Freedom v. Freedom

According to information I gleaned from OnThisDay.com, June 4th is an underrated date. All kinds of interesting things have happened on June 4th. For instance, in 1850, self-deodorizing fertilizer was patented in England. One hundred and forty-two years later, the U.S. post office announced that the stamp featuring the young Elvis was better than the one with the old Elvis. Then, in 2016, Serena Williams was defeated in the French Open women’s tennis tournament.

But as crushing as that may have been for Williams, something even more significant happened on June 4th, 2016, and you won’t find it by going to OnThisDay.com.

On that date, a Kremlin troll posted this tweet: “SJWs are using their freedom of speech mostly to censor other peoples’ freedom of speech.”

What is an SJW?

Back when people used to get dates by running personals ads in the local paper, it might have stood for “Single Jewish Woman.” Print media space being limited, if you spelled out the words it could put your ad into a higher cost bracket, so people abbreviated a lot.

Not much has changed. Tweets have character limits, so people still abbreviate a lot. But SJW doesn’t stand for Single Jewish Woman. Rather, it stands for Social Justice Warrior. The only reason I know that is because I’ve seen it spelled out in other troll tweets.

What the Kremlin doesn’t want you to realize

The Kremlin, in amplifying the term, is subtly suggesting that social justice and warfare have something to do with one another, or that people who want social justice think so.

Social justice is a goal, not a war. It’s about fairness. If you’re being shot, starved, tortured, blown up, or anything else that happens to people during a war, you aren’t being treated fairly. One could argue that violent acts can be morally justifiable under the right circumstances, self-defense being the most obvious, but they aren’t a means of achieving social justice.

Putin is a cynic when it comes to western values, so he thinks that people who strive for fairness are insincere, stupid, and/or sissies – or worse, threats to his aspirations. So he does what he can to destroy them.

Another pesky western value …

Freedom of speech. Other than maybe freedom of the press, this is Putin’s least favorite thing. His values were formed during his time at the KGB, so he is all about control. Russia controlling its neighbors. Men controlling their households. The Russian Orthodox Church controlling people’s thoughts, their sexual orientation, their ability to reason, etc.

Putin himself, through his trusted allies, controls the money, the media, the military, the secret services, the natural resources, the internet, the courts, the legislature, the Russian Orthodox Church, and nearly everything else within Russia’s borders – and outside its borders to some extent.

To maintain that control, it’s best if freedom of speech is eliminated. If Russians were to talk among themselves, they might realize that Putin’s setup has a fairness problem. If they don’t, they might all think they’re the only ones who take issue with the Kremlin’s providing a chicken for every other pot and three helicopter pads for Putin’s Black Sea vacation home.

However, suppressing freedom of speech is not that easy to do, even if you’re willing to use violence and other repressive tactics. Language developed in humans because it provides an evolutionary advantage. If you can say to someone, “The river’s current is stronger in that spot than it looks,” you can save a life and make your species less likely to go extinct. So when Putin tries to prevent people from openly communicating, he is bucking a hundred thousand years of evolutionary precedent.

That’s one reason he needs trolls. They out-speak people who are trying to be honest and helpful, often burying what those people have to say.

Information manipulation

A common variation on that technique is volume adjustment, where trolls put their social media weight behind certain messages, making other ones less visible. This method has the benefit of usually going undetected and therefore unchallenged. Typically, trolls will look for a preexisting point of conflict within western nations and then amplify the most extreme versions of the messaging on all sides in order to be a destabilizing influence.

The SJW freedom of speech tweet represents a different approach. It is an original troll message, suggesting that the troll is pushing an idea that is uncommon or non-existent within the target audience. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in a western nation who would say flat out that freedom of speech is bad, so the Kremlin has to find ways to chip away at the concept.

Failure

One common Kremlin approach to this sort of problem is to turn truth into a matter of opinion. For instance, in our river example, a troll would come along and say, “The river is dangerous everywhere. Why should you go out of your way to cross in a different place when you could get swept away by the current anyway?” The implication is that the details of the river current cannot be known, so you should just believe whatever you want to about it.

That method of manipulation can be effective if, say, you’re trying to cover up that it was your missile, launched by the rebels you support, that shot down a passenger plane over Ukraine. You could say that it looks like it was actually a Ukrainian missile that shot the plane down from an area controlled by Ukraine, not the rebels. You could simultaneously point out that there was a Ukrainian military plane in the vicinity of the passenger jet and suggest that maybe it shot the plane down.

Personally, I think it was Ukrainian aliens from outer space disguised as a puffy white cloud who shot it down. (Just kidding, but the plane incident was real, and the Kremlin’s reaction was brilliantly untangled by the citizen journalists at Bellingcat.) At any rate, if it is a question of what happened, you can dodge responsibility without being factual or even consistent as long as you provide a lot of alternative scenarios to pick from and have a loud enough megaphone. It’s a different story with questions of what is right.

Try, try again

It is quite disabling to be deprived of the manipulator’s basic toolkit: doctored photos, unrelated facts, and evidence that can be mischaracterized. That makes it hard to attack a thing like a principle or a concept, and that is the problem the troll encountered with the anti-free speech tweet.

The troll persona who posted the tweet was among the most successful of the early Kremlin Twitter trolls. She had over 51,000 followers at that time, yet the response to her tweet was anemic – 39 retweets and 44 likes. To put that in perspective, she posted a tweet about “dick prints” later that month that got 532 retweets and 736 likes.

Part of the problem may be that the message is incoherent. To say that Person X uses their freedom of speech to censor the freedom of speech of Person Y is absurd on its face and therefore confusing. That the troll couldn’t do any better than that suggests that she underestimated the difficulty of her task.

Undeterred, she tried again the next day, posting, “SJWs are just redefining violence as 'free speech', and free speech as violence.” That time she got 108 retweets and 122 likes, almost four times the response as her first attempt.

Clever. Noting that the idea she pushed in the first tweet didn’t go over well, she restated it but put the words in the mouths of her persona’s enemies.

The Twist

While the essence of both tweets is “freedom of speech is bad,” the details are totally different. The first statement implies that free speech is a commodity in limited supply. If somebody takes theirs, you might not get yours. While that reasoning probably works on people who have only lived in places (like Russia) where the concept of freedom of expression is not well developed or respected, it leaves Americans scratching their heads.

Therefore, the troll had to lead her followers to the intended “free speech is bad” conclusion by providing a liaison: violence is a type of speech. While this didn’t quite get her to the level of appreciation she got for the dick prints tweet, the numbers indicate that this second message resonated.

That is not to say that her followers all suddenly believed that beating up protesters or assassinating doctors who perform abortions are acts protected under the First Amendment, but they didn’t have to. Those of her followers who heard “violence is speech” and said “Right on!” would have been exposed to the pro-repression idea twice, reinforcing it as legitimate. Such a person is not going to be a stickler for logic, so the troll’s instant abandonment of her original message wouldn’t give them pause.

On the other hand, her followers who were thinking “Hmmm, speech is about ideas, whereas violence is about brutality …” would have been happy to attribute the “violence equals speech” idea to a group they had been encouraged to dislike. Then, when people from that group later called on their right to freedom of speech, they could disregard such calls with a clean conscience.

Mission accomplished.