Nearly 50% of Twitter Accounts Talking about Coronavirus Might Be Bots

Twitter is dealing with a pandemic of bots jamming the platform with misinformation about COVID-19.

By Tess Owen Apr 23 2020

Nearly half the “people” talking about the coronavirus pandemic on Twitter are not actually people, but bots, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University.

And many of those bots are rapidly feeding Twitter with harmful, false story lines about the pandemic, including some inspiring real-world activity, such as the theory that 5G towers cause COVID-19, or state-sponsored propaganda from Russia and China that falsely claims the U.S. developed the coronavirus as a bioweapon or that American politicians are issuing “mandatory” lockdowns.

“We do see that a lot of bots are acting in ways that are consistent with the story lines that are coming out of Russia or China,” said Kathleen Carley, professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research.

Researchers there found that 45.5% of users tweeting about the coronavirus have the characteristics of bots, such as tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible, or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later.

Carley says that’s a massive jump from the 20% she’d expected based on previous analyses of bot activity around other major global news events and national disasters.

The Carnegie Mellon team identified more than 100 false narratives relating to coronavirus worldwide, which they divided into six different categories: cures or preventative measures, weaponization of the virus, emergency responses, the nature of the virus (like children being immune to it), self-diagnosis methods, and feel-good stories, like dolphins returning to Venice’s canals.

They found the largest number of different narratives in the cures or preventative measures category — 77 in total. Carley said those ranged from the downright silly, like Corona beer cures coronavirus, to the downright deadly, like drinking bleach cures coronavirus (this was touted by the pro-Trump group QAnon). Disinformation in this category was the most likely to travel internationally, Carley said.




Disinformation about the coronavirus erodes trust in institutions and makes the public less likely to comply with scientifically informed government measures needed to curb the spread of the virus, like lockdowns and social distancing.

"The real goal of those running these disinformation campaigns is about creating distrust in the overall ecosystem and institutions. It’s not so much about picking a side as it is about creating confusion and doubt and distrust of authority,” said Jevin West, who runs the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
Bot or not?

Carley and her team rely on a “bot hunter” tool that they developed, which uses artificial intelligence to process account information from users on Twitter to determine who is or who isn’t a bot.

The bot hunter looks at information like number of followers, the things they tweet about, the frequency of tweeting, language, the types of accounts they retweet, and their mentions network.

To analyze bot activity around the pandemic, the tool examined all tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19 — that ended up being about 67 million tweets between January 29 and March 4, and after that about 4 million tweets on average each day, from more than 12 million users.

Carley’s findings, which will be laid out in an upcoming paper, are in keeping with reports that China and Russia have launched massive disinformation campaigns around the coronavirus pandemic directed at the U.S.

Reuters got their hands on a European Union document last month alleging that the Kremlin had mounted a “significant disinformation campaign” against the West with the goal of sowing panic and distrust.

In mid-March, the White House’s National Security Council had to put out an announcement via Twitter denying social media reports that President Donald Trump was about to lock down the entirety of the U.S. According to the New York Times, that narrative was pushed by Chinese agents. And earlier this month, the Justice Department said it was investigating coronavirus disinformation campaigns originating from China and Russia.

While some bots fit the profile of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, Carley said it’s hard to say definitively where they came from or who made them. “We can’t prove attribution,” she said.
Removing tweets

A spokesperson for Twitter told VICE News that they’re “prioritizing the removal of COVID-19 content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm,” a policy that they adopted on March 18. Since then, they’ve removed more than 2,200 tweets.

“As we’ve said previously, we will not take enforcement action on every tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19,” the spokesperson said. “As we’ve doubled down on tech, our automated systems have challenged more than 3.4 million accounts that were targeting discussions around COVID-19 with spammy or manipulative behaviors.”

Carley has described bot detection as a game of cat-and-mouse: Bots are constantly becoming more sophisticated to evade social media crackdowns, and so the software needed to catch them has to be regularly updated.


At the moment, Twitter says they’re not seeing any kind of coordinated platform-manipulation effort with regards to coronavirus. They also cautioned that not all bots are created equal — and not all bots are bad. If they were, Twitter says, they’d be in violation of their company policy.

