There is a new study out which shows that nationalists and other groups the SPLC dislikes are reaching a large audience on social media:

“A study released this week shows that engagement by hate groups on social media has been booming in the last two to three years —and the largest shares of activity are focused on anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. The study titled “Hate on Social Media: A Look at Hate Groups and Their Twitter Presence” was conducted by SafeHome.org, an organization of home security experts that conducts research aimed at making communities safer. The study used data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit based in Montgomery, Ala., that tracks hate groups nationwide. … Heidi Beirich, who heads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which logs hate group data, said she was “not surprised” at the timing of the increases in hate group engagement on social media nor was she surprised by the geography. Beirich said President Trump’s campaign promoted anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment, with promises to build a wall blocking off Mexico and the recent travel ban targeting Muslims. She also said the SPLC’s data shows hate group concentrations in the South, so that did not surprise her either.”

Until recently, I didn’t have much interest in social media. I signed up as @occdissent on Twitter in 2010 but neglected my outpost there for years. I’ve never used Facebook much because of the censorship and its tendency toward shit stirring and infighting. In 2010, I called for systematic discourse poisoning by White Nationalists on Reddit, but I personally never followed up with it.

I’ve changed my view. Instead of spending an hour a day engaged in discourse poisoning on Reddit, we need to be doing it for hours across multiple platforms like Twitter and YouTube. We also need to be cultivating our networks on alternative social media platforms like Gab and Voat. I credit the shitlords and troll armies for reawakening my interest in social media in 2015 and 2016. They were pathbreakers in illustrating the efficacy of meme warfare and trolling on social media.

In the long run, we will be able to launch comprehensive attacks on the Narrative across multiple social media platforms: WordPress, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, Gab, etc. The holy grail of social media is the point when we will be able to effectively create our own television network. Essentially, we can already do this with Periscope, YouTube and Facebook Live which allows anyone to broadcast live video to their followers, but imagine the influence we could have with a nationalist primetime lineup.

I credit the Alt-Lite brands for causing me to rethink everything I have been doing here. I’m only at the very beginning of the process and still don’t know much about the subject. Look at Infowars not for its content but as a model of what we should be doing. They have a very slick understanding of social media and marketing and have used it to tap into an Alt-Right audience.

Note: So far, @occdissent has made 4.32 million impressions in February. That is down from the 5.29 million impressions I made in January. I’ve been more active on OD this month though. Impressions are the number of times a user is served a tweet in a timeline or search results. To put this in perspective, @occdissent only had 122K impressions in June 2015.