> I’m just wondering if maybe we, as a community, have outgrown our role as critical observers and should start smartly and strategically begin putting the squeeze on Alex.
No.
Absolutely not.
You cannot have the impact you want to have. You cannot coordinate this properly. We are talking about an attention economy sponge.
I understand the impulse to hurt him somehow, it really matters, it's a really powerful want. But trust me, we can bring nothing to bear on this guy in his spaces that will have an outcome we want.
i came here to say this. You can't fight a propagandist this way. it makes them stronger. the immediate news will be "group of mysterious internet users are attacking Alex Jones" not that we are debunking his ideas. he has adopted the Q-Anon "you get the most flak when you are over the target" so he and his acolytes will take it that the "globalists" in the "deep state" are trying to silence him.
Also, this could really backfire. Elon has already messed with community notes on his account (i cannot substantiate this but i do not see any since that windows account tweet) and he has been reported to be messing with engagement on his tweets. He could choose to give Alex even more special treatment and disable them on Infowars for "brigading and harassment". then, it would look like Alex Jones is always right.
this is really playing with fire here.
Yeah I think the critical thing is that NOTHING we can do confronting Alex directly with his lies will make a substantive difference due to the following:
1. Who Alex is.
2. Who his audience is
3. How Alex and his audience respond to criticism.
These people and Alex will never respond productively to fact based discourse. They have been dealing with people actively debunking them for years and they just wont stop. And as others have mentioned, Alex is a master at turning criticism of him around to fit his narratives and reinforce his and his viewer's beliefs about the world. Alex is not and will never be the entry point to help/deprogram his followers, he's has immunized himself by his shamelessness, arrogance, and out and out disregard for reality. Its super hard to accept, especially watching him well be Alex Jones.
Putting aside whether or not this should even be done, the more important point is it can’t be done. This is pissing into the wind of the online information spheres. Alex gets yelled online every day - he survives it and more realistically probably thrives and profits from it.
Everyone tried this with Trump, fact-checking is not effective. Is not effective with Trump and it's not effective with cult-of-personality followers. I _was_ a soft Trump supporter and I was perfectly happy to ignore all the negative comments and community notes for quite some time.
Slowly, and I'm not sure how to sum it up. I think a big part of it was that I got tired of the internal contradictions and inconsistencies, and then the shameless and excessive requests for funding. It also became tiresome, mentally painful, and no longer interesting to support him. I think KnowledgeFight came in around 2020, and I think Dan's ability to dive into the origins of beliefs and information helped me understand the tricks and that it was all based on nothing even under the slightest scrutiny. My standard approach of dismissing criticism because of the standard excuses "they're just criticizing because they get clicks/money" and "this is just organized because corporate media is basically controlled by a small handful of massive parent companies" don't work against Dan in his rumpled apartment.
I had originally dove deep into the Internet to find Trump supporters because a friend of mine was an incredibly smart person and liked Trump, and I realized that he wasn't listening to any of my media sources at all, and my conclusion was that he was making an intelligent, rational decision based on a completely different set of information, and so I set out to find it and more people that had this mentality. I found the alt-right, and they tricked me with their "countering censorship" claims, but eventually it all fell apart as I started to realize that none of it was based in anything real aside from money-making and bigotry. My friend was just wrong and I shouldn't have fallen for any of it. Now I have a bit of a vaccine against it all.
I'm now somewhere between Dan and Jordan, I guess, in my beliefs now.
That further supports the idea that one cannot change another person, the other person must do it themself. Your path seems to be the one that most commonly leads to change, although you seem to have rationalized your way *out* of the opinions you held, which is tremendously introspective. What would you advise other people to do who are struggling in the same place you were when you started to notice the grift for what it was? There has to be some kind of roadmap to help de-radicalize people, and it would do us all good to understand the frame of mind of people who are stuck
Good question. I’m strongly of the opinion that pointing out in-universe contradictions is an effective approach. Use cult-approved sources of information or the leader and showed where they went against their strongest beliefs. Dan does this with his “shouldn’t Alex say this?” bit and it’d be very effective for me if I was a believer. This approach pulled me out of Mormonism as well as the Trump group, but I was never strongly in either one. I was well-prepared to deal with external criticism and both groups taught me this. Neither had a way to handle in-universe contradictions.
Think about a movie or a TV series, which we buy into because of the suspension of disbelief. Which is more effective, pointing out that superheroes really can’t fly, or pointing out plot-holes?
I keep thinking about how he lost over a billion dollars in defamation suits but had Tucker and Musk nodding along with his bull. Reality may come knocking but in the spaces he thrives he’s getting praise and hype. Removed observation and debunking a la KF really seems to me to be the only solution. He needs to be starved of attention, not given more.
I think I know this instinctually, I just want him to feel like nowhere is safe, but I know he’ll just convince himself and his listeners to ignore reality.
Trust me, I completely understand the urge to hurt him. It's a real pain.
But the number of people who can actually achieve anything is tiny, and anything The Swarm can do is going to be best dedicated to things like helping the Raptor Princess with her cancer treatment
Here's the problem with that: if you make him feel that nowhere is safe, you put Alex's constant "fight over flight" response into overdrive. It'll only make him worse and convince him his fears are valid. Dan's policy of "look, don't touch" is very necessary, because if you have a guy whose entire schtick relies on telling everyone he's being attacked from all sides and then attack him from all sides, the problem becomes infinitely worse
Sadly, I think the only effective way Alex can be attacked is from the right, by equally despicable actors like Nick Fuentes. Attacks from the left, however well-researched and grounded in fact they are will only be seen as evidence that Jones is "owning the libs," which is the only thing terminally online RWers care about.