#KAKISTOCRACY
'Don't You Have a Bat to Eat?' New HHS Spokesman Made Racist Remarks About Chinese People on Twitter

Michael Caputo deleted the comments on Twitter before he was named assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week.

By Emma Ockerman -VICE-Apr 23 2020

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Cover: Newly-appointed spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart Senate Office building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, on May 1, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new spokesman tweeted — and then deleted — racist comments about Chinese people in March, and accused reporters critical of President Trump’s labeling of COVID-19 as the “the Chinese Virus” of “carrying water for the Chinese Community Party.”

Michael Caputo’s since-deleted tweets, archived online and first reported by CNN, came before he was appointed as the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week. (HHS hasn’t commented on Caputo’s tweets to CNN, and did not respond to a VICE News request for comment.)

HHS is among the agencies currently attempting to fight off the coronavirus pandemic. Caputo previously worked for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In early March — just as COVID-19 was starting to sweep across the U.S., and shelter-in-place orders were being issued — Caputo responded to a tweet about the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged.

Foreign Ministry spokesman and Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijian tweeted the conspiracy theory, saying “US owe us an explanation!”

“This virus originated in Wuhan. You own it, and you know why. Nobody believes your bullshit. Take your lumps and clean up your act so you don’t kill the world,” Caputo responded.

When another Twitter user asked how Caputo knew the virus originated in Wuhan, Caputo responded: “Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters, but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That's it.”

He responded to other people critical of him, too, saying to one user: “Don’t you have a bat to eat?” And another: “You’re very convincing, Wang.”



Caputo was apparently referencing the fact that researchers believe coronavirus was transmitted from bats to other wild animals possibly sold to humans at a wet market in Wuhan.

And as Trump was being criticized for labeling COVID-19 as “the China Virus” — saying it wasn’t racist — Caputo tweeted “#ChineseVirus” 20 times in a row on March 17. He also tweeted that Democrats and members of the Media were acting too favorably to Beijing.

“The Chinese Communist Party has always been adept at lying to cover their murders. What's remarkable here is the US Democrats and their conjugal media repeating CCP propaganda because they hate Trump more than they love America. The Wuhan virus has exposed them,” Caputo tweeted.

The next day, March 18, Caputo said on Twitter that “leftists lost the true meaning of ‘racism’ long ago,” suggesting that people “double down on #ChineseVirus.” He then said that reporters were “carrying water for the Chinese Communist party.”

Separately, Caputo suggested several times that Democrats would celebrate coronavirus deaths and an economic collapse, because it would look as if Trump had failed to handle the crisis.

"How many Americans must die to feed Democrat powerlust? 100K? 1M? More??," Caputo said in a tweet March 22. "How much economic destruction is the Democrat goal? 100% unemployment?'"

The Biggest Environmental Disaster in U.S. History Never Really Ended
Cleanup workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are still suffering 10 years later.

By Agnes Walton and Jana Lerner Apr 21 2020

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up 41 miles off the Louisiana coast in April 2010, 11 workers died in the explosion, and over the next three months, 210 million gallons of oil poured from the ruptured well into the Gulf of Mexico, unleashing the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

Ten years later, local fisheries are still feeling the impact.

Like thousands of other fishers, Kindra and David Arnesen found themselves without work as Gulf fisheries shut down. Unlike other fishers, Kindra Arnesen very publicly took on British Petroleum for their part in the spill, campaigning for a fair settlement long after the media lost interest.





Today, with fisheries on a slow path to recovery, she still sees no reason to celebrate.

“I think to call this an anniversary is a slap in the face to the families that lost a man on that rig. An anniversary is something you celebrate. I don't think we should celebrate this,” she said. “We're still living with it. And we'll continue to live with this for the rest of our lives.”

After the spill, thousands of oilfield workers, fishers, and coastal residents stepped in to help with the cleanup. Many of those workers were not fitted with appropriate personal protective equipment like respirators, and were exposed to crude oil and to a potentially hazardous chemical product called Corexit.

Corexit is a dispersant. It breaks up the oil, removing it from the surface, and it’s approved for use in oil spill emergencies by the EPA. But its effects on humans weren’t well studied before BP applied at least 1.8 million gallons of the product above and below the ocean’s surface.




