“‘It’s a toxic place.’ How the online world of white nationalists distorts population genetics”
“Stormfront and similar online forums, as well as the comment sections on “alt-right” news websites and Twitter accounts, regularly host what he’s dubbed “informal journal clubs,” dedicated to dissecting population genetics papers and sorting them into those that support a white nationalist ideology and those that don’t. For more than a year, he has followed the evolution of this strange, racist trend…
People will grab figures from scientific papers and edit them in several different ways to make them look like they support the white nationalist ideology. For instance, in a 2008 Science paper, researchers published a figure with a plot inferring regional ancestry of dozens of different populations around the world. Based on the genetic compositions of hundreds of individuals, the figure divided the populations into clusters that revealed patterns in their ancestral population structure.
So [people on the forums] take this plot and add some subtle text like “The genetic reality of race,” with no context showing what the scientists were actually looking at, and ignoring the fact that there’s a continuum among the individuals…
In an argument between a logical person and illogical person, the logical person is always going to lose because the illogical person isn’t playing by the same rules.”