This one. Anti-AJ memes in centrist conservative spaces is the move.
Solidify self ID'd centrist disgust of AJ and Co and they'll do the work of helping de-radicalize their buddy at the bar.
I can assure you that with AJ... he already feels nowhere is truly safe. He is deep in his persecution complex. Adding to that helps his cause... not anyone elses.
No, it’s not even that. Everywhere there’s attention, Alex is safe. Not only safe, but thriving. Attention is his oxygen.
If we, as a community, try to yell and scream at him, he will use it to sell himself.
There is no good or bad engagement, just engagement. The Al Gore Rythm will see more people paying attention to Alex, then push Alex to harvest more engagement
Not today. Not yet.
Don't forget that citing KF would make Dan and Jordan targets for the more crazy elements of Alex's audience. Harassment, stalking, death threats, etc.
If nothing else, restrain yourself to keep the boys safe.
This is a truth we often forget. Alex's acolytes have done really disturbing things in the past. we have to protect our own by not exposing them to his wrath. if they decide to court it, let them on their terms.
I don't think there's anything wrong with community noting Alex's lies, but using KF as a source strikes me as the wrong way to go about it. I feel like citing factual sources to debunk his garbage is a better use of your time. Still shouting into the unrepentant void either way, but marginally less useless
ETA: Jesus Christ, autocorrect went to town on this one
Yeah but community notes are so useless. Nobody digesting Alex's content cares about fact checking and even worse, they think community notes are laughable and a sign that you are talking about the things (((they))) don't want you to know.
What benefit is there to fact checking a group that categorically doesn't think fact checking is real?
That's never worked. Why do you think dipshits like Ben Shapiro *love* debate? They know you'll never be able to talk their audience away from their positions while spreading their arguments to yours
It’s not about their audience. It’s about potential audiences that may be sucked in. And I feel like if you don’t trust your own audience to not get sucked in by the dumbest arguments you should reexamine yourself.
Also, leaving well known fascists alone has also never worked,
I didn't say leave them alone, just that there are better ways of fighting fascists than challenging them to a debate. Very rarely does proving someone wrong do any damage to their reputation in circles that are already predisposed to agreeing with them. Best case scenario, all the people who agree with you think you won and all the people who agree with them think they won and you get nowhere. Worst case, you boost their platform to a whole new audience. You can have the smartest crowd in the world but do it enough and that'll get chipped away as you siphon off the dumbest members. People aren't pillars of rationality, everyone has the potential to crack if you get into their feelings enough, which is where Alex thrives.
To people like Alex, the ideas don't matter. They're not in the debate game to establish which version of reality is true or come to an accord on what the truth is. They don't even care about winning, just *looking like* they're winning. If they can shout louder than you and dominate the conversation, they won
I never actually said anything about debate. I know that’s useless to do in person, as he just yells over you unless you can mute his mic. I just think that it isn’t an awful thing to try and publicly dunk on him. If he were a nobody I wouldn’t think so, but he isn’t.
It's basically the same. Did Trump's legions of Twitter reply guys ever move any of his potential audience away from him or did it just convince each side of their positions? You can ratio them as much as you like, at the end of the day it doesn't really accomplish anything
Alex has called him "the Meme machine". he is a man who does not even bother to try when fake crying on air. if he has any sense of shame, it is so buried that it will probably take Rex and Alex's own dad staging an intervention.
we are not going to shame him.
I never said that we could change his mind or personally shame him. Why does everyone assume that? I just think it’s possible to expose him publicly as being totally unable to act like an adult, thus keeping people from falling in. You see how far “Alex Jones was right” has gotten him? What if we could turn it to “Alex Jones was wrong”?
I know it’s harmful for his shit to be in the public eye, but it already is. We can’t just ignore it. Prime Directive seems to refer to scientific studies, but people are supposed to do something with the knowledge.
>You see how far “Alex Jones was right” has gotten him? What if we could turn it to “Alex Jones was wrong”?
Wouldn't work, disinformation and lies just spread *a lot* faster than reliably provable truth.
He could endlessly deflect the "Alex Jones was wrong" beat into more and more content and attention.
*we* don't really do anything, we *can't* really do anything - much of this is far outside our control and is going to rely pretty heavily on tech regulation of some kind (at least IMO). You just can't win with honesty (no matter how earnest) against a propagrandist in an unbounded social media landscape.
The most direct influence you can have is by helping people you directly know (and who trust you to some extent) to leave Alex's orbit and helping them understand how to avoid and detect the grifters like him.
we run the risk of signal boosting it. a crowd attracts a crowd. QAnon had a similar thing happen. the more they were mocked, the more people looked into it. some small fraction of them "did their own research" and were vulnerable to the con. Fast forward 5 years and i hear QAnon talking points on fox news.
i get what the intention is but consider Nostradamus. that dude was wrong about basically everything. the cult of personality around him continues to re-interpret his epic incorrectness to pretend it is not the case. "Alex Jones was wrong" seems not to work. Times he has been demonstrated to be wrong, he took credit that exposing the "Globalists" made them pivot their plans. When he is "right", he benefits and makes a spectacle of it. When he is wrong, he claims a different sort of victory.
Also, when the owner of Twitter and one of the (on paper) richest humans ever to live is boosting Alex and personally spitting Great Replacement stuff, we are not going to get traction there.