David Arnesen was exposed to Corexit when he went on a last shrimping trip before oil flooded the fishery.

“16 crewmen went out. Most of them returned home before the fishing hours were over because they were becoming ill from smelling it. David got sick after that trip.”

Those acute short-term reactions turned into long-term problems.

Thousands of Gulf Coast residents and cleanup workers have alleged in lawsuits against BP that they, too, suffered health problems as a result of the exposure to oil and Corexit. Ten years later, many are still waiting for answers and, as new health problems emerge, so do new lawsuits.


“We kind of learned to live sick in our community,” said Arnesen. “As for most people, they've given up on [litigation] at this point.”

But Kindra Arnesen hasn’t given up on litigation entirely. Along with Alaskans who say they’re still feeling the fallout from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, and the dispersants used to clean it up, she joined a lawsuit this year against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Their aim is to get the agency to revise its contingency plan for oil spills and find a safer product than Corexit to use in the future. A court is expected to rule shortly on whether the plaintiffs’ claims can move forward.

“They're trying to expand oil and gas drilling all over the place. So it's not if it's when this comes to a shoreline near you,” said Arnesen.

British Petroleum and Nalco Water, the manufacturer of Corexit, did not respond to requests for comment.

Is There Any Better Time Than Now For a General Strike?

May Day offers a perfect opportunity to reshape labor relations during this pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the inequalities baked into the U.S.’s capitalist system—one that deems nurses and grocery workers “essential,” but leaves them with just as few rights and privileges as they had before the crisis struck. The scenario before us, where society depends more than ever on the bottom rung of the working class, offers a perfect storm for these “essential workers” to use their leverage and demand better protections for themselves now and in the future. This perfect storm may well unfold on May 1—a day with historic roots in the U.S., marked by workers all around the world to demand their labor rights.

For those of us considered “non-essential workers,” May 1, 2020, also offers an opportunity to say a resounding “no” to President Donald Trump, who is desperate to salvage his flagging shot at reelection and demanding that people return to work at the beginning of May. Trump has made clear that his needs are more important than ours in defying health experts who agree that May 1 is far too early to return to “normal.” He has claimed “total” authority over lifting state and citywide quarantines during the pandemic. A general strike on May 1 would lay waste to his wishful thinking for totalitarianism.

Kali Akuno, the co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, laid out his organization’s call for a May Day strike this year and shared with me in an interview that, “we are calling on all workers to come as one, in particular the essential workers to strike for their lives.” He explained that, “If Trump is calling for businesses to return to normal, if that is allowed to proceed without the personal protective gear being in place for every single one of our essential workers, we’re just going to create a calamity and keep this crisis going further.”

Workers deemed “essential” have been forced to work in order to keep their jobs but offered little recompense or even protection from the virus.

Akuno also sees the pandemic as a turning point where workers can send a message of refusing to “go back to business-as-usual”—the status quo where a massive underclass of working people are living paycheck-to-paycheck without adequate health care, paid leave, childcare for their dependents, or decent wages is no longer acceptable. “It was business-as-usual that allowed this to roll out in the way that it has,” he said.

Workers deemed “essential” have been forced to work in order to keep their jobs but offered little recompense or even protection from the virus. A supermarket worker at Tem’s Food Market in Macon, Mississippi, found my personal mask-making project on social media and begged me to make 20 masks for her colleagues and her. In the early days of the crisis, not only were grocery workers like her not provided with protective gear, but many were also stunningly not allowed to wear their own safety equipment such as masks and gloves. My own cousin, a grocery store manager in Boston, Massachusetts, responded to my worried queries about his health and safety saying that upper management was not permitting him and others to wear masks at work until recently. This was corroborated by supermarket analyst Phil Lempert who told the Washington Post, “One of the biggest mistakes supermarkets made early on was not allowing employees to wear masks and gloves the way they wanted to.”

