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World War Meme: How anonymous "keyboard commandos" helped Trump win, now going after Europe
From Politico:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-trump-supporters-trolls-internet-214856
There is no real evidence that memes won the election, but there is little question they changed its tone, especially in the fast-moving and influential currents of social media. The meme battalions created a mass of pro-Trump iconography as powerful as the Obama “Hope” poster and far more adaptable; they relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics—like conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health—that they would otherwise ignore. And they provoked a variety of real-world reactions, from Clinton’s August speech denouncing the alt-right to the Anti-Defamation League’s designation of Pepe as a hate symbol to—after the election—the armed assault on a Washington pizzeria wrongly believed to be hiding sex slaves.
Part of the power of memes has always been their organic, grass-roots quality: They bubble up from the fever swamps of the internet, shrouded in anonymity, as agents of chaos and mockery. But in this election, something seemed to change. They began colliding with a real campaign operation and doing useful work, seemingly always pushing in one direction. Curious about what happened, I tracked down and interviewed a number of veterans of the Great Meme War, along with others who hung out in the same dark corners of the internet and watched it all unfold. It turns out that, as anonymous online pranksters go, they’re surprisingly organized and motivated. It also turns out that the Trump campaign, which spent relatively little on messaging, paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start. They took it seriously, even pushing some memes out to the candidate’s millions of Twitter followers.
-snip-
But it wasn’t until the arrival months later of Steve Bannon, who brought with him an in-depth knowledge of the internet’s underbelly acquired while growing the anti-establishment Breitbart News, that the campaign’s engagement with the fever swamps reached its apogee. By the fall, a team in the war room at Trump Tower was monitoring social media trends, including The_Donald subreddit—a message board that acted as a conduit between 4Chan and the mainstream Web and refers to its users as “centipedes” in honor of the aforementioned video—and privately communicating with the most active users to seed new trends, according to two former Trump campaign officials. The team would bump up anything particularly catchy to social media director Dan Scavino. (Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said there were no staffers dedicated full-time to monitoring social media trends, and that Bannon was not involved in social media strategy.) But one former campaign official said the goal was to relentlessly tilt the prevailing sentiment on social media in favor of Trump: “He clearly won that war against Hillary Clinton day after day after day.”
-snip-
Meanwhile, the meme warriors have opened up a second front in Europe, where they are applying their U.S. election experiences to help far-right parties in upcoming races in France and Germany. “We’ve built a whole team in France. We’re in the process of building one in Germany,” the white nationalist hacker Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, a 4Chan veteran, told me a month after Trump’s win. “We’re about to get back in the saddle. Start making trouble again.”
Auernheimer, who once worked in marketing, said he and a team of unnamed accomplices had used industry-grade marketing tools like multivariate testing to deploy the most effective pro-Trump memes online during the U.S. election. He said he studied persuasion literature and evangelical street preaching to perfect his methods of converting Bernie Sanders supporters into Trump backers, and that he was in the process of recruiting volunteer teams in Germany and France to tip those countries to nationalist parties.
He is far from alone in targeting Europe. In January, BuzzFeed gained access to private chatrooms in which veterans of the Great Meme War were organizing to influence the French elections. The highly structured campaign included long guides that provided prefabricated memes and instructions for English speakers who want to appear French on social media. Organizers are urging American users to set up fake “sock-puppet” social media accounts and to teach French collaborators how to create effective memes in an effort to help the far right’s anti-immigrant, pro-Russia candidate, Marine Le Pen.
In our call, Auernheimer, breaking at points into manic laughter, pointed to growing friction between France’s military and police and its civilian leadership, and said he was working to foment popular sentiment in favor of a coup if Le Pen’s National Front does not win in April. “We hope to catalyze a new democratic system or encourage military and police putting the country back in order,” he said.
He offered to show me his command center if I flew out to his home in Ukraine. In January, when I emailed him to follow up on his offer, he responded, “Due to an NDA I can’t have any further discussions with you on this subject. Sorry.” It is not clear if the non-disclosure agreement, like meme magic itself, is real or illusory. We may find out in April.
Part of the power of memes has always been their organic, grass-roots quality: They bubble up from the fever swamps of the internet, shrouded in anonymity, as agents of chaos and mockery. But in this election, something seemed to change. They began colliding with a real campaign operation and doing useful work, seemingly always pushing in one direction. Curious about what happened, I tracked down and interviewed a number of veterans of the Great Meme War, along with others who hung out in the same dark corners of the internet and watched it all unfold. It turns out that, as anonymous online pranksters go, they’re surprisingly organized and motivated. It also turns out that the Trump campaign, which spent relatively little on messaging, paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start. They took it seriously, even pushing some memes out to the candidate’s millions of Twitter followers.
-snip-
But it wasn’t until the arrival months later of Steve Bannon, who brought with him an in-depth knowledge of the internet’s underbelly acquired while growing the anti-establishment Breitbart News, that the campaign’s engagement with the fever swamps reached its apogee. By the fall, a team in the war room at Trump Tower was monitoring social media trends, including The_Donald subreddit—a message board that acted as a conduit between 4Chan and the mainstream Web and refers to its users as “centipedes” in honor of the aforementioned video—and privately communicating with the most active users to seed new trends, according to two former Trump campaign officials. The team would bump up anything particularly catchy to social media director Dan Scavino. (Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said there were no staffers dedicated full-time to monitoring social media trends, and that Bannon was not involved in social media strategy.) But one former campaign official said the goal was to relentlessly tilt the prevailing sentiment on social media in favor of Trump: “He clearly won that war against Hillary Clinton day after day after day.”
-snip-
Meanwhile, the meme warriors have opened up a second front in Europe, where they are applying their U.S. election experiences to help far-right parties in upcoming races in France and Germany. “We’ve built a whole team in France. We’re in the process of building one in Germany,” the white nationalist hacker Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, a 4Chan veteran, told me a month after Trump’s win. “We’re about to get back in the saddle. Start making trouble again.”
Auernheimer, who once worked in marketing, said he and a team of unnamed accomplices had used industry-grade marketing tools like multivariate testing to deploy the most effective pro-Trump memes online during the U.S. election. He said he studied persuasion literature and evangelical street preaching to perfect his methods of converting Bernie Sanders supporters into Trump backers, and that he was in the process of recruiting volunteer teams in Germany and France to tip those countries to nationalist parties.
He is far from alone in targeting Europe. In January, BuzzFeed gained access to private chatrooms in which veterans of the Great Meme War were organizing to influence the French elections. The highly structured campaign included long guides that provided prefabricated memes and instructions for English speakers who want to appear French on social media. Organizers are urging American users to set up fake “sock-puppet” social media accounts and to teach French collaborators how to create effective memes in an effort to help the far right’s anti-immigrant, pro-Russia candidate, Marine Le Pen.
In our call, Auernheimer, breaking at points into manic laughter, pointed to growing friction between France’s military and police and its civilian leadership, and said he was working to foment popular sentiment in favor of a coup if Le Pen’s National Front does not win in April. “We hope to catalyze a new democratic system or encourage military and police putting the country back in order,” he said.
He offered to show me his command center if I flew out to his home in Ukraine. In January, when I emailed him to follow up on his offer, he responded, “Due to an NDA I can’t have any further discussions with you on this subject. Sorry.” It is not clear if the non-disclosure agreement, like meme magic itself, is real or illusory. We may find out in April.
2 replies
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[font size = 4]Attended by Mike Flynn Jr and others (I think Kellyanne?)[/font]
[font size = 4]Sponsored by racist orgs Warfare Media and Art Wing Conspiracy[/font]