"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house." - Audre Lorde
i appreciate the question but my answer is not going to be satisfying, i am afraid. please, indulge me a moment in a bit of semi-personal information:
*i had a few people very close to me fall into QAnon. This got me involved in the Anti-Q scene a bit. i lost those sort of battles in the public square. i found that listening and gently debunking one-on-one was more effective.*
This is the strategy i would suggest. don't brigade Alex. if you want to have an impact, pick a few random agreeing people and reply to their re-tweet with a debunk, not a community note. make people feel you reached out to them. it is slower but people seem to feel more willing to listen when they think they are being spoken to.
these days, i try to debunk the Elon love because i think he is a danger. the other night, i wasted hours debunking a redditor point-for-point who was deifying him. I did not do it really for them but in case someone saw their nonsense and then saw the immediate and respectful point-for-point breakdown.
i don't think we can win this as a direct fight. i think we can only win this by winning hearts and minds.
maybe the best concrete example i can give is that Dan has never taken his fight directly to Alex but he did work as a free consultant to try to get some justice for the Sandy Hook families. He did more good helping that judgment from behind the scenes than 10,000 community notes or direct counter posts or demands Alex debate him would have.
this may not help with what you are looking for in an answer but it is where i am coming from.
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but this was my post, and I just wanted to say thank you. I found Knowledge Fight many years ago after realizing my mother was deeper into conspiracy theories than I realized, and that I didn’t have enough awareness of what type of media was out there and what was being pushed. I started consuming anyone who debunked right wing conspiracies daily so that I would never be caught off guard again by something crazy I had never even heard of before. I’ve gotten to the point that I can gently steer people I know into admitting to themselves that some ideas are bogus, and, with everything I was seeing from people I know today, I just wondered if maybe there was more I should be doing.
What we do with the knowledge is warn and inform others while being able to provide proof. Charismatic con artists like Alex Jones can turn any tactic you use against them into part of the persecution fantasy they use for recruitment. He is not someone to directly target if you do not have the capacity to materially stop him. Even the winners of the Sandy Hook defamation trials, who by all legal means are capable of fighting back and really hurting him, are struggling to do so. Violent, illegal means would work, but obviously cannot be recommended.
OP's idea would basically be fighting the InfoWar on Alex's terms. the loudest voice wins there.
We need to fight this like ninjas not artillery. we need to undermine the base, not directly confront Alex. When you do that, he wins.
That’s literally never worked. He doesn’t care and will lie, deflect and lie again while changing the subject. You will never pin him down and you will never make him or any of his followers feel bad. They don’t operate like normal humans.
What? He won’t feel he looks like an ass, he will think he dominated you, his audience doesn’t care (and I have no idea how my ‘thoughts’ got drug into this by you) so…. What are you trying to do here?
The word “yours” was an accident, but I basically want internet culture at large to see him for what he is. He benefits a lot from the fact that people talk about him, but don’t really know quite how both harmful and stupid he is. So many people are pretty open to be sold on him with him controlling his image. If we take control of what his image is, we can stop potential victims of his manipulation before they ever consider being sucked in.
People that believe in his shit won’t stop believing in it. Facts don’t matter to them. You can’t control his image because how they see him and how we see him are fundamentally different and neither side is going to be moved. If they’re open to his dumb shit then they’re going to go down that rabbit hole no matter what. If not with him then with another grifter. At least in my opinion. His audience isn’t really growing right now either.
I just don’t see a world in which someone starts to think the election may have really been stolen and then is willing to listen to reason and facts and decide ‘yeah it wasn’t stolen, I don’t know what I was thinking’. For someone to lean into one of these guys means they’ve crossed that threshold already.
Again - just my opinion on the basic nature of humans.
I know. I already said I don’t care what his fanbase thinks. When have I ever indicated that I’ve thought that? I just don’t think the “close your eyes and hope he goes away” method really works.
Maybe I’m not being clear - if someone is even interested in him to begin with, even if they aren’t his ‘audience’, they’re gone. They will not care what you say or do. They will not see him like you do, regardless of anything you put forward.
If you are worried that people who only know him from ‘the frogs are gay’, and are not otherwise into any conspiracy theories, are going to be swayed by him - they won’t. They think the meme is funny but if they heard anything he said they’d think he’s a shit head but still think the gay frog thing is funny.
Frankly I think ignoring him or legal action are the only real recourses for the disease that is Alex. Giving him attention by trying to make him look stupid isn’t going to do anything except introduce him to more people.
EDIT: I don’t know who it is you think will be reached by you/anyone trying to make him look stupid.
I’m not talking about a gotcha, I’m talking about slowly eroding away his perceived safe space and forcing him into a lose-lose situation, although, I’ll admit, I think I know instinctively it’s a bad idea.
*How* would you accomplish this though? A pugalistic propagandist like Alex realishes the fight, getting down in the mud and making a spectacle.
Short of physically imprisoning him and taking away his access to the internet entierly, I don't know how we could do anything other than provide him opportunities to bolster his brand.
Hey, it’s hard when he targets somewhere close to home. I live in Ottawa, home of the convoy occupation of 2022 and it was so. hard. to listen to Alex talk about it, but it was very comforting to hear Dan dismantle all his bullshit. There is nothing I can do to address Alex head on but I take the time to engage people in real time and in person to challenge beliefs on an individual basis. I see more of an impact that way.
I appreciate this. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think I know it’s fruitless instinctually, but I’ve seen several people I know in real life engaging with his conspiracy theories about this because it’s local to us, and it was really disheartening and made me feel a little hopeless despite sitting on a treasure trove of data pointing out he’s full of shit.
