Skeptic Review

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s has published “McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-right.” Written by the Hatewatch Staff, the article first asks: “What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?”

SPLC:  “The question was posed in two threads posted during the last week of March on the white nationalist forum The Right Stuff (TRS), leading 74 individual users to describe their radicalization narratives.”

Ok, just to clarity, this is 74 anonymous people who might be trolls, who might have more than one user name, who might be undercover cops, who might be journalists, who might be anti-white nationalists trying to discredit white nationalists or who might have a personal agenda to actively smear a certain person—do I have this right?

Ironically, the SPLC makes use of the terms “deeply flawed data” and “faulty statistical analysis” to drive home the point that the Alt-Right will misuse information and science in order to boost its adherents.

Here is the charted data as presented by the SPLC. Remember, we don’t know who the 74 people are, we don’t know if these mentions were in the positive or the negative in terms of “influence.” This is the methodology further explained:

SPLC: “The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified.”

And I have one more question about the reliability of this data—let’s assume for a moment that these are 74 unique, card-carrying members of the Alt-right. Then how do we account for the fact that the SPLC acknowledges that these folks actively propagandize, misinform, distort and co-opt culture and ideas to legitimize this ideology? Would this still be a reliable pool from which to extract hard data?

https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right

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