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msconductI was relieved this morning to see that the FBI is warning about domestic terrorists planning further armed uprisings. Relieved, that is, in the sense that I and many other people had been watching them plan in plain sight what happened at the Capitol on their horrible right-wing social media, and assumed many three-letter acronyms were watching too and would deal with it, only to see... well, what happened. Given that the terrorists' new plans have been equally public, I've been anxiously haunting the relevant social media to double-check that people are tipping off the FBI. It's a relief that the FBI are clearly in the know, although I can't shake the suspicion that they discovered it on Reddit too.
This whole thing has been a very instructive lesson on the more novel uses and abuses of social media. I'm not even going to go there re Trump's Twitter account, because we all know about that stuff. But watching people use Parler as an organising tool then seeing it be used by others to identify the terrorists has been fascinating. As have the amazing efforts to crowd-source the identities of people I thought nobody would have a chance of pinpointing - an effort I highly doubt the FBI would have been able to match on its own. It's been as heartening as the other stuff has been horrifying.
And the coverage of the event itself was equally fascinating. In a situation where the mainstream media would have been (and sometimes were) ripped to shreds, the gap was filled by the terrorists themselves. I and around 60,000 other people watched the entire thing livestreamed by participants on Woke.tv - an intensely visceral experience that I will never forget - and then saw that very coverage used to arrest the participants.
There's a hell of a lot there that needs to be unpacked in the future about the new place of social media in news. In the meantime, I'm just grateful to be able to relax a little about whatever happens next. I really need to back away from this stuff a bit. This morning I found myself in the supermarket carpark flinching as a middle-aged man in a red baseball cap innocently approached with his trolley. Time to leave this to the FBI et al in the hope and reasonable expectation that this time they actually have got it.
This whole thing has been a very instructive lesson on the more novel uses and abuses of social media. I'm not even going to go there re Trump's Twitter account, because we all know about that stuff. But watching people use Parler as an organising tool then seeing it be used by others to identify the terrorists has been fascinating. As have the amazing efforts to crowd-source the identities of people I thought nobody would have a chance of pinpointing - an effort I highly doubt the FBI would have been able to match on its own. It's been as heartening as the other stuff has been horrifying.
And the coverage of the event itself was equally fascinating. In a situation where the mainstream media would have been (and sometimes were) ripped to shreds, the gap was filled by the terrorists themselves. I and around 60,000 other people watched the entire thing livestreamed by participants on Woke.tv - an intensely visceral experience that I will never forget - and then saw that very coverage used to arrest the participants.
There's a hell of a lot there that needs to be unpacked in the future about the new place of social media in news. In the meantime, I'm just grateful to be able to relax a little about whatever happens next. I really need to back away from this stuff a bit. This morning I found myself in the supermarket carpark flinching as a middle-aged man in a red baseball cap innocently approached with his trolley. Time to leave this to the FBI et al in the hope and reasonable expectation that this time they actually have got it.
