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

submitted 1 month 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 1 month 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] 40 points 1 month ago (4 children)

someone genuinely interested for intellectual reasons would likely not fall for it. I would imagine that a non-trivial percentage of "antiquity enjoyers" are very light on history substance and heavy on history feelz.

once the appropriate brain tickles have been pushed into their heads their "history substance" feed content becomes decidedly propagandized.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think this is it.

The historians I know of actually seem to lean quite left of the average person; it's the light hobbieists, who are often more interested in the aesthetics/surface stuff, who seem to fall victim to the alt-right stuff.

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

Honestly I'm a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

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