One of the pleasures of my day job is reading forensically detailed investigations into misinformation by a partner organisation, the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Because its team is doing proper investigations which have to be evidence-based, rigorously fact-checked and legally cleared, they tend to be pretty comprehensive and lengthy.
One that has just been published (you can find it on the DFRLab’s Medium page) exposes the nefarious dealings of one Anthony Matumba, a government official employed by the Makhado local municipality in Limpopo and also, incidentally, a member of the EFF.
Posing as a racist white woman on Twitter, Matumba posts some awful and incendiary stuff. Well, awful by human standards — some would say it’s fairly par for the course by Twitter ones. As his white woman fake name, Matumba has chosen Tracy Zille, which appears to be some sort of (perhaps unconscious) homage to the Patron Saint of Those Who Venture Unpopular Opinions, the very holier-than-thou Helen Zille.
Or, more likely, "Zille" has now become a brand with the sort of association you want if you’re starting a fake account to offer unsolicited opinions about race, calculated to provoke people into angry responses.
The tweets by "Tracy Zille" run the usual gamut of racist baiting, offered ostensibly as first-person advice to fellow white people.
The topics tick all the usual xenophobic and racist tropes. On the well-worn dog-whistle of the benefits of colonialism and/or apartheid, for example, at 4.26pm on July 3 he tweeted: "Black people love defending our economy as if it is theirs. SA Black politicians didn’t build any economy after 1994. Blacks take taxis and buses to come and work in our White areas. You will never ever see us going to work in Black Areas because there is no Black economy."
Or take this one — at 3.47pm on July 2 — designed to poke the Herman Mashaba Xenophobia Bear™: "Which jobs are Nigerians taking for Black South Africans? Have you ever seen a Nigerian working as a Garden boy or begging for a job on the streets? Nigerians create jobs for themselves. They don’t have time to beg people for jobs. #NigeriansMustGo for what? #NigeriansMustStay."
Ultimately, the primary aim of the fake account’s tweets, which also include salacious celebrity gossip, is to get people to share them, and to get you to eventually land up on three websites that are monetised using Google AdSense.
The facts of the story are interesting, and I do urge you to read the meticulous detective work done by DFRLab’s Jean le Roux, delineating how you can find out who is behind fake news websites using various forensic tools. But the secondary aim is to drive conflict and hatred.
It’s not just collateral damage, which the report describes here: "The deployment of racist rhetoric as a lever to propagate disinformation serves to not only undermine legitimate concerns around race and identity, but also exacerbate existing racial tensions."
It’s actually purposeful, necessary damage — anger and hatred is the very fuel of the business case, and the more of it you can stoke up, the better your chances of getting your disinformation spread around.
A recent report from Cornell University found that "anger leads to more incentivised audiences in terms of anxiety management and information sharing and accordingly makes fake news more contagious than real news online".
That report recommends that a mechanism such as tagging anger on social media could slow "the contagion of fake news at the source".
One of the sentences in the DFRLab report leapt out in its full, ugly matter-of-factness when I read it: "Using race as a vector for the spreading of disinformation is nothing new."
It’s a phrase, like the word contagion, that owes something to the idea of disinformation as a kind of disease, but also to the idea that disinformation is a strategy that can be used to serve different, and multiple, objectives.
There is a rash of contrarian and radical voices in our societal soundbox at the moment, each driving money-making agendas disguised as social commentary or contrarian activism. And these voices don’t care at all about the damage they do in their efforts to build a market. It’s as if they’ve bought some digital-dimwit version of the classic The Anarchist Cookbook, and they’re using their playdough ideas to cook up a clumsy misinfo brand in the little plastic toy ovens of their brains.
To remind you: The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, was written by a teenager to give (mostly American) people tips on how to organise against "fascist, capitalist and communist threats", as well as "detailed instructions in hand-to-hand combat, explosives, booby traps, drugs, tear gas, sabotage and demolition, surveillance, improvised weapons and other topics related to anarchism".
Our brave social media rabble rousers are getting their modernised recipe from a plethora of platforms, but the ingredients are all cheap and nasty.
There are several staples they pick from, depending on the demographics of their desired audience. The insistence that the coronavirus is "just a flu"; urging you to not wear a face mask; the forced characterisation of farm murders as a category of white genocide; the use of radical economic transformation and "Stratcom" to obscure corruption; and the constant refrains of "don’t trust the mainstream media" and "the government is coming for your liberties".
There’s also the hatred of experts or, for the more "sophisticated", the pushing of alternative experts. They either explicitly or subtly appeal to the anti-vaxxers, the neo-nutjobs, the conveniently libertarian and the nakedly angry.
As with "Tracy Zille", they’re just in it for the money, and they don’t care about the damage they do. This is not to say that some of them don’t believe the stupidity they spout on their live-streams, chat shows or Twitter feeds. But whatever semblance of twisted integrity they possess is subsumed in the desire for followers, applause and money.
I almost feel like writing a guide on how to spot these alt-right-lite creatures in the cyberwild, a kind of Roberts Bird Guide for Twitter-twitchers — and perhaps I will one day. There are many ways to identify them. For example, they’re constantly asking pseudo-critical questions, leaving a line space, and then answering them in the same tweet in an attempt to mimic the process of critical thought.
The biggest giveaway, though, is when they utter their plaintive mating cry into the unforgiving ether: "Debate me!"
Some of you reading this might not spend as much time mired in the cyberswamp as I do, and so might not have come across the term "Debate Me Bros" before. It refers to the sort of edgelord who, when he (mostly he) gets riled up by something you say on social media, angrily demands that you come onto his personal platform and engage in the gentlemanly cut and thrust of rigorous debate.
He (I’ll stick with he) appears, for some reason, to not consider the actual Twitter discussion you’re having as a debate, mostly because he’s losing.
This person is generally characterised by an utter lack of humour, and by a profound and tragic misunderstanding of the value of his opinions. He doesn’t understand that you have no interest in proving yourself right to him and his fellow shouty folk. Crucially, he believes that if he can control the terms of the "debate", he’ll be able to win it. Because, yes, this type of debate bro believes that debate is a contest, not an exploration.
You can draw a straight line from these YouTubing contrarians and their merchandise stores to the likes of the fake Tracy Zille account. And this is why you must never, ever fall for their angry demands that you debate them. The set-up is designed to keep stoking the pyre of anger and discontent that fuels both their business and their ego, and the more airtime you give them, the worse it is for those trying to constructively change our country for the better.
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