It is no wonder that the workers we rely on to feed and care for us are falling ill from the virus and dying. Thousands of grocery workers have already tested positive for COVID-19 and as of mid-April more than 40 have died. Although such “essential workers” are naturally terrified of catching the virus in their workplace, their vulnerable socioeconomic status also means they cannot afford to quit. The pressure to conform and fall in line with the demands of corporate America are all too real as workers face a choice between accepting their oppression or being fired. More than 16 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and beyond a $1,200 payout from the federal government and hard-to-access unemployment benefits, there is little else to compensate them.

Still, in the face of such an untenable situation, workers are already agitating for their rights with walkouts and protests. The New York Times’ labor writer Steven Greenhouse explained that, “Fearing retaliation, American workers are generally far more reluctant to stick their necks out and protest working conditions than are workers in other industrial countries.” However, now, “with greater fear of the disease than of their bosses, workers have set off a burst of walkouts, sickouts and wildcat strikes.” Whole Foods workers had planned an action for May Day but moved up their “sick out” to March 31 to demand better conditions and pay. Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, organized a walkout, but the world’s largest retail giant simply fired the organizer. The person ultimately responsible for overseeing workers at Whole Foods and Amazon is Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man who personally racked up an extra $24 billion this year alone largely as a result of the pandemic. Bezos’s wealth and power, when contrasted with the harsh conditions under which his employees work, are an appropriate symbol for a general strike on May Day as the best chance for workers to demand their rights.

On its website, Akuno’s organization Cooperation Jackson spells out the demands it is making for May Day in encouraging workers to not show up for their jobs, and for all Americans to collectively refuse to shop for a day. These include not only short-term demands for personal protective equipment for all essential workers, but also long-term demands for a Universal Basic Income, health care for all, housing rights, and a Green New Deal.

Americans are perhaps more receptive to the idea of a general strike than they have been in a century. Alongside the hashtag #NotDying4WallStreet are calls on social media for a #GeneralStrike2020. High-profile left thinkers like Naomi Klein have already embraced the idea of a general strike. But Akuno admits that a strike will not work if only small numbers of Americans participate, saying, “we need to reach people in the hundreds of millions,” and “we have to organize in such a way where we change the fundamental dynamics of labor, how it’s valued, how it’s treated.” In other words, there is the potential for transformative change in this crisis—but only if we can seize the moment.

Sonalie Kolhatkar
Independent Media Institute

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Covid-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.”

From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace.

From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace. “’Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven… because of this we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace.”

Fifty one years later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the very notion of normalcy is being questioned as never before. While Donald Trump is “chomping on the bit” to return the economy to normal very soon based on a metric in his own head, more reflective voices are saying that a return to normal, now or even in the future, is an intolerable threat to be resisted. “There is a lot of talk about returning to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19 outbreak,” says climate activist Greta Thunberg, “but normal was a crisis.”

In recent days even economists with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and columnists in the New York Times have spoken about the urgent necessity of reordering economic and political priorities to something more human- only the thickest and cruelest minds today speak of a return to normal as a positive outcome.

Early in the pandemic, the Australian journalist John Pilger reminded the world of the baseline normal that COVID-19 exacerbates: “A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America’s blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.”

I was starting high school when Daniel Berrigan asked his question and at the time, while there obviously were wars and injustices in the world, it seemed as though if we did not take them too seriously or protest too strenuously, the American Dream with its limitless potential was spread before us. Play the game, and our hopes would “march on schedule” was an implied promise that in 1969 looked like a sure thing, for us young white North Americans, anyway. A few years later, I abandoned normal life, dropped out after a year of college and joined the Catholic Worker movement where I came under the influence of Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, but these were privileged choices that I made. I did not reject normalcy because I did not think that it could deliver on its promise, but because I wanted something else. As Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikers for climate convict my generation, few young people, even from previously privileged places, come of age today with such confidence in their futures.

The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by climate change and nuclear war should have long ago- that the promises of normalcy will never deliver in the end, that they are lies that lead those who trust in them to the ruin. Daniel Berrigan saw this a half century ago, normalcy is an affliction, a wasting disease more dangerous to its victims and to the planet than any viral plague.

Author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of many who recognizes the peril and the promise of the moment: “Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity,” said Pope Francis about the present situation. “Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. This is the opportunity for conversion. Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were.”

