Crypto-Fascism: How the Alt-Right uses Guerilla Warfare Tactics to spread their Ideology to Mainstream Social Media Platforms
Many news outlets have recently been featuring stories about the so-called “dog whistles” used by members of the alt-right. Signals such as the “O.K.” hand sign, represented with an emoji in a tweet from far-right political activist Lauren Southern, are meant to be clearly understood by their intended white supremacist audience, while being largely innocuous to most readers.
This “secret language” seems rather silly, seeing as all it would take to unveil the code to the world is for one mainstream news source to pick up on it, but therein lies the most insidious part of this new tactic. These symbols aren’t meant to be a secret. The trick is plausible deniability. Early on, this meant that members of the alt-right would wait for a symbol to get picked up by the media, and then lambast whichever outlet was unlucky enough to publish an article about it for their “sensational, liberal paranoia.”
More recently, however, white supremacists have employed this same trick of plausible deniability to get around hate-speech filtering and moderator bans on mainstream social media sites, as well as coercing members of these sites to join their cause, appealing to those in favor of free speech by framing themselves as anti-censorship activists, victimized by the deletion of their supposedly innocent comments or posts by power-hungry moderators.
One example of this is seen in the controversy surrounding a subreddit known as r/frenworld. The subreddit, which has only five rules, one being “be frenly” [sic], seems innocent enough, but taking a closer look reveals a frightening amount of fascist symbolism and rhetoric in the seemingly wholesome cartoons posted on the sub.
The above image features the subreddit’s de facto mascot, Apu, a character popularized on the infamous internet forum 4chan, dropping a bowl of fruit, with the fruit arranged to resemble a Jewish caricature (the banana is a nose, the blueberries are eyes, and the apple slice is a yarmulke). Though easy for a casual reader to scroll past, the antisemitic imagery is clearly present, and not accidental, as the original poster’s comment suggests. It is also worth noting that in his comment, the poster includes the phrase “I dindu nuffin,” an anti-black pejorative popularized on 4chan. This post, and others like it, is subtle enough to go unnoticed by anyone not deliberately scanning for racist dogwhistles, and therefore manages to slip under the radar of sitewide moderators and new users trying to get a feel for the subreddit before going further into the community.
Not to be limited to pictographic signalling, the r/frenworld community has devised a number of terms to convey radical fascist messages in normal conversation. For instance, Jewish people are sometimes referred to as “nosefrens” or “starfrens;” “Honk Honk,” or sometimes “Hulk Hogan” is code for “Heil Hitler;” and to kill or injure someone is referred to as “bopping” them.
These hidden symbols and coded words are far from harmless. Users have advocated for racially motivated murders, and defended themselves from detractors (called “nonfrens”) with plausible deniability. This is seen below in a post that seems to be alluding to something a tad more sinister than the Roswell incident, despite what the original poster claims.
Despite how plainly the racism can be seen when pointed out, r/frenworld is actually one of the more subtle crypto-fascist communities operating on Reddit. Some others include r/AgainstDomesticAbuse, a deceptively named community built around hating interracial couples, and r/weekendgunnit, a gun rights subreddit focused mainly on planning for what it calls “boogaloo,” otherwise known as race war.
Avoiding blatant racism not only helps these users and subreddits to stick around longer before being banned, it also allows the alt-right community to stir up public outrage in “free speech advocacy” subreddits such as r/WatchRedditDie when the bans eventually do occur.
Reddit isn’t the only platform this happens on. Twitter is infested with thousands of alt-right users with a coded vocabulary similar to that of 4chan and r/frenworld. Many of these users subvert bans by making new accounts with similar names, and making tweets like the one below to regain their previous following.
Not only is this a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service, it also showcases the disturbing ease with which the alt-right community on Twitter (referred to by its members as “frog twitter”) is able to circumvent the few tools in place to prevent hate speech on the platform.
Twitter fascists are typically more bold and more radical than their Reddit counterparts. This is likely because the interconnectivity of users is greater on Twitter than on Reddit, and Twitter accounts allow a greater degree of personal expression (profile pictures, more flexibility in usernames, etc.), making it easier for racists to identify members of their “in group,” combined with the decentralized nature of the platform, which makes it more difficult for moderates to keep tabs on specific communities. Their slang includes terms such as “WE” (short for “WE WUZ KANGS”) and “13/50” to refer to African-Americans (based on a frequently cited statistic regarding crime rates), along with “World War Poo” to refer to race war, which they believe to be inevitable. “The JQ” is short for “The Jewish Question” and terms such as “schlomo” “k*ke” and “jewdi” are used to refer to Jewish people. (When they want to be more cryptic, Jewish people are sometimes referred to as “members of a certain Levantine tribe,” and members of the alt-right are said to be “those who wish to preserve Western society”).
The threat posed by the alt-right’s new strategy of cryptic communication is alarming, and it seems the only viable solution to avoid giving racists a mainstream platform is thorough documentation of any and all suspected dogwhistles, along with monitoring of users suspected of being members of a hateful ideology. Regardless of how the situation is treated, it signifies a new era of internet propaganda, and it has serious implications for the treatment of social media by governments in the future.
