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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Before resuming discussion about the Sweden Democrats, we review information about the overlap between WikiLeaks and CIA derivatives such as the Broadcasting Board of Governors. (In our previous program, we noted that both the Pirate Bay website–which hosted WikiLeaks–and the Sweden Democrats were financed by Swedish fascist Carl Lundstrom.) In this context, one should remember in connection with the allegations of Russian primacy in the foreign support for Sweden Democrats, that the CIA’s hacking tools are designed to mimic Russian cyber activity.
After review of Carl Lundstrom’s financing of the Sweden Democrats, as well as his central role in financing the Pirate Bay site (which hosted WikiLeaks, courtesy of Joran Jermas/Israel Shamir), we delve into the operations of Lundstrom’s Sweden Democrat associates.
Utilizing the anti-immigrant theme utilized with great effect by fascists around the world, the Sweden Democrats are gaining ground on the Swedish political landscape.
Key points of discussion include: The Nazi origins of the Sweden Democrats; the Waffen SS background of one of the party’s founders; networking of the Sweden Democrats with fascists and reactionaries in other countries, including the U.S., France and Germany; the pivotal role of the internet in advancing the fortunes of the Sweden Democrats.
Next, we examine the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government.
Again, in recent programs, we have examined the profound role of online technology in the promotion of fascism, as well as overlapping areas of intelligence activity. In that context, it is vital to remember that the Internet was developed as a weapon, with the focus of the technology being counterinsurgency.
In Brazil, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government received decisive momentum from YouTube, which is transforming the political landscape in Brazil, as it is in this country.
“. . . . In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
‘YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,’ said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office. . . .”
Two excerpts from the story below encapsulate and epitomize the growing, successful manifestation of internet fascism: “An Ecosystem of Hate” and the “Dictatorship of the ‘Like’ ”
“. . . . An Ecosystem of Hate
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots. . . . .
. . . . As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil. . . .”
” . . . . ‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked ‘the YouTube Division’ and said, ‘This is the heart of things.’
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right. . . .
. . . . The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said ‘we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.’
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled ‘1964′ for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings. ‘I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,’ she said. . . .”
1a. In FTR #‘s 724, 725, 732, 745, 755 and 917, we have detailed the fascist and far right-wing ideology, associations and politics of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Here, we review the links between the WikiLeaks milieu and the Tor/CIA
Tor, Appelbaum, Assange and WikiLeaks:
- Became increasingly intertwined, enjoying accolades from many, apparently unsuspecting, groups: ” . . . . His [Appelbaum’s] association with WikiLeaks and Assange boosted the Tor Project’s public profile and radical credentials. Support and accolades poured in from journalists, privacy organizations, and government watchdogs. The American Civil Liberties Union partnered with Appelbaum on an Internet privacy project, and New York’s Whitney Museum—one of the leading modern art museums in the world—invited him for a ‘Surveillance Teach-In.’ The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Tor its Pioneer Award, and Roger Dingledine made in on Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for protecting ‘anyone and everyone from the dangers of Big Brother.’ . . . .”
- Differed fundamentally from the accepted text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endorsing Tor, reporters assumed that the US government saw the anonymity nonprofit as a threat. But internal documents obtained through FOIA from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as well as analysis of Tor’s government contracts paint a different picture. They reveal that Appelbaum and Dingledine worked with Assange on securing WikiLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their handlers at the BBG informed about their relationship and even provided information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks’s secure submission system. . . .”