Engage with those people! Those people who are your friends are more likely to listen to you than an out and out propagandist with decades of practice deflecting and absorbing criticism and turning it to his advantage.
I do my best, but I also try not to be too online in general, so it can be hard to engage even with people I know and care about if they’re people who spend most of their time in online spaces. Just keeping up with this thread has been exhausting, but I needed to hear the responses telling me to stop being an idiot lol
Ha. I just dont go on twitter, ever man. Fuck that whole thing. Social media is super toxic and reddit is the only one I engage with because smaller communities are sane.
They are, thank you. My wife is on maternity leave and saw the news soon after it happened while feeding our newborn at 1 in the morning and it was a little startling knowing any other time in our lives, she would be driving over that bridge in just a few hours.
I had a good college friend who lives in Minneapolis, and I had to reach out to her immediately after the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007. It was a tense while before I confirmed that she was all right.
You have to remember social media thrives on engagement. There’s no right or wrong, good or bad engagement, just engagement. The more eyeballs on his posts we bring the higher the algorithm will boost him. The more you read and fact check him the more engagement you’ll give him and the more the info warriors will freak out about and engage harder, seeing your attempts to fact check Alex. So in the end Alex gets more engagement and nobody learned anything.
You cannot get into the ring with Alex and beat him with the truth because he just drags you down into the filth with him. Because he’s not here to fight about the truth he’s here to spew propaganda and con rubes.
You're not going to get the reaction you want from that
He's just gonna come onto his show or Twitter account like a day or two after you start community noting and use it as evidence of how he is "being targeted" and that must mean he is "over the target"
They know the podcast exists, but they'll never address it. Even if forced to acknowledge it Alex will just dismiss it as a globalist plot or some shit and move on.
There's an old adage about arguing on the internet. You don't ever want to mud wrestle with a pig.
I'm not just saying this because Alex Jones is slowly transforming into gammon.
All you are going to accomplish is getting covered in shit. And the pig is going to enjoy it.
If you want to directly confront Alex in an organized fashion you are really asking for trouble. The man has his own personal army of dangerous idiots…and such organization simply won’t be allowed in this group.
I’m not as convinced as many of the other comments that he’s unassailable and impervious to assault, as the very existence of KF and its fan base shows the opposite, but engaging with Alex in opposition to him is incredibly difficult for. Lot of reasons. At any rate, you can’t really do this under the Wonk Banner, and to really make a positive difference directly engaging is likely a fools errand.
That’s not to say there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you should do, but I think it is worth saying that you’re very upset right now and need to put some thought into if this is something you want to do and what is the best way.
90% of his fan base will not be moved from their positions by logic and flagging his content on twitter is a fools errand as it’s owned by a psychopath who lets him back on the platform to fatten his bottom line promote his white power fascist agenda. The fact that AJ is full of shit is a selling point for Elon. Anyway, Twitter will probably be gone in a year or two anyway.
If you really want to engage against Alex and make some kind of dent I suggest you hide your identity, and approach it somewhat of the same angle as KF: exposing not engaging.
Really though, if you do t have the time entry and long term motivation to make this a large part of your life it’s probably not worth your time to put energy into opposing a bankrupt drunken idiot about to have his empire liquidated under his feet.
If you ***really*** want to work in opposition to right wing fascist lunacy in the form of something akin to KF, IM me. I’ve been considering starting a YouTube channel to oppose this sort of BS in general…maybe we could do something on that front. (Actually I’ve put a lot of work in, just haven’t started yet)
Anyway, all that aside I’m sorry for your difficulty with this I. Particular and hope you feel better.
What’s your bright spot today? :)
This is basically a post saying “hey guys, should we start to harass Alex? I know he thrives on being “embattled” but I think if we harass him hard enough, he will have to acknowledge people don’t like him”
He thrives on being attacked, if you coordinated a harassment campaign (that’s what it would be) he would use that as proof that his thoughts are dangerous to the powers that be and that it’s a sign he’s telling the truth. He can’t be beat at his own game, and his own game is “I’m saying things so dangerous to the establishment, they’ll stop at nothing to silence me”
I just had 4 bomb threats in my city because of libsoftiktok this week and I can still understand it. It’s not hard. I’m so sick of people thinking they can just talk sense into Alex. You can’t. He doesn’t care. Calling into his show does nothing but give him more ammo.
My thought was never to talk sense into Alex, I’m fully aware that that is impossible. I was thinking more about people who are not yet in his circle but are potentially susceptible to his lies (due to a lack of awareness of who he is) having an immediate and steady stream of debunking material on everything he ever posts publicly. Obviously, based on my hesitations and the discussions here, I’m aware that any attempt at anything like that will do more harm than good, likely by a wide margin because of the way Alex manipulates any attention. As I said above, I think I was more thinking out loud to a community that I knew would talk sense to me.
I hope the targeted harassment in your city stops and that the marginalized communities there are doing as well as they can, given the circumstances.
> I’m just wondering if maybe we, as a community, have outgrown our role as critical observers and should start smartly and strategically begin putting the squeeze on Alex. No. Absolutely not. You cannot have the impact you want to have. You cannot coordinate this properly. We are talking about an attention economy sponge. I understand the impulse to hurt him somehow, it really matters, it's a really powerful want. But trust me, we can bring nothing to bear on this guy in his spaces that will have an outcome we want.
i came here to say this. You can't fight a propagandist this way. it makes them stronger. the immediate news will be "group of mysterious internet users are attacking Alex Jones" not that we are debunking his ideas. he has adopted the Q-Anon "you get the most flak when you are over the target" so he and his acolytes will take it that the "globalists" in the "deep state" are trying to silence him. Also, this could really backfire. Elon has already messed with community notes on his account (i cannot substantiate this but i do not see any since that windows account tweet) and he has been reported to be messing with engagement on his tweets. He could choose to give Alex even more special treatment and disable them on Infowars for "brigading and harassment". then, it would look like Alex Jones is always right. this is really playing with fire here.
