The Rise of Fakectivism
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
What do the forced departure of Brendan Eich from
Mozilla and #CancelColbert have in common? They are
both examples of Fakectivism.
Fakectivism is social media activism by small
numbers of people that is integrated into the news
cycle because it matches the media’s political
agenda.
Every Tea Party member knows that media coverage of
actual protests is unequal. Twenty students, most of
them volunteers at an environmental non-profit,
protesting Keystone will get media coverage that a
thousand Tea Party members protesting ObamaCare
won't receive.
The same is true of online protests.
Many of the real life protests covered by the media
are fake. For example, unions hire non-union
protesters to protest on their behalf, a fact that
the media organizations covering the protests rarely
point out. (That same privilege wouldn't be extended
to Tea Party members who hired professional
protesters to yell at the cameras for them.) Other
protests pretend to be grass roots when they
actually consist of members or even paid employees
of a single organization.
During the Bush years, many anti-war protests were
actually run by the same small number of radical
left-wing groups, but were reported on as if they
were mainstream marches of ordinary people.
The situation has become much worse online as the
media applies this same selective sloppiness to
internet Fakectivism.
Fakectivism online multiplies the problems with
media coverage of left-wing activism by completely
distorting the number of people participating in a
protest and their credibility in representing anyone
except themselves.
In real life protests, the media routinely reported
higher turnout for left-wing protests and lower
turnout for conservative protests. Online,
Fakectivism dispenses with head counts. If it's a
trending topic, then it's news. And sometimes it's
news, even if it isn't.
Fakectivism begins with left-wing agitprop sites
selectively collecting tweets in support or against
something. Invariably the handful of tweets are
described in collective terms as "The Internet"
being outraged or supportive of something. The use
of the collective "Internet" is a staple of
Fakectivism because it conflates a manufactured
story with the impulses and opinions of billions of
people.
Successful Fakectivism moves up the ladder to higher
end left-wing websites searching for teachable
controversies. These websites have enough status
that they are monitored by producers and editors
from the mainstream media looking for stories.
The mainstream media harvests content from sites
such as Slate or the Huffington Post and reframes it
in biased but credible language while disguising its
sources. Twitter Fakectivism is invariably described
as a "backlash" or a "firestorm". Phrases such as
"Twitter was lit up by outraged users" give
non-technical readers the impression that the
complainers represent the consensus of the site
instead of a small number of overactive users.
The manufactured Fakectivism becomes a major news
story by a successive filtering process that
disguises the dubious source and the credibility of
the originating event.
Eich's donation in defense of marriage had already
become an issue two years ago. The same Twitter
attacks were curated by left-wing Fakectivist
websites, but the 'spark' that would allow the story
to go mainstream was missing. Instead Eich walked
away, mostly unscathed, because the protests did not
gain traction in the media.
The Fakectivism directed at Eich in 2012 fizzled
away because without media involvement the
professional social justice activists are nothing
more than their own feeble rage echo chamber. It's
the mainstream media that makes Fakectivism work by
choosing to report on it. Its outlets put the final
"fake" in Fakectivism.
It's not mythical grass roots outrage that seals the
fate of someone like Brendan Eich. It's the
mainstream media. The social justice Tumblr and
Twitter activists like to think that they can claim
scalps, but the only scalps that they claim are the
ones that the media allows them to take.
Fakectivism is really a means of allowing media
professionals to pursue their political agendas
through selective reporting. The Fakectivists are
only the hook that the media hangs its dirty fedora
on. They manufacture the stories and are repaid with
social justice fellowships at the left-wing agit
prop outlets that pick up their manufactured stories
and pass them up the media ladder.
The left-wing online ecosystem lives or dies by
its ability to move "edgier" material and agendas
into the mainstream media and the media decides
whether the time is right to force the agenda on its
viewers, listeners and readers.
Media and social media Fakectivists both calculate
their stories and protests around a larger agenda.
