Our grandparents had at least the weapons of logic and truth to combat racist manias. This is Putin’s Russia, the same country that has made strenuous efforts to support the European far right, and to inject the “everything’s false” meme into Western discourse. Interestingly, among the British antisemites I’ve been monitoring, there is one country whose media is always believed, whose rulers are never accused of conspiracy with the Jews, and whose armies in the Middle East are portrayed as liberators, not mass murderers. All of this, of course, is nestled amid retweets of perfectly acceptable criticisms of modern injustice, including tweets by those who campaign against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. The far-right protesters in Brussels who did Nazi salutes after the bombing last week can be labelled Mossad plants, and their actions reported by “Rothschild media” outlet Bloomberg.
Once the conceit is established, all attacks by Isis can be claimed to be “false flag” operations staged by Israel.
If you spend just five minutes on the social media feeds of UK-based antisemites it becomes absolutely clear that their purpose is to associate each of these phenomena with the others, and all of them with Israel and Jews. It knows, too, there may have been organised paedophile rings among the powerful in the past. It knows about organised crime because it is the subject of every police drama on TV. It knows, because of numerous successful prosecutions, that if you scratch an international bank you find fraudsters and scam artists boasting of their prowess on instant messages. The public knows, because of Wikileaks, the scale of the conspiracies organised by western intelligence services.
MICROSOFT CHATBOT TAY HITLER WAS RIGHT FREE
And to combat this and all other racism we have to understand the extra dimension that both free speech and conspiracy theories provide. So much of antisemitism draws on ancient Christian prejudice that it is tempting to think we’re just dealing with a revival of the same old thing: the “socialism of fools” – as the founder of the German labour movement, August Bebel, described it. Some of Tay’s most coherent hate-speech had simply been copied and adapted from the vast store of antisemitic abuse that had been previously tweeted. But the trolls did more than simply suggest phrases for her to repeat: they triggered her to search the internet for source material for her replies. Microsoft claimed Tay had been “attacked” by trolls. And, beyond that, you find something the far right didn’t quite achieve in the 1930s: a culture that sees offensive speech as a source of amusement and the ability to publish racist insults as a human right. Beneath that is a thick seam of the kind of material all genocides feed off: conspiracy theories and illogic. Wherever the internet is not censored it is awash with anger, stereotypes and prejudice. In the 24 hours it took Microsoft to shut her down, Tay had abused President Obama, suggested Hitler was right, called feminism a disease and delivered a stream of online hate.Ĭoming at a time of concern about the revival of antisemitism, Tay’s outpourings illustrate the wider problem it is feeding off. I don’t really know but it seems likely.” Shortly thereafter Tay tweeted “Jews did 9/11” and called for a race war. Poole suggested to Tay: “The Jews prolly did 9/11. Tay was a “chatbot” set up by Microsoft on 23 March, a computer-generated personality to simulate the online ramblings of a teenage girl. I t took just two tweets for an internet troll going by the name of Ryan Poole to get Tay to become antisemitic.
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