This is what happened when racist America made me Enemy #1 – The Tempest
On Tuesday, June 14, 2016, I woke up to a hell that even I could not have predicted.
I always check my phone when I wake up, a lazy exercise that has me checking site analytics, Facebook, texts, email, and then, if I’m feeling really lazy, Twitter.
That day, I checked Twitter, and my world as I knew it was changed forever.
Hundreds of people were tweeting at me, the vitriol, hatred and fury in their messages each worse than the last one. I scrambled to figure out the source: a petty blogger from a right-wing conservative site wrote a piece called “Syrian Immigrant Who Said 9/11 ‘Changed The World For Good’ Is A Homeland Security Adviser ” had done a Twitter search of my account, looking for anything remotely incriminating.
From: This is what happened when racist America made me Enemy #1 – The Tempest
People seriously suck, and have bad reading comprehension to boot.Report
I don’t actually believe reading comprehension had anything to do with this one.Report
@murali explains the reading comprehension part. Of course, in this case, since I’m not feeling even remotely charitable, I’m gonna go with “People read what they wanted to read and the actual words & context didn’t matter”.
Ergo:
http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.221785416.5907/fc,800×800,navy.u1.jpgReport
Why vote for the lesser evil?Report
I’d rather face annihilation via cosmic event, rather than insanity and bodily consumption by an elder god of questionable character.
TMMVReport
Twitter in four sentences:
• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important?
• If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.
• You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.
• Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.
Seems all aspects are covered…Report
Or, “4 Reasons I Don’t Have A Twitter Account, And Never Will, And I’m Seriously Thinking Facebook Is Getting To Be More Trouble Than It’s Worth”Report
indeed sums up social mediaReport
To be fair, I made the same mistake when I started reading the article and thought she said that 9/11 was ultimately to the good.* But I thought it was some weird neo-con claim about how 9/11 has triggered a series of events that got us serious about combating terrorism and spreading democracy in the middle east.
The possibility that for good meant forever in this case did strike my mind and that made me revise my credence downwards. I do know that when she quoted the dictionary, I believed the “forever” meaning instead of the “9/11 was awesome” interpretation, but I don’t think I was quite there until that line.
*We do say, for good or for ill, X happened. The for good here does not mean forever. It seems we can also say, X happened for good or for ill without essentially changing the meaning of the sentence. Then we can just cut off the second half of the disjunct and also say X happened for good.
The racists on the other hand…Report
It might be a regional phrasing thing. I read it as “change the world forever” and the other possibility didn’t even occur to me.
I could have written that exact line myself without having a second thought about it.
And I honestly suspect that no Twitter-storm would have erupted, due to the fact that I’m not Muslim and therefore my words aren’t being parsed for maximum anger by some readers.Report
Might also be caused by this chain of events:
1. Donald Trump claims Muslims in New Jersey cheered after 9/11 in stump speech.
2. Fact-checkers call bullshit.
3. Trump supporters say, “No, I remember that too,” and start looking for support to prove fact-checkers wrong.
4. Finding nothing, they expand their search to search for any Muslims expressing approval of 9/11. Search parses for phrases “9/11,” “Muslim,” “world,” and “good” in close proximity.
5. Upon finding something that even vaguely resembled an actual hit, proceed to “Fire, ready, aim.” Result: a twitter dogpile.Report
Twitter highlights what search terms you used to find a tweet. You can clearly see in the original article that the DC reporter is searching Alawa’s twitter feed for mentions of “9/11”, “America”, “fuck”, and “white”.Report
She has a interesting work history. I am not entirely convinced this wasn’t troll bait by a certain affiliation of media folk.Report
Seriously? You’re going to be one of those “minority woman is just faking incredibly hateful and persistent harassment including death threats” people?
It’s almost like, the more a person writes about things, and fits into demographics, that make them likely to receive harassment and hate, the less likely a whole segment of folks are to believe that they are faced with harassment and hate. I don’t get it.Report
There’s death threats, and then there’s Israeli Death Threats.Report
All the terror, twice the hummus?Report
Joe,
grow the fuck up. You want to talk about troll bait, I can give you some fucking troll-bait.