- Did not adversely affect the government funding of Tor at all, as might be expected by the superficial apparent reality of the situation: ” . . . . Perhaps most telling was that support from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] continued even after WikiLeaks began publishing classified government information and Appelbaum became the target of a larger Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks. For example, on July 31, 2010, CNET reported that Appelbaum had been detained at the Las Vegas airport and questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks. News of the detention made headlines around the world, once again highlighting Appelbaum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week later, Tor’s executive director Andrew Lewman, clearly worried that this might affect Tor’s funding, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smoothing things over and answering ‘any questions you may have about the recent press regarding Jake and WikiLeaks.’ But Lewman was in for a pleasant surprise: Roger Dingledine had been keeping folks at the BBG in the loop, and everything seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a number of questions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
- ” . . . . In 2011 contracts came in without a hitch–$150,000 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors and $227,118 from the State Department. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of money from the Pentagon: a new $503,706 annual contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, an elite information and intelligence unit that houses a top-secret cyber-warfare division.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stanford military contractor that had done counterinsurgency, networking, and chemical weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larger Navy ‘Command, Control, Communcations, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance’ program to improve military operations. A year later, Tor would see its government contracts more than double to $2.2 million: $353,000 from the State Department, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors. . . .”
1b. After review of Carl Lundstrom’s financing of the Sweden Democrats, as well as Lundstrom’s central role in financing the Pirate Bay site (which hosted WikiLeaks, courtesy of Joran Jermas/Israel Shamir), we delve into the operations of Lundstrom’s associates.
Utilizing the anti-immigrant theme utilized with great effect by fascists around the world, the Sweden Democrats are gaining ground on the Swedish political landscape.
Key points of discussion include: The Nazi origins of the Sweden Democrats; the Waffen SS background of one of the party’s founders; networking of the Sweden Democrats with fascists and reactionaries in other countries, including the U.S., France and Germany; the pivotal role of the internet in advancing the fortunes of the Sweden Democrats.
. . . . That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso.
In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. What is even more striking is how many people in Sweden — progressive, egalitarian, welcoming Sweden — seem to be warming to the nationalists’ view: that immigration has brought crime, chaos and a fraying of the cherished social safety net, not to mention a withering away of national culture and tradition.
Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.
To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplification of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.
The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.
A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right websites.
Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.
At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content. . . .
. . . . The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.
“I’d put Sweden up there with the anti-Soros campaign,” said Chloe Colliver, a researcher for the institute, referring to anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, the billionaire benefactor of liberal causes. “It’s become an enduring centerpiece of the far-right conversation.”
From Margins to Mainstream
Mattias Karlsson, the Sweden Democrats’ international secretary and chief ideologist, likes to tell the story of how he became a soldier in what he has described as the “existential battle for our culture’s and our nation’s survival.”
It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Karlsson, now 41, was attending high school in the southern city of Vaxjo. Sweden was accepting a record number of refugees from the Balkan War and other conflicts. In Vaxjo and elsewhere, young immigrant men began joining brawling “kicker” gangs, radicalizing Mr. Karlsson and drawing him toward the local skinhead scene.
He took to wearing a leather jacket with a Swedish flag on the back and was soon introduced to Mats Nilsson, a Swedish National Socialist leader who gave him a copy of “Mein Kampf.” They began to debate: Mr. Nilsson argued that the goal should be ethnic purity — the preservation of “Swedish DNA.” Mr. Karlsson countered that the focus should be on preserving national culture and identity. That, he said, was when Mr. Nilsson conferred on him an epithet of insufficient commitment to the cause — “meatball patriot,” meaning that “I thought that every African or Arab can come to this country as long as they assimilate and eat meatballs.”
It is an account that offers the most benign explanation for an odious association. Whatever the case, in 1999, he joined the Sweden Democrats, a party undeniably rooted in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Indeed, scholars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immigration parties in Europe and makes its rise from marginalized to mainstream so remarkable.
The party was founded in 1988 by several Nazi ideologues, including a former member of the Waffen SS. Early on, it sought international alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist group founded by a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Sweden Democrats wore Nazi uniforms to party functions. Its platform included the forced repatriation of all immigrants since 1970.
That was not, however, a winning formula in a country where social democrats have dominated every election for more than a century.
While attending university, Mr. Karlsson had met Jimmie Akesson, who took over the Sweden Democrats’ youth party in 2000 and became party leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was outspoken in his belief that Muslim refugees posed “the biggest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War.” But to make that case effectively, he and Mr. Karlsson agreed, they needed to remake the party’s image.
