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The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline (www.workingclassicists.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content.

Quote: "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to alt-right and "manosphere" ideology. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by internet political commentators – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (10 children)

I just don't understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying "yeah, we'll let you do that in order to maintain the peace" and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar..?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I'm not surprised that they don't learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

And, even when it comes to the empire, they're busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that's important context if you're trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there's enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

True that.

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there's a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.

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