Louis, were motivated to take their bizarre stand. Outrage contagion is why the McCloskeys, the husband-and-wife duo who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter marchers in St. These emotional reactions help develop an unshakable trust between the partisan content creators and the content consumers. In chat rooms, watchers actively cheer as cops and other aggressors brutalize Black Lives Matter activists. Judging by the reactions shared by followers of right-wing influencers, riot porn further enrages and traumatizes these audiences from afar, inflaming their perceptions of risk and danger. The motivating factor is the hope to live out fantasies of taking justice into their own hands, à la Dirty Harry, the film series about a rogue cop who shirks protocol and murders at will. With riot porn, what moves someone from watching to showing up is the potential for participating in a violent altercation. In the recording of the George Floyd murder, the video mobilized hundreds of thousands of people outraged that Floyd’s killer had not been arrested. Riot porn is different from videos of abuse and violence carried out by police, and we should not confuse one for the other. The footage has a hypnotic, almost balletic quality, designed to influence and overwhelm the sense-making capacity of watchers consuming it from a safe distance online. Their videos are edited, decontextualized, and shared among audiences hungry for a new fix of “ riot porn,” which instantly goes viral across the right-wing media ecosystem with the aid of influential pundits and politicians, including President Donald Trump. Both have even gone “undercover” by posing as protesters to capture footage for their channels, seeking to name and shame those marching. These narratives have been intensified and supplemented by the work of right-wing adversarial media-makers like Elijah Schaffer and Andy Ngo, who collect videos of conflict at public protests and recirculate them to their online audiences. In one case, Fox News manipulated photos to make protesters appear more ominous and threatening, while other right-wing outlets falsely reported that the occupying protesters were extorting local businesses. What has been a minor storyline among left-wing audiences has been dramatically overemphasized by right-wing media because these protests provided plenty of visceral content for online content creators. Now, with social media as a broadcast system, the right-wing media has upped the ante.Īccording to analysis I conducted using MediaCloud, a research tool from MIT and Harvard, right-wing media outlets wrote five to six times more articles about Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” than did center or left media. This directs a disproportionate amount of attention across the entire media ecosystem to violent protesters. Mainstream media bias toward covering violence in protests is well studied, best encapsulated by the saying “If it bleeds, it leads.” Most protests are largely peaceful, but “Citizens gather, grieve, and leave” is no story at all. This coverage has come to dominate the right-wing narrative in a new way, flipping the script to suggest that Black protesters-demonstrating because they fear police violence-are themselves a threat to white people. Since the George Floyd protests, conservative media outlets including Fox News (particularly Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity), One America News, Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV, and right-wing YouTubers have been covering Black Lives Matter and other left-wing protests daily, specifically highlighting instances of violence, fighting, and property damage. If social-media companies do not act swiftly to stop calls for violence against protesters, the situation can only get worse. Given the way media accounts shape public perceptions about protest and define who has recourse to the “legitimate use of violence,” the kinds of content shared within these hyperpartisan media systems play a powerful yet often invisible role in mobilizing white vigilante groups. Their efforts to counter the wave of public support for Black Lives Matter protests have made extensive use of this tactic.Īs a scholar of social movements and media studies, I see an alarming split between the types of content consumed by right-wing reactionaries and left-wing social justice advocates. And visuals can be just as motivating for the right wing-recently, perhaps even more so.īecause right-wing reactionaries do not have the same kind of experience in organizing street protests as the left, they instead rely heavily on social media-particularly Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter-to mobilize crowds.
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