“We needed to really address our past,” Mr. Karlsson said.They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward extreme xenophobia and racism, emphasized their youthful leadership and urged members to dress presentably. And while immigration remained at the center of their platform, they moderated the way they talked about it.
No longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.
Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.
The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.
To what extent the party’s makeover is just window dressing is an open question.
The doubts were highlighted in what became known as “the Iron Pipe Scandal” in 2012. Leaked video showed two Sweden Democrat MPs and the party’s candidate for attorney general hurling racist slurs at a comedian of Kurdish descent, then threatening a drunken witness with iron pipes.
High-ranking party officials have bounced between Sweden and Hungary, ruled by the authoritarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Mr. Karlsson himself has come under fire for calling out an extremist site as neo-fascist while using an alias to recommend posts as “worth reading” to party members.
“There’s a public face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stockholm-based foundation that tracks far-right extremism.
Still, even detractors admit that strategy has worked. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats captured 5.7 percent of the vote, enough for the party, and Mr. Karlsson, to enter Parliament for the first time. That share has steadily increased along with the growing population of refugees. (Today, roughly 20 percent of Sweden’s population is foreign born.)
At its peak in 2015, Sweden accepted 163,000 asylum-seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria. Though border controls and tighter rules have eased that flow, Ardalan Shekarabi, the country’s public administration minister, acknowledged that his government had been slow to act.
Mr. Shekarabi, an immigrant from Iran, said the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them.
“I absolutely don’t think that the majority of Swedes have racist or xenophobic views, but they had questions about this migration policy and the other parties didn’t have any answers,” he said. “Which is one of the reasons why Sweden Democrats had a case.” . . . .
. . . . For years, the Sweden Democrats had struggled to make their case to the public. Many mainstream media outlets declined their ads. The party even had difficulty getting the postal service to deliver its mailers. So it built a network of closed Facebook pages whose reach would ultimately exceed that of any other party.
But to thrive in the viral sense, that network required fresh, alluring content. It drew on a clutch of relatively new websites whose popularity was exploding.
Members of the Sweden Democrats helped create two of them: Samhallsnytt (News in Society) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 election year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.
These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish internet users a week and, according to an Oxford University study, accounted for 85 percent of the election-related “junk news” — deemed deliberately distorted or misleading — shared online. There were other sites, too, all injecting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic messaging into the Swedish political bloodstream.
“Immigration Behind Shortage of Drinking Water in Northern Stockholm,” read one recent headline. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daughter; Thought It Was Legal,” read another. “Performed Female Genital Mutilation on Her Children — Given Asylum in Sweden,” read a third. . . . .
. . . . At the magazine Nya Tider, the editor, Vavra Suk, has traveled to Moscow as an election observer and to Syria, where he produced Kremlin-friendly accounts of the civil war. Nya Tider has published work by Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Donald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”
Nya Tider’s contributors include Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of Zuerst!, a German far-right newspaper. Mr. Ochsenreiter — who has appeared regularly on RT, the Kremlin propaganda channel — worked until recently for Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the German Bundestag representing the far-right Alternative for Germany party. . . . .
Links Abroad
. . . . Another way to look inside the explosive growth of Sweden’s alt-right outlets is to see who is linking to them. The more links, especially from well-trafficked outlets, the more likely Google is to rank the sites as authoritative. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more likely to see them when they search for, say, immigration and crime.
The Times analyzed more than 12 million available links from over 18,000 domains to four prominent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhallsnytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lindholm from two search engine optimization tools and represents a snapshot of all known links through July 2.
As expected, given the relative paucity of Swedish speakers worldwide, most of the links came from Swedish-language sites.
But the analysis turned up a surprising number of links from well-trafficked foreign-language sites — which suggests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been driven to a significant degree from abroad.
“It has the makings, the characteristics, of an operation whose purpose or goal is to help these sites become relevant by getting them to be seen as widely as possible,” Mr. Lindholm said.
Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish language sites. English-language sites, along with Norwegian ones, linked the most, nearly a million times. But other European-language far-right sites — Russian but also Czech, Danish, German, Finnish and Polish — were also frequent linkers.
The Times identified 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.
Many are well known in American far-right circles. Among them is the Gatestone Institute, a think tank whose site regularly stokes fears about Muslims in the United States and Europe. Its chairman until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and its funders have included Rebekah Mercer, a prominent wealthy Trump supporter.Other domains that linked to all four Swedish sites included Stormfront, one of the oldest and largest American white supremacist sites; Voice of Europe, a Kremlin-friendly right-wing site; a Russian-language blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site supportive of the AfD in Germany. . . . .
. . . . But it came at a price: some prominent center-right politicians are now expressing a willingness to work with the Sweden Democrats, portending a new political alignment.
In February, the Sweden Democrats’ Mr. Karlsson strode into a Washington-area hotel where leaders of the American and European right were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. As he settled in at the lobby bar, straightening his navy three-piece suit, he was clearly very much at home.
At the conference — where political boot-camp training mixed with speeches by luminaries like Mr. Trump and the British populist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karlsson hoped to learn about the infrastructure of the American conservative movement, particularly its funding and use of the media and think tanks to broaden its appeal. But in a measure of how nationalism and conservatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Washington, many of the Americans with whom he wanted to network were just as eager to network with him.
Mr. Karlsson had flown in from Colorado, where he had given a speech at the Steamboat Institute, a conservative think tank. That morning, Tobias Andersson, 23, the Sweden Democrats’ youngest member of Parliament and a contributor to Breitbart, had spoken to Americans for Tax Reform, a bastion of tax-cut orthodoxy.
Now, they found themselves encircled by admirers like Matthew Hurtt, the director for external relationships at Americans for Prosperity, part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political operation, and Matthew Tyrmand, a board member of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses undercover filming to sting its targets.
Mr. Tyrmand, who is also an adviser to a senator from Poland’s anti-immigration ruling Law and Justice party, was particularly eager. “You are taking your country back!” he exclaimed.
Mr. Karlsson smiled.
2. In recent programs, we have examined the profound role of online technology in the promotion of fascism, as well as overlapping areas of intelligence activity. In that context, it is vital to remember that the Internet was developed as a weapon, with the focus of the technology being counterinsurgency.
In Brazil, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government received decisive momentum from YouTube, which is transforming the political landscape in Brazil, as it is in this country.
. . . . In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office. . . .
Two excerpts from the story below encapsulate and epitomize the growing, successful manifestation of internet fascism: “An Ecosystem of Hate” and the “Dictatorship of the ‘Like’ ”
. . . . An Ecosystem of Hate
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots. . . . .
. . . . As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil. . . .
. . . . ‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right. . . .
. . . . The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings. “I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
“How YouTube Radicalized Brazil” by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub; The New York Times; 8/11/2019.
When Matheus Dominguez was 16, YouTube recommended a video that changed his life.
He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.
YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.
In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office.
Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. . . .
. . . . And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. . . .
. . . . But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.
As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.
The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in over $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.
Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some of the findings and promised to make changes.
Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said that YouTube has “invested heavily in the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”
Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.
Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a break with the status quo, Ms. Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.
“This is happening everywhere,” she said.
The Party of YouTube
Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.
He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.
“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”
“It was like that with everyone,” he said.
The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian schools.
“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D., a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.
More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.
“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.
Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.
Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Mr. Jordy took inspiration from bloggers like Mr. Moura and his political mentor, Mr. Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.
He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the federal legislature.
“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”
Down The Rabbit Hole
A few hundred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over computers, trying understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.
The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be tilting the site’s overall political content.
In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.
A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by YouTube’s recommendation engine.
Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.
By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Mr. Moura’s.
Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.
The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them, the researchers concluded.
One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political base, which barely existed on a national level.
Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.
YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate. . . .
An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.
The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions mandatory.
As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.