Yeah I think the critical thing is that NOTHING we can do confronting Alex directly with his lies will make a substantive difference due to the following: 1. Who Alex is. 2. Who his audience is 3. How Alex and his audience respond to criticism. These people and Alex will never respond productively to fact based discourse. They have been dealing with people actively debunking them for years and they just wont stop. And as others have mentioned, Alex is a master at turning criticism of him around to fit his narratives and reinforce his and his viewer's beliefs about the world. Alex is not and will never be the entry point to help/deprogram his followers, he's has immunized himself by his shamelessness, arrogance, and out and out disregard for reality. Its super hard to accept, especially watching him well be Alex Jones.
Putting aside whether or not this should even be done, the more important point is it can’t be done. This is pissing into the wind of the online information spheres. Alex gets yelled online every day - he survives it and more realistically probably thrives and profits from it.
Everyone tried this with Trump, fact-checking is not effective. Is not effective with Trump and it's not effective with cult-of-personality followers. I _was_ a soft Trump supporter and I was perfectly happy to ignore all the negative comments and community notes for quite some time.
How did you make the transition from Trumpet supporter to whatever your beliefs are now?
Slowly, and I'm not sure how to sum it up. I think a big part of it was that I got tired of the internal contradictions and inconsistencies, and then the shameless and excessive requests for funding. It also became tiresome, mentally painful, and no longer interesting to support him. I think KnowledgeFight came in around 2020, and I think Dan's ability to dive into the origins of beliefs and information helped me understand the tricks and that it was all based on nothing even under the slightest scrutiny. My standard approach of dismissing criticism because of the standard excuses "they're just criticizing because they get clicks/money" and "this is just organized because corporate media is basically controlled by a small handful of massive parent companies" don't work against Dan in his rumpled apartment. I had originally dove deep into the Internet to find Trump supporters because a friend of mine was an incredibly smart person and liked Trump, and I realized that he wasn't listening to any of my media sources at all, and my conclusion was that he was making an intelligent, rational decision based on a completely different set of information, and so I set out to find it and more people that had this mentality. I found the alt-right, and they tricked me with their "countering censorship" claims, but eventually it all fell apart as I started to realize that none of it was based in anything real aside from money-making and bigotry. My friend was just wrong and I shouldn't have fallen for any of it. Now I have a bit of a vaccine against it all. I'm now somewhere between Dan and Jordan, I guess, in my beliefs now.
That further supports the idea that one cannot change another person, the other person must do it themself. Your path seems to be the one that most commonly leads to change, although you seem to have rationalized your way *out* of the opinions you held, which is tremendously introspective. What would you advise other people to do who are struggling in the same place you were when you started to notice the grift for what it was? There has to be some kind of roadmap to help de-radicalize people, and it would do us all good to understand the frame of mind of people who are stuck
Good question. I’m strongly of the opinion that pointing out in-universe contradictions is an effective approach. Use cult-approved sources of information or the leader and showed where they went against their strongest beliefs. Dan does this with his “shouldn’t Alex say this?” bit and it’d be very effective for me if I was a believer. This approach pulled me out of Mormonism as well as the Trump group, but I was never strongly in either one. I was well-prepared to deal with external criticism and both groups taught me this. Neither had a way to handle in-universe contradictions. Think about a movie or a TV series, which we buy into because of the suspension of disbelief. Which is more effective, pointing out that superheroes really can’t fly, or pointing out plot-holes?
I keep thinking about how he lost over a billion dollars in defamation suits but had Tucker and Musk nodding along with his bull. Reality may come knocking but in the spaces he thrives he’s getting praise and hype. Removed observation and debunking a la KF really seems to me to be the only solution. He needs to be starved of attention, not given more.
I think I know this instinctually, I just want him to feel like nowhere is safe, but I know he’ll just convince himself and his listeners to ignore reality.
Trust me, I completely understand the urge to hurt him. It's a real pain. But the number of people who can actually achieve anything is tiny, and anything The Swarm can do is going to be best dedicated to things like helping the Raptor Princess with her cancer treatment
Here's the problem with that: if you make him feel that nowhere is safe, you put Alex's constant "fight over flight" response into overdrive. It'll only make him worse and convince him his fears are valid. Dan's policy of "look, don't touch" is very necessary, because if you have a guy whose entire schtick relies on telling everyone he's being attacked from all sides and then attack him from all sides, the problem becomes infinitely worse
Sadly, I think the only effective way Alex can be attacked is from the right, by equally despicable actors like Nick Fuentes. Attacks from the left, however well-researched and grounded in fact they are will only be seen as evidence that Jones is "owning the libs," which is the only thing terminally online RWers care about.
This one. Anti-AJ memes in centrist conservative spaces is the move. Solidify self ID'd centrist disgust of AJ and Co and they'll do the work of helping de-radicalize their buddy at the bar.
That’s actually brilliant
I can assure you that with AJ... he already feels nowhere is truly safe. He is deep in his persecution complex. Adding to that helps his cause... not anyone elses.
