The author, Emma Ellis, has no comprehension of the tweet in question. Understanding the background could have prevented this:
1. Neo-Nazis begin to point out to their supporters that the people they are discussing are Jews (or "Jew aiders and abettors" [sic]) by placing three brackets around their name. The subjects are often unaware and their account usernames (obviously) do not display brackets.
2. In reaction to this, numerous camps (social justice activists, evangelical Christians, civil society workers, journalists, etc.) both Jewish and non-Jewish alike begin to place three brackets around their display name to draw attention to the practice and to express solidarity with those who are being discussed in brackets, a practice sometimes revered in Western culture [1][2][3][4].
3. A subset of these self-labelled, self-bracketed individuals criticize WikiLeaks.
4. The WikiLeaks account notices that many of their critics are self-bracketed individuals expressing solidarity and wonders what type of people do this, as one might question the individuals who change their profile pictures to have a flag overlay for the tragedy du jour, and if said people are doing so for their own interest.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deputy#Historical_models [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus_(film)#.22I.27m_Spar... [4] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmSpartacus
Tribalist here in the sense of those who are complicit with In-Group/Out-Group dynamics [1]. Knowing that Assange is some sort of anarchist helps [2]. Such language is common within a certain political perspective that includes anarchism; these 'horizontalist' 'global citizens' envision a utopia and as they work towards it, in addition to opposing establishment climbers especially, they often look down on and view 'identity politics' or 'lifestyle politics' (and the use of ideological labels and in-group signaling all together) as base and beneath them [3]. And yes, they often practice the same things they critique and theoretically oppose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20060712184552/http://iq.org/inde... [3] http://new-compass.net/articles/beyond-ideology
I searched Reddit and found it used as a perjorative for capitalists/statists a few times.
Then again, when you say it like that, it looks just as bad.
WikiLeaks account looks up the profile pictures of many of its critics and notices that they all wear black-rim glasses, which strikes WikiLeaks admin as bizarre?
That three parenthesis thing was news to me. It seems weird that people would brand themselves in such an obscure way. I guess Twitter handles can't have Unicode ?
> Yesterday, Mic reported that a Google Chrome extension called "Coincidence Detector" was creating a database of Jewish people in order to notify users when they were reading the work of, or reading about, a Jewish person online. The extension placed three sets of parentheses (a symbol used by neo-Nazis) around certain names to identify them as Jewish. Now, one day later, Google has pulled the extension for violating its hate speech policy, Engadget reports.
Has the triple-parentheses ever been used to signify something previously? Kind of hard to believe that the Wikileaks Twitter account used it coincidentally: http://twitter.com/gallopingcats/status/757527227798003712/p...
Calling that tweet anti-Semitic just doesn't make sense. It reads like someone trying way too hard to turn a molehill into a mountain. I'm guessing if we look through the history we'll discover that the people attacking him on Twitter had changed their usernames to include the parenthesis.
Also who knows who runs the wikileaks twitter account. I find that a little creepy.
After he got called out on it he went into damage control, I mean seriously it would really compromise his mission to out of the blue just make an intentional overt anti-Semitic remark.
The way I look at it, WikiLeaks is basically a parallel construction. We have no idea how or where the info came from, but if it's a map to the bodies, we go there and see if it's accurate info.
I think they are hugely important factors. Information is power and they have a huge amount of influence because of the trust people have placed in them.
Like it or not, wikileaks will influence all of our lives. To say that they are a mere conduit and have no obligation to vet or squelch the information they've been given is to also assume that they will never get their hands on information (factual, or otherwise) which may have a direct, negative impact to you personally.
Useful information is rarely neutral. There are nearly always winners and losers when it is disclosed.
They have been accused of releasing PII before, but they claim to be a journalistic organization. My take is, they're more concerned with delivering data dumps than sorting through terabytes to redact innocent details, because they're more of a dump site than a news site. And as such, it's raw information to consumers. I expect it to be pretty fully digested if I'm going to call it a news or analysis product.