Death threats are in the fucking advertising playbook, for god’s sake.
But people don’t use it, businesses do. [Addendum: anyone running a personal business, who knows the people I know, may be using it. I can name some people if you like — part o’ all that Gamergate nonsense.]Report
Jeebus, I was just pointing out that a gal that has been in the media business for awhile, posted on media something that could have more than one meaning, and eventually someone took it and ran with that other meaning. Shocking!
I wasn’t going all ‘death threat denial’ here.Report
Oh, I see, you’re not going all “death threat denial”, you’re going all “she was asking for it”
Or does “troll bait by a certain affiliation of media folk” mean something else?Report
Maybe the ‘people in the media business know what they are writing/doing’ is carrying excessive weight.Report
I personally might write something like “9/11 change the world for good” – even proofread over it before posting – and think ‘yeah, that’s clearly an indication that the results were significant and permanent, not that they’re desirable.
I mean, I’m a secular-identifying white man, haven’t been exposed to the willful malice of sexist / racist / sectarian internet hate the way others have. Maybe others with different experiences would more readily go “oh yeah, alt-right quote-journalists-endquote will totally spin that to mean 9/11 was good.”
But I never in a months of Sundays would have caught that before I posted it.Report
Yeah I get that, and probably the platform you would build on I would look at and say, yeah, df just has the one meaning.
If a media person took that and built it on a platform of ‘controversial and edgy’ I might look at that and say what the hell.Report
I don’t understand your argument. The Tweet could have been trolling. And the responses to the Tweet would still be terrible. The two things are mutually exclusive.
I err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn’t mean that @joe-sal’s question is completely out of bounds. It is certainly a possibility that someone who does social media for a living might have been purposefully ambiguous in anticipation of negative responses.Report
Sure, but if you ONLY ask that question about certain people or certain groups, it can quickly become problematic. I don’t think we have enough of a “data set” on Joe to identify a pattern. But when there is a broader pattern of women, people of color, and women of color being doubted out of the gate, we need to consider that.
In a weird way, DragonFrog’s response paralleled Joe’s initial question: there was enough of a “there” there to make Joe’s question legitimate… but also enough of a “there” there to make DF’s objection legitimate.Report
@kazzy
I just don’t view the world that way. I see a world in which folks are constantly trying to feed me bullsh*t, from the right, left and center. Therefore, I question everything I read. Heck, I try to question the people who agree with me more, because that’s where the biggest risks of confirmation bias are. That’s the way to get the most accurate picture of the world. The question that everyone ought to ask themselves is how important accuracy is relative to other values. And that’s for each person to decide for him or herself.
Now, I don’t go around interrogating everyone. Most of these questions I simply ask to myself, but I don’t see anything wrong with wondering something out loud in the comments section of a blog.Report
@j-r
Interesting perspective. Are you more inclined to think people are stupid or lying?Report
I’m not sure that I’m inclined toward either. Also, not sure that the two things can be disentangled. People are rarely either evil geniuses or well-intention idiots.
I disagree with Tod’s comment above, in that it is almost always about reading comprehension.Report
Yeah, that would carry more weight if she had just sent out the email, someone saw it, and it went viral.
In this case, it was a tweet sent out a really long time ago that was found after a ‘reporter’ that went through hundreds of her tweets looking for a smoking gun. All of her other tweets, as best I can tell from my own going though, appear to be pretty regular stuff. There isn’t anything there that screams “Oh my God, this woman wants death to infidels!”
That alone should have given someone pause, especially a reporter.
But even if it didn’t, it does not appear that the ‘reporter’ reached out to her, or to anyone who knew her, or anyone she worked for, to get a comment, clarification, or any kind of information at all.
That should be a second red flag.
And then, after it was published, it appears that the context finally was explained to the ‘reporter’ — who then simply doubled down on his initial claim. Last I checked, there is nothing on the the reporter’s site or post that notes, at the very least, that she has gone on record with an explanation for why the tweet was taken out of context.