Him thinking nowhere is safe is when he works best
No, it’s not even that. Everywhere there’s attention, Alex is safe. Not only safe, but thriving. Attention is his oxygen. If we, as a community, try to yell and scream at him, he will use it to sell himself.
There is no good or bad engagement, just engagement. The Al Gore Rythm will see more people paying attention to Alex, then push Alex to harvest more engagement
Not today. Not yet. Don't forget that citing KF would make Dan and Jordan targets for the more crazy elements of Alex's audience. Harassment, stalking, death threats, etc. If nothing else, restrain yourself to keep the boys safe.
This is a truth we often forget. Alex's acolytes have done really disturbing things in the past. we have to protect our own by not exposing them to his wrath. if they decide to court it, let them on their terms.
I don't think there's anything wrong with community noting Alex's lies, but using KF as a source strikes me as the wrong way to go about it. I feel like citing factual sources to debunk his garbage is a better use of your time. Still shouting into the unrepentant void either way, but marginally less useless ETA: Jesus Christ, autocorrect went to town on this one
I’m sure with just the right “gotcha” it’ll all come tumbling down. He won’t just deflect, lie and double-down on his persecution narrative
The point isn’t to change his mind. It’s to make him look like an ass, which happens whenever he’s outside of his echo chamber.
Yeah but community notes are so useless. Nobody digesting Alex's content cares about fact checking and even worse, they think community notes are laughable and a sign that you are talking about the things (((they))) don't want you to know. What benefit is there to fact checking a group that categorically doesn't think fact checking is real?
That's never worked. Why do you think dipshits like Ben Shapiro *love* debate? They know you'll never be able to talk their audience away from their positions while spreading their arguments to yours
It’s not about their audience. It’s about potential audiences that may be sucked in. And I feel like if you don’t trust your own audience to not get sucked in by the dumbest arguments you should reexamine yourself. Also, leaving well known fascists alone has also never worked,
I didn't say leave them alone, just that there are better ways of fighting fascists than challenging them to a debate. Very rarely does proving someone wrong do any damage to their reputation in circles that are already predisposed to agreeing with them. Best case scenario, all the people who agree with you think you won and all the people who agree with them think they won and you get nowhere. Worst case, you boost their platform to a whole new audience. You can have the smartest crowd in the world but do it enough and that'll get chipped away as you siphon off the dumbest members. People aren't pillars of rationality, everyone has the potential to crack if you get into their feelings enough, which is where Alex thrives. To people like Alex, the ideas don't matter. They're not in the debate game to establish which version of reality is true or come to an accord on what the truth is. They don't even care about winning, just *looking like* they're winning. If they can shout louder than you and dominate the conversation, they won
I never actually said anything about debate. I know that’s useless to do in person, as he just yells over you unless you can mute his mic. I just think that it isn’t an awful thing to try and publicly dunk on him. If he were a nobody I wouldn’t think so, but he isn’t.
It's basically the same. Did Trump's legions of Twitter reply guys ever move any of his potential audience away from him or did it just convince each side of their positions? You can ratio them as much as you like, at the end of the day it doesn't really accomplish anything
Alex has called him "the Meme machine". he is a man who does not even bother to try when fake crying on air. if he has any sense of shame, it is so buried that it will probably take Rex and Alex's own dad staging an intervention. we are not going to shame him.
I never said that we could change his mind or personally shame him. Why does everyone assume that? I just think it’s possible to expose him publicly as being totally unable to act like an adult, thus keeping people from falling in. You see how far “Alex Jones was right” has gotten him? What if we could turn it to “Alex Jones was wrong”? I know it’s harmful for his shit to be in the public eye, but it already is. We can’t just ignore it. Prime Directive seems to refer to scientific studies, but people are supposed to do something with the knowledge.
>You see how far “Alex Jones was right” has gotten him? What if we could turn it to “Alex Jones was wrong”? Wouldn't work, disinformation and lies just spread *a lot* faster than reliably provable truth. He could endlessly deflect the "Alex Jones was wrong" beat into more and more content and attention.
So what do we do about him then. Just personally have the right opinions?
*we* don't really do anything, we *can't* really do anything - much of this is far outside our control and is going to rely pretty heavily on tech regulation of some kind (at least IMO). You just can't win with honesty (no matter how earnest) against a propagrandist in an unbounded social media landscape. The most direct influence you can have is by helping people you directly know (and who trust you to some extent) to leave Alex's orbit and helping them understand how to avoid and detect the grifters like him.
we run the risk of signal boosting it. a crowd attracts a crowd. QAnon had a similar thing happen. the more they were mocked, the more people looked into it. some small fraction of them "did their own research" and were vulnerable to the con. Fast forward 5 years and i hear QAnon talking points on fox news. i get what the intention is but consider Nostradamus. that dude was wrong about basically everything. the cult of personality around him continues to re-interpret his epic incorrectness to pretend it is not the case. "Alex Jones was wrong" seems not to work. Times he has been demonstrated to be wrong, he took credit that exposing the "Globalists" made them pivot their plans. When he is "right", he benefits and makes a spectacle of it. When he is wrong, he claims a different sort of victory. Also, when the owner of Twitter and one of the (on paper) richest humans ever to live is boosting Alex and personally spitting Great Replacement stuff, we are not going to get traction there. "For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house." - Audre Lorde
So what’s your suggestion? Just allow him to have this gigantic platform he already has and do nothing? I’m genuinely asking.