It's the role of the social media Fakectivists to
aggressively push their most radical agendas and of
the media Fakectivists to moderate their tone. The
media act as the formal gatekeepers of liberalism
determining which radical agenda can be mainstreamed
this week while the social media activists keep
forcing the gates to open even wider.
It's never about the facts. The media and social
media Fakectivists only care about emotional
manipulation in the service of their agenda. Their
stories are morality plays that expect the audience
to view a human drama and come down on their side
and for their agenda. The drama is the narrative
which both sets of Fakectivists skew their way
through misleading reporting.
In the Eich case, the media deliberately
misreported facts about the Mozilla Foundation. For
example, media stories claimed that board members
were resigning in protest over Eich's role. That was
untrue. Mozilla was in turmoil and had been for some
time, but the reasons for that had nothing to do
with Eich’s views on marriage. Eich had stepped into
a thankless role that he didn't want in an
organization whose signature browser had been
steadily losing market share.
Likewise the media failed to explain Eich's major
contribution to the modern internet while
highlighting protest Tweets from a handful of
Mozilla employees, mostly non-technical and/or
associated with the Open Badges Project.
Some of this can be attributed to sloppiness, but
had Eich been a gay CEO targeted by Twitter
protesters angry over his sexual identity, there is
little doubt that the backstory would have been
researched and accurately clarified. Media
sloppiness is a calculated blindness on stories
where research would only damage the narrative.
The media outsources much of its research to
left-wing sites and often only rewrites their
stories. A belated fact check may occasionally shoot
down a false story, as with the Washington Post's
Keystone attack on the Koch Brothers, but mostly
content from Media Matters, Think Progress, Salon,
Gawker and worse streams uninterrupted into the
newspapers of record and the wire services with
changes in style, not substance.
The media only truly goes into research mode when
the facts fit a conservative narrative. If ocean
temperatures are rising, then no research is needed.
The talking points are rewritten and jammed in. But
if ocean temperatures aren't rising, then suddenly
research is needed to explain why the lack of
warming is actually proof of Global Warming. This
brand of counter-intuitive apologetics attracts the
"brightest" figures in the media because it requires
that they make an argument that disproves the facts,
instead of rewriting a Media Matters release.
The traditional "prestige" media that we used to
know still exists, but it exercises less influence
than ever. The real media now mainly reports on
trending internet content, whether it's Twitter
protests, pop stars or cat videos. The distinction
between CNN and any random website that collects the
same viral content is that the viral site is likely
to have it first. That's increasingly the same
distinction between NBC News and the Huffington
Post.
Fakectivism extends a convenient relationship in
which the media acts as a gatekeeper for social
media into the political realm. The difference is
that while the media is agnostic when it comes to
passing along cat videos or reporting on a pop
star's trashy antics, it carefully curates which
protests it takes seriously, which causes it
advances and which people it gets fired.
The media has come to embody a decentralized
relationship between different levels of left-wing
content providers from major activist groups to
random aspirants for social justice fellowships
trying to get a hashtag going on Twitter. What we
think of as the media is only the formal tip of the
iceberg with its billion dollar brand names and
national and international operations.
The real media isn't a station or a newspaper, it's
an agenda. It's a network of relationships between
open radicals and covert radicals. It's a pipeline
for pushing a viewpoint through fake stories.
The media has become a closed loop of the left,
inventing its own stories and reporting on the
stories that it invents. Fakectivism has allowed it
to manufacture its own system of non-profit content
providers who have become an extension of it. It
applies the political relationship between elected
officials and non-profits who answer to community
activists funded by national foundations rather than
their own voters to the news business.
Fakectivism manufactures news. It frees the media
from reporting on actual events and allows them to
report on non-events manufactured by their political
allies with a pre-made narrative. How many people
really wanted Eich gone? It doesn't matter. The
media takes refuge in abstractions. It treats the
internet as a collective force that drives its
reporting, when it's actually just the echo chamber
for its agenda.