“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”
“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’”
“We need the companies to face their role,” Ms. Diniz said. “Ethically, they are responsible.”
As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.
In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.
Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.
One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.
Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said.
“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”
‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right.
But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Mr. Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some people around Mr. Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”
The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings.
“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
With the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s second impeachment just getting underway, here’s a pair of article that are a reminder that the target audience for this impeachment isn’t just the American public. Fascists and wannabe dictators around the world have got to be watching how this plays out, and likely rooting for Trump’s acquittal. And of Trump’s wannbe-dictator fans around the world, Jair Bolsonaro is arguably his biggest fan. Not just a fan, but also a student, especially in the area of preemptively delegitimizing elections. At least that’s the growing fear in Brazil now that Bolsonaro has been making it clear that his campaign strategy for the upcoming 2022 elections is going to be the Trump 2020 strategy: preemptively declare the whole voting system is rigged against him:
“Since winning election in 2018, far-right Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has waged an all-out assault on the country’s democratic institutions, sought to undermine faith in its electoral system, and trafficked in many of the same voting-related conspiracy theories that Trump and the Republican Party fomented over the last six months.”
Yes, Jair Bolsonaro has been such a consistent enemy of Brazil’s democratic institution after his 2018 victory that you almost have to wonder if Trump was following Bolsonaro’s lead and not the other way around. It’s that track record that puts Brazil near the top of the list of democracies expected to be tested by a coup attempt or two in coming years.
It’s also quite interesting that Brazil’s far right appears to be joining Republicans in demonizing electronic voting machines, with Bolsonaro demanding that they return to paper ballots by 2022. On the one hand, Bolsonaro is clearly setting up a claim of a stolen election should he lose. But at the same time, there’s no getting around the reality that electronic voting machines really are an absurd security risk for elections, something voting security experts have warned about for years. The irony is that, at least in the US, it’s virtually always been Republicans who seem to benefit when electronic voting machines have come into use. It’s an example of one of the challenges facing corrupt leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump. On the one hand, making baseless “electronic voting machines stole the election from me!” claims is an alluring short-term response to an election loss, but actually keeping those riggable electronic voting machines in place for future elections is obviously a much more desirable form of corruption. So when we see politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro focus on claims of electronic voting machine rigging and demand that elections return to paper ballots, it’s important to keep in mind that they probably aren’t actually serious about wanting to see a return to paper ballots and are far more likely to be planning on using these claims to argue that the whole system is too corrupt to continue and effectively postpone or end elections entirely:
And as the following Foreign Policy piece notes, should Bolsonaro actually decide to go down the path of declaring a coup or instigating an actual civil war in the event of a 2022 loss, he’s going to have a lot of advantages Donald Trump didn’t have, like a government cabinet stacked with loyal former military officers. Then there’s the fact that Bolsonaro’s were already heavily armed when he came into office. And thanks to Bolsonaro’s relaxations of gun ownership laws, the number of privately owned guns in Brazil basically doubled in 2019 and doubled again in 2020:
“Bolsonaro’s hardcore loyalists are heavily armed and determined to protect their commander-in-chief from impeachment and being elected out of office. His backers are building up their arsenals, with some of them calling for a military takeover should the National Congress move forward with impeachment. Well before Bolsonaro assumed the presidency, one of his most urgent priorities was to dismantle the country’s firearms legislation. Since taking office, he has issued a slew of legal measures to increase access to high-powered firearms and ammunition and water down efforts to track missing guns. In addition to making semi-automatic rifles more available to civilians, he’s also tried to lower import duties on foreign-manufactured firearms.”
If Bolsonaro is impeached the military should take over. Those are some of the calls from Bolsonaro’s heavily armed backers, which is particularly disturbing given that the calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment are only growing. And as this is all playing out, gun ownership is exploding which is exactly what Bolsonaro and his allies intended:
So as we can see, Brazil’s democracy is being set up for an assassination in 2022 by Bolsonaro and the far right and they are openly following the Trump ‘rigged elections’ playbook. And that’s all why Bolsonaro and his fascist allies were probably some of keenest observers of the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Along with all of the efforts that led up to it and whipped Trump’s supporters into a violent fervor. Trump and the GOP taught the world a big lesson in the potential fragility of democracy and it wasn’t just Democrats taking notes.