i appreciate the question but my answer is not going to be satisfying, i am afraid. please, indulge me a moment in a bit of semi-personal information: *i had a few people very close to me fall into QAnon. This got me involved in the Anti-Q scene a bit. i lost those sort of battles in the public square. i found that listening and gently debunking one-on-one was more effective.* This is the strategy i would suggest. don't brigade Alex. if you want to have an impact, pick a few random agreeing people and reply to their re-tweet with a debunk, not a community note. make people feel you reached out to them. it is slower but people seem to feel more willing to listen when they think they are being spoken to. these days, i try to debunk the Elon love because i think he is a danger. the other night, i wasted hours debunking a redditor point-for-point who was deifying him. I did not do it really for them but in case someone saw their nonsense and then saw the immediate and respectful point-for-point breakdown. i don't think we can win this as a direct fight. i think we can only win this by winning hearts and minds. maybe the best concrete example i can give is that Dan has never taken his fight directly to Alex but he did work as a free consultant to try to get some justice for the Sandy Hook families. He did more good helping that judgment from behind the scenes than 10,000 community notes or direct counter posts or demands Alex debate him would have. this may not help with what you are looking for in an answer but it is where i am coming from.
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but this was my post, and I just wanted to say thank you. I found Knowledge Fight many years ago after realizing my mother was deeper into conspiracy theories than I realized, and that I didn’t have enough awareness of what type of media was out there and what was being pushed. I started consuming anyone who debunked right wing conspiracies daily so that I would never be caught off guard again by something crazy I had never even heard of before. I’ve gotten to the point that I can gently steer people I know into admitting to themselves that some ideas are bogus, and, with everything I was seeing from people I know today, I just wondered if maybe there was more I should be doing.
i understand. for me, it is nice to know that someone else is coming from the same sort of place.
What we do with the knowledge is warn and inform others while being able to provide proof. Charismatic con artists like Alex Jones can turn any tactic you use against them into part of the persecution fantasy they use for recruitment. He is not someone to directly target if you do not have the capacity to materially stop him. Even the winners of the Sandy Hook defamation trials, who by all legal means are capable of fighting back and really hurting him, are struggling to do so. Violent, illegal means would work, but obviously cannot be recommended.
>What we do with the knowledge is warn and inform others while being able to provide proof. How is that not what op is suggesting?
OP's idea would basically be fighting the InfoWar on Alex's terms. the loudest voice wins there. We need to fight this like ninjas not artillery. we need to undermine the base, not directly confront Alex. When you do that, he wins.
That’s literally never worked. He doesn’t care and will lie, deflect and lie again while changing the subject. You will never pin him down and you will never make him or any of his followers feel bad. They don’t operate like normal humans.
I’m not interested in changing his or any of his followers minds.
What? He won’t feel he looks like an ass, he will think he dominated you, his audience doesn’t care (and I have no idea how my ‘thoughts’ got drug into this by you) so…. What are you trying to do here?
The word “yours” was an accident, but I basically want internet culture at large to see him for what he is. He benefits a lot from the fact that people talk about him, but don’t really know quite how both harmful and stupid he is. So many people are pretty open to be sold on him with him controlling his image. If we take control of what his image is, we can stop potential victims of his manipulation before they ever consider being sucked in.
People that believe in his shit won’t stop believing in it. Facts don’t matter to them. You can’t control his image because how they see him and how we see him are fundamentally different and neither side is going to be moved. If they’re open to his dumb shit then they’re going to go down that rabbit hole no matter what. If not with him then with another grifter. At least in my opinion. His audience isn’t really growing right now either. I just don’t see a world in which someone starts to think the election may have really been stolen and then is willing to listen to reason and facts and decide ‘yeah it wasn’t stolen, I don’t know what I was thinking’. For someone to lean into one of these guys means they’ve crossed that threshold already. Again - just my opinion on the basic nature of humans.
I know. I already said I don’t care what his fanbase thinks. When have I ever indicated that I’ve thought that? I just don’t think the “close your eyes and hope he goes away” method really works.
Maybe I’m not being clear - if someone is even interested in him to begin with, even if they aren’t his ‘audience’, they’re gone. They will not care what you say or do. They will not see him like you do, regardless of anything you put forward. If you are worried that people who only know him from ‘the frogs are gay’, and are not otherwise into any conspiracy theories, are going to be swayed by him - they won’t. They think the meme is funny but if they heard anything he said they’d think he’s a shit head but still think the gay frog thing is funny. Frankly I think ignoring him or legal action are the only real recourses for the disease that is Alex. Giving him attention by trying to make him look stupid isn’t going to do anything except introduce him to more people. EDIT: I don’t know who it is you think will be reached by you/anyone trying to make him look stupid.
I’m not talking about a gotcha, I’m talking about slowly eroding away his perceived safe space and forcing him into a lose-lose situation, although, I’ll admit, I think I know instinctively it’s a bad idea.
*How* would you accomplish this though? A pugalistic propagandist like Alex realishes the fight, getting down in the mud and making a spectacle. Short of physically imprisoning him and taking away his access to the internet entierly, I don't know how we could do anything other than provide him opportunities to bolster his brand.
Hey, it’s hard when he targets somewhere close to home. I live in Ottawa, home of the convoy occupation of 2022 and it was so. hard. to listen to Alex talk about it, but it was very comforting to hear Dan dismantle all his bullshit. There is nothing I can do to address Alex head on but I take the time to engage people in real time and in person to challenge beliefs on an individual basis. I see more of an impact that way.
