarships, anything and everything that has "race" be an integral (or even tangential) part of the policy. It doesn't matter if it's for a good reason, it doesn't matter if the policy is actively doing a good thing, it doesn't matter what the policy is intended to do, what matters to the trailer park trash, and their ilk, is that they see other races get an advantage they don't. Doesn't matter to the trailer park trash what their granddaddy did or didn't do, hell, they probably don't even know where they're actually from ancestrally. They just see another race get something they are denied.
It's really REALLY easy to get mad at someone for getting something you can't because of reasons you can't change. Especially when you don't understand why.
So, when some group comes along and says "you are right to be mad, and we are gonna give you what 'they' give themselves" it's really easy to see why those who are in a bad situation will drift towards that group. Even if the bad situation is the groups doing or, even if the bad situation is because of the individuals own life choices.
They're not making a comeback. It's just that some people have built their careers and even personalities on the threat of "nazis" and so are heavily invested in that threat being as large as possible... even when reality doesn't cooperate.
Don't underestimate what Obama's victory did for the modern conservative hate movement. That's why and when this thing went into high gear like it has.
Why are Neo-Nazis making a comeback? Because Russia has spent upwards of 300 million dollars supporting them in order to undermine Western democracies and institutions
As money filters up to a few oligarchs, as climate change gets harder and harder, as social rot makes it harder and harder to succeed by being responsible and ethical... This will get worse.
When people are desperate or angry or feel powerless, they're just really easy to manipulate.
They arent not actual nazis anyway. Its just literally anything that isnt an armchair brocialist is labled facist.
Its gone beyond parody when you have people writing articles about how working out and going to the gym makes you a facist.
One of the best ways to get attention these days is to have crazy takes so people give you attention and point out how stupid they are but because tribalism people will defend or downplay their stupidity to avoid giving ground to their political opposition as they consider it worse then standing up for their principles.
To be fair, they're not Nazis, it's just that the things they post publicly are so close to what Nazis say that a trained AI wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
That's not what it's saying either. It's saying to completely remove a certain type of content with no exceptions and without requiring human oversight the algorithm has to cast an extremely wide net.
I know, I know. But in 2023, and in what pretends to be the pinnacle of freedom and opportunity, the difference isn't enough for me to separate the two.
2.0k
u/Xszit 3d ago
Not sure what the link in the screenshot was pointing to but here's an article Vice wrote about it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too