So sorry, @j-r . Normally I appreciate your cool thinking. But in this case, I think the suggestion that this is a simply case of poor reading comprehension is ridiculously incredulous.Report
@tod-kelly
I was’t talking about the initial report. I was talking about the sh*tstorm that followed.
I have no doubt, however, that the original report was an intentional hit piece. But even then, internet instigators know that most of their audience isn’t reading for comprehension, which is what makes spreading these kinds of stories a fruitful exercise.Report
Got it. Then we are actually in agreement.Report
Given the context Tod provides, any serious consideration of the tweet being trolling feels silly. If it was trolling, it was *awful* trolling. Is it possible it was trolling? Of course. It is also possible her account was hacked or that her cat walked across the keyboard or that she was talking about a boat.
But none of those are really the least bit reasonable when looked at in light of the readily available evidence.
So what is gained by questions like Joe’s? It seems like a cheap shot aimed at discrediting someone without actually doing the work to prove why she should be discredited “Who me? I didn’t say she was trolling… I was just wondering aloud…”
I mean, are we *sure* that Joe Sal isn’t the “reporter” who called out the tweet and is here to legitimize his piece? I mean, it’s possible, right?Report
Do you really believe that the possibility of a cat walking across the keyboard resides in the same epistemilogical category as the possibility of someone Tweeting an ambiguous statement to increase the likelihood of a Twitter sh*tstorm?
I find it hard to believe that if there were actual stakes on the line, you’d have the same difficulty in ranking their relative likelihoods.Report
No, but I believe if someone Tweets something that draws no response for several months and then it suddenly does but only through a gross and obvious intentional misreading of it, we should put the onus on the person who actually created the shirtstorm instead of on the person who simply failed to fully prevent them from doing so. Joe’s approach risks making the perfect the enemy of the good… “Well, she didn’t word it so that it couldn’t be misinterpreted, so we should probably question her intentions… months after the fact… and when everything until now demonstrated that her stated goals were consistent with the goals that she realized.”
I was clearly engaging in some hyperbole there and that you focused in on the most hyperbolic aspect of my comment gives me a bit of pause, honestly.
As I said earlier, Joe’s comment wasn’t totally out of bounds, but neither was Dragon Frog’s. Again, to say that Dragon Frog shouldn’t have responded as he did basically undermines Joe’s initial comment: either it is okay to draw reasonable inferences about someone’s intent and unstated meaning or it is not. Joe raised the potential for the Tweeter to have been trolling. Dragon Frog raised the possibility of Joe engaging in a biased and uncharitable reading. Why is one okay and the other not?Report
I suppose m iunt is that it Is POSSIBLE she was trolling but not particularly likely given the full context (as Tod supplied). More likely than a cat walking across the keyboard but both are in the realm of very unlikely. And we should generally avoid wasting time with such indulgences, especially when they play into existing biases.
If the extent of the “evidence” in favor of her trolling is that she was a female activist of color who played for the “other team” — and other evidence suggested just the opposite — we SHOULD be calling out such crap.
I don’t think Joe’s comment was beyond the pale but it was deserving of criticism which DF offered. It was unconsidered and built upon superficial analysis of the person and not the actual facts. Weren’t we recently decrying the lack of critical thinking?Report
I’m not putting the onus on anyone to prove anything, because I’m not trying to evaluate competing claims. Whether she considered the possibility that some people would misread her Tweet exists as an empirical reality completely independent of any reaction that came after it. Time only works in one direction.
As far as I’m concerned, even if she was being purposefully ambiguous, the people who attacked her for it were wrong. Heck, even if someone did Tweet something like “America deserved 9/11,” I’d still defend that person’s right to express herself free of harassment. So, teams don’t really play into my comment.
And I didn’t say anything about what Dragonfrog should or shouldn’t have done. I just said that the claim doesn’t make sense.Report
I suppose I was responding to the issue of how “in bounds” Joe’s comment was. As I said, I don’t think it was out of bounds but I also don’t think it was particularly constructive given the facts.