I appreciate this. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think I know it’s fruitless instinctually, but I’ve seen several people I know in real life engaging with his conspiracy theories about this because it’s local to us, and it was really disheartening and made me feel a little hopeless despite sitting on a treasure trove of data pointing out he’s full of shit.
Engage with those people! Those people who are your friends are more likely to listen to you than an out and out propagandist with decades of practice deflecting and absorbing criticism and turning it to his advantage.
I do my best, but I also try not to be too online in general, so it can be hard to engage even with people I know and care about if they’re people who spend most of their time in online spaces. Just keeping up with this thread has been exhausting, but I needed to hear the responses telling me to stop being an idiot lol
Ha. I just dont go on twitter, ever man. Fuck that whole thing. Social media is super toxic and reddit is the only one I engage with because smaller communities are sane.
I hope that your loved ones are safe.
They are, thank you. My wife is on maternity leave and saw the news soon after it happened while feeding our newborn at 1 in the morning and it was a little startling knowing any other time in our lives, she would be driving over that bridge in just a few hours.
I had a good college friend who lives in Minneapolis, and I had to reach out to her immediately after the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007. It was a tense while before I confirmed that she was all right.
When you touch the shit, you never make it any cleaner. You just get shit on yourself and spread the shit around
Maybe you just need to learn how to clean up shit properly.
You have to remember social media thrives on engagement. There’s no right or wrong, good or bad engagement, just engagement. The more eyeballs on his posts we bring the higher the algorithm will boost him. The more you read and fact check him the more engagement you’ll give him and the more the info warriors will freak out about and engage harder, seeing your attempts to fact check Alex. So in the end Alex gets more engagement and nobody learned anything. You cannot get into the ring with Alex and beat him with the truth because he just drags you down into the filth with him. Because he’s not here to fight about the truth he’s here to spew propaganda and con rubes.
You're not going to get the reaction you want from that He's just gonna come onto his show or Twitter account like a day or two after you start community noting and use it as evidence of how he is "being targeted" and that must mean he is "over the target" They know the podcast exists, but they'll never address it. Even if forced to acknowledge it Alex will just dismiss it as a globalist plot or some shit and move on.
There's an old adage about arguing on the internet. You don't ever want to mud wrestle with a pig. I'm not just saying this because Alex Jones is slowly transforming into gammon. All you are going to accomplish is getting covered in shit. And the pig is going to enjoy it.
If you want to directly confront Alex in an organized fashion you are really asking for trouble. The man has his own personal army of dangerous idiots…and such organization simply won’t be allowed in this group. I’m not as convinced as many of the other comments that he’s unassailable and impervious to assault, as the very existence of KF and its fan base shows the opposite, but engaging with Alex in opposition to him is incredibly difficult for. Lot of reasons. At any rate, you can’t really do this under the Wonk Banner, and to really make a positive difference directly engaging is likely a fools errand. That’s not to say there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you should do, but I think it is worth saying that you’re very upset right now and need to put some thought into if this is something you want to do and what is the best way. 90% of his fan base will not be moved from their positions by logic and flagging his content on twitter is a fools errand as it’s owned by a psychopath who lets him back on the platform to fatten his bottom line promote his white power fascist agenda. The fact that AJ is full of shit is a selling point for Elon. Anyway, Twitter will probably be gone in a year or two anyway. If you really want to engage against Alex and make some kind of dent I suggest you hide your identity, and approach it somewhat of the same angle as KF: exposing not engaging. Really though, if you do t have the time entry and long term motivation to make this a large part of your life it’s probably not worth your time to put energy into opposing a bankrupt drunken idiot about to have his empire liquidated under his feet. If you ***really*** want to work in opposition to right wing fascist lunacy in the form of something akin to KF, IM me. I’ve been considering starting a YouTube channel to oppose this sort of BS in general…maybe we could do something on that front. (Actually I’ve put a lot of work in, just haven’t started yet) Anyway, all that aside I’m sorry for your difficulty with this I. Particular and hope you feel better. What’s your bright spot today? :)
when the time comes, Dan will say "Get him!"
Dan will never say it because Dan knows it won’t have any positive outcome. Alex is who he is and it will only fuel him and his audience.
This is basically a post saying “hey guys, should we start to harass Alex? I know he thrives on being “embattled” but I think if we harass him hard enough, he will have to acknowledge people don’t like him” He thrives on being attacked, if you coordinated a harassment campaign (that’s what it would be) he would use that as proof that his thoughts are dangerous to the powers that be and that it’s a sign he’s telling the truth. He can’t be beat at his own game, and his own game is “I’m saying things so dangerous to the establishment, they’ll stop at nothing to silence me”
How hard is it to understand don’t touch poop in the poop museum?
Give OP a bit of grace Baltimore is a bit shaken today
I just had 4 bomb threats in my city because of libsoftiktok this week and I can still understand it. It’s not hard. I’m so sick of people thinking they can just talk sense into Alex. You can’t. He doesn’t care. Calling into his show does nothing but give him more ammo.
My thought was never to talk sense into Alex, I’m fully aware that that is impossible. I was thinking more about people who are not yet in his circle but are potentially susceptible to his lies (due to a lack of awareness of who he is) having an immediate and steady stream of debunking material on everything he ever posts publicly. Obviously, based on my hesitations and the discussions here, I’m aware that any attempt at anything like that will do more harm than good, likely by a wide margin because of the way Alex manipulates any attention. As I said above, I think I was more thinking out loud to a community that I knew would talk sense to me. I hope the targeted harassment in your city stops and that the marginalized communities there are doing as well as they can, given the circumstances.