Now that the GOP’s intra-party struggle over whether or not to condemn or embrace the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection and the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie underpinning the event has boiled over into a fight over whether or not Trump critic and House GOP caucus leader Liz Cheney will be replaced with a Elise Stefanik, it’s worth noting that we might be relatively to a real-world test of one of Cheney’s recent warnings about the failure to rebuke Trump over the insurrection. Recall how Cheney’s May 5 Washington Post op-ed included the warning that condoning the insurrection and the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie behind it would do damage to the very idea that democratic institutions can or should be trusted and empower authoritarian governments around the world. Well, it turns out Brazil has a new presidential election coming up in October of 2022, and we’re already hearing indications that Jair Bolsonaro’s government could end up calling in the military should he lose the election. Under what pretext would Bolsonaro suspend democracy? Allegations of widespread election fraud...presumably along the lines of the allegations made by Donald Trump since it turns out Bolsonaro was an open supporter of Trump’s ‘stolen election’ claims.
So what are the indications that Brazil could be in store for a return to a dictatorship? Well, for starters, Bolsoaro is looking increasingly vulnerable to losing an election, especially with Brazil experiencing the second worst coronavirus outbreak in the world right now. But perhaps more important is that former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was jailed in highly politicized charges, is now out of jail and has begun rebuilding his political coalition. And while Lula has yet indicated if he’s going to run against Bolsonaro in next year’s elections, current polls indicate he would have a very good shot if he does run.
Oh, and then there’s the warning about a looming dictatorship that came from Bolsonaro himself in recent week when he confidently predicted that, should he order the military into take the streets to ‘restore order’, the order will be followed. The comment came a month after a cabinet reshuffle that was reportedly met with shock from senior military officers. Bolsonaro put his former chief of staff in charge of the Defense Ministry and swapped all three commanders of the armed forces.
So the key ingredients required for a return to a dictatorship in Brazil are all in place: a wanna-be dictator who has consolidated his control over the military is already in office and it looks like he might lose:
“The popular former union leader has not said whether he will run for president in October 2022, but opinion polls show he may have a strong shot at defeating Bolsonaro after the Supreme Court threw out his graft convictions. read more”
Lula might have a real shot at beating Bolsonaro. At least in a fairly run election, according to recent polls. And that’s all we need to know to reasonably suspect that Bolsonaro is planning for non-democratic means of staying in office. So it doesn’t help that he has been making baseless claims of voter-fraud for years and recently spoke of his confidence in the military following his orders to take control of the streets:
“Speaking during a TV interview, Bolsonaro said he would not “go into details into what I’m preparing.” But he said that “if we were to have problems, we have a plan of how to enter the field ... our armed forces could one day go into the streets.””
He won’t reveal his plan for sending the military into the streets. But he’ll reveal he has such a plan. It’s more than a little ominous. Especially since these comments come after he shocked the military with a leadership overhaul that put his chief of staff in charge of the Defense Ministry:
And that military reshuffling came a just months after Bolsonaro openly endorese the Capitol insurrection on January 7th, one day after the attack. He blamed the insurrection on voter fraud suspicious that, in his words, “No one can deny,” and then predicted a similar outcome or worse for Brazil in future elections:
““There’s fraud here, too,” he said, warning Brazil faced “an even worse problem than the United States” if it did not reintroduce paper ballots, as he has insisted.”
If Brazil doesn’t switch over to paper ballots entirely by 2022, something worse than the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection could take place in Brazil. That’s what Bolsonaro was openly predicting just one day after Trump’s failed coup attempt.