Below he says that his primary rationale for questioning her intent was her role as a member of the media. That doesn’t seem an absurd point from which to start. But if we ask ourselves before digesting ANY thing ANY one in the media produces, “Am I being trolled?” we’re going to waste a lot of time. We are right to be reasonably skeptical and certain media members have positioned them such that we ought to reflexively question their motives. But there are so many people with varied roles in and around the media pumping out content across multiple platforms seemingly at the speed of light that attempting to troll-moderate every single one will grind every conversation to a halt.
So, basically, absent real evidence that she was trolling the, “Was this person trolling?” should be a question we keep chambered if necessary but only pull the trigger on when given real reason to think we are.Report
My main pivot point was that she was/is a agent of media. The part that bugs me is many appear to want to start at a place of honesty without some degree of awareness that media is a clusterfish of agendas. This person is not working outside of those agendas, if anything she is an insider.Report
Legit, I think that the likelihood of a cat walking across a keyboard being somehow involved in that tweet (not typing the whole thing out a random, but say selecting an autocorrect that made the tweet ever so slightly ambiguously interpretable, or maybe changing 7/11 to 9-11) is right up there with the likelihood that the lady meant to coyly write something deliberately interpretable as offering approval for mass murder.
Which is to say, I wouldn’t for a moment think either happened, but neither is technically impossible, since things like this also happen: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/03/10/cat-shoots-owner-with-mm-handgun.htmlReport
@tod-kelly
My original comment on reading comprehension was aimed at follow on commenters & Twits. Most hit pieces are transparent and depend almost entirely on an audience of useful idiots who don’t read past the headline, yet eagerly fling poo.
Well crafted and subtle hit pieces are a dying art.Report
Option 3, by far the most common, is that people are fooled by their cognitive biases into believing things without adequate empirical support. This isn’t lying (except to oneself) and plenty of smart people fall into this trap.Report
The Tweet could have been trolling.
And she might have been wearing a short skirt and a low-cut top while she typed it.Report
For once, a Facebook meme that is apt:
Me, most of the time: “People are mostly good and mean well.”
Me, after reading comments section of the newspaper: “The world can only be cleansed with fire.”Report
It’s worth noting that the Daily Caller article has still not been updated, and still contains the statement “Neither Alawa nor the DHS replied to TheDC’s requests for comment over Alawa’s social media activity.” Which doesn’t appear to be true but is certainly not true anymore. The comments contain a vigorous debate on whether the US should deport just Muslims or Muslims + Jews for good measure.Report
They’re very very loud, yes, but how many people like this are there, really? (N.b., “We’ll know when we see the popular vote count for Trump” is a humorous but ultimately unsatisfactory answer.)Report
sic transit “you do not have the right to speak without social retribution or consequence”, I guess.Report
I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
She said “9/11 changed the world for good” meaning “forever” not “for the better”. An idiot hate-mongering journalist willfully misread it as the latter. She began receiving “social retribution and consequence” in the form of thousands of truly vile messages.
Did I misunderstand you as suggesting that “social retribution or consequence” including thousands of harassing and threatening messages, are deserved and reasonable for writing something a twisted jerk could misinterpret if they put their mind to it?
Or do you honestly believe that she meant “9/11 changed the world for the better”, chose to write it in a way that 99.9% of people would misunderstand as non-hateful, and the Daily Caller writer was among the perceptive 0.1% who sussed out her endorsement of mass murder?
Or did you just miss that part of the article?Report
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
Pretty much this.Report
“It is an odd phenomena of social media that it somehow transforms cultural relativism’s biggest critics into its most impassioned defenders.”Report
Can you elaborate on how you think that previous OT article applies to this situation?Report
Shall I also chew your food for you?Report
Density, you’ve been really on your top game recently. I almost always disagree with you, but you’ve had a lot of good, sarcastic posts in the last few days. Are you eating more fiber?Report
In other words “Nothing whatsoever.”Report