Tuesday, August 8, 2023
The weaponization of loneliness
Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump's presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as "rootless white males," disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted "incels," or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. "You can activate that army," Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. "They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Click Older Posts above to see more.
No comments:
Post a Comment