So we’re already basically being told what to expect if Bolsonaro loses the 2022 election. Expect a coup. That’s now really in question. The big question is whether or not Lulua or someone else can actually defeat Bolsonaro in the first place. Along with all the secondary questions related to the lessons Bolsonaro may or may not have learned from Jan 6. It points towards to how far the US managed to fall by the end of the Trump term: a far right Brazilian general was learning lessons from the US over how to pull off a coup. That’s obviously not a new phenomena, but it’s usually not this direct.
Following up on the story of the growing interest by Jair Bolsonaro’s government and Steve Bannon in running the same Trump 2020 ‘stolen election’ playbook in Brazil’s upcoming election, here’s a fascinating Twitter thread by teleSUR on a correspondent Brian Mier on a related development. Related in the sense that is falls under the same unbrella of the international elites organizing the rise of fascism. And in this case, the fascist return of the Brazilian Monarchy. As Mier’s tweets describe, AfD Parliamentarian Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Count Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. Her birth title was Her Highness Duchess Beatrix Amelie Ehrengard Eilika von Oldenburg. She’s a relative of Bertrand de Orléans e Bragança, the head of the Brazilian royal family, who she met with in in July. The formation of a new Conservative International was announced during that meeting with the Bolsonaro government and the Brazilian monarchy. As Mier put it, “So, recalling the relationship between deposed royal families, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Brazilian military dictatorship, it’s noteworthy that a German duchess/AfD Deputy Director, just met with Bolsonaro and the Monarchy, and announced formation of a Conservative International.” Yep:
And now here’s a piece that has a bit more on Von Storch’s trip to Brazil and the joint calls for an international far right network. And as the piece points out, the Bolsonaro government has become so important in that international far right networking effort that the Trump White House essentially passed the leadership mantel to Bolsonaro’s government on January 20, Trump’s last day in office. That was when Valerie Huber, the person chosen by the White House during the Trump administration to address women’s health issues, sent an email announcing that Brazil has kindly offered to coordinate this “historic coalition” and the Brazilian president will be responsible for leading the ultra-conservative international alliance created to influence the decisions of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and other organizations. It’s part of the context of Von Storch’s trip to Brazil: the Bolsonaro government’s relative importance to the international far right has only grown in the months since Trump left office:
“Brazil has become fertile ground to expand those ideas, with a government that still contributes an extra element: after the end of Donald Trump’s term in the United States, the ultra-conservative offensive has bet all its chips on Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In January 2021, senior Trump officials sent messages to other countries informing that the projects that had been led by the White House would be taken over by Bolsonaro from that moment on. The information is part of an email sent to collaborators by Valerie Huber, the person chosen by the White House during the Trump administration to address women’s health issues. In a message on January 20, 2021, Huber announces that Brazil has kindly offered to coordinate this “historic coalition”. Under this provision, the Brazilian president is responsible for leading the ultra-conservative international alliance created to influence the decisions of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and other organizations.”
With Trump out of office, Brazil was the brightest light of fascism left in the Western hemisphere. With new leadership responsibilities:
And yet Brazil is following the model of some even more brightly shining fascist stars found in the EU, with Brazil and Hungary developing a particularly close relationship in recent years:
And note that the resignation of Brazilian Culture Secretary, Roberto Alvim, in 2020 over his making Nazi references wasn’t really Alvim about merely referring to the Nazis. The problem was Alvim seemingly copied word for word proclamations by Joseph Goebbels when Alvim announced that, “The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national, will be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement... deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing.” It’s a reminder that, while Poland and Hungary may be model fascist nations countries like Brazil are increasingly trying to emulate, the real model government they’re all trying to follow ceased existing in 1945, if you exclude the hearts and mind of fascists where it obviously still thrives.
@Pterrafractyl–
Wow!
BTW, in AFA#1 (April of 1984) we noted that it was Finance Minister von Krosigk who coined the term “Iron Curtain.”
https://spitfirelist.com/anti-fascist-archives/rfa-1-looking-back-from-1984/
Source: “The Bormann Brotherhood” by William Stevenson.
Best,
Dave Emory