“There are ways forward we never imagined – at huge cost, with great suffering – but there are possibilities and I’m immensely hopeful,” said Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on Easter. “After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS (National Health Service) in this country and their equivalents all across the globe, once this epidemic is conquered we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all was normal. There needs to be a resurrection of our common life, a new normal, something that links to the old but is different and more beautiful.”

In these perilous times, it is necessary to use the best social practices and to wisely apply science and technology to survive the present COVID-19 pandemic. The wasting disease of normalcy, though, is the far greater existential threat and our survival requires that we meet it with at least the same courage, generosity and ingenuity.

Brian Terrell

Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is quarantined on a Catholic Worker farm in Maloy, Iowa

Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism’

Naomi Klein explains how governments and the global elite will exploit a pandemic.

By Marie Solis Mar 13 2020 VICE US

The coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too. Experts warn that some people who suspect they may be sick with the virus, also known as COVID-19, are going about their daily routines, either because their jobs do not provide paid time off because of systemic failures in our privatized health care system.

Most of us aren’t exactly sure what to do or who to listen to. President Donald Trump has contradicted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and these mixed messages have narrowed our window of time to mitigate harm from the highly contagious virus.

These are the perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented. This chain of events isn’t unique to the crisis sparked by the coronavirus; it’s the blueprint politicians and governments have been following for decades known as the “shock doctrine,” a term coined by activist and author Naomi Klein in a 2007 book of the same name.

History is a chronicle of “shocks”—the shocks of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises—and their aftermath. This aftermath is characterized by “disaster capitalism,” calculated, free-market “solutions” to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities.

Klein says we’re already seeing disaster capitalism play out on the national stage: In response to the coronavirus, Trump has proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business as a result of the pandemic.

“They’re not doing this because they think it’s the most effective way to alleviate suffering during a pandemic—they have these ideas lying around that they now see an opportunity to implement,” Klein said.

VICE spoke to Klein about how the “shock” of coronavirus is giving way to the chain of events she outlined more than a decade ago in The Shock Doctrine.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. What is disaster capitalism? What is its relationship to the “shock doctrine”?

The way I define disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises. Disaster profiteering and war profiteering isn’t a new concept, but it really deepened under the Bush administration after 9/11, when the administration declared this sort of never-ending security crisis, and simultaneously privatized it and outsourced it—this included the domestic, privatized security state, as well as the [privatized] invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “shock doctrine” is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else. In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.

Where does that political strategy come from? How do you trace its history in American politics?

The shock-doctrine strategy was as a response to the original New Deal under FDR. [Economist] Milton Friedman believes everything went wrong in America under the New Deal: As a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a much more activist government emerged in the country, which made it its mission to directly solve the economic crisis of the day by creating government employment and offering direct relief.

If you’re a hard-core free-market economist, you understand that when markets fail it lends itself to progressive change much more organically than it does the kind of deregulatory policies that favor large corporations. So the shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge. Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis is their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world.

Right now we have multiple crises happening: a pandemic, a lack of infrastructure to manage it, and the crashing stock market. Can you outline how each of these components fit into the schema you outline in The Shock Doctrine ?

The shock really is the virus itself. And it has been managed in a way that is maximizing confusion and minimizing protection. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, that’s just the way the U.S. government and Trump have utterly mismanaged this crisis. Trump has so far treated this not as a public health crisis but as a crisis of perception, and a potential problem for his reelection.

The shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge.

It’s the worst-case scenario, especially combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health care program and its protections for workers are abysmal. This combination of forces has delivered a maximum shock. It’s going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises that we face, like the climate crisis: the airline industry, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry—they want to prop all of this up.



How have we seen this play out before?

In The Shock Doctrine I talk about how this happened after Hurricane Katrina. Washington think tanks like the Heritage Foundation met and came up with a wish list of “pro-free market” solutions to Katrina. We can be sure that exactly the same kinds of meetings will happen now— in fact, the person who chaired the Katrina group was Mike Pence. In 2008, you saw this play out in the original [bank] bail out, where countries wrote these blank checks to banks, which eventually added up to many trillions of dollars. But the real cost of that came in the form of economic austerity [later cuts to social services]. So it’s not just about what’s going on right now, but how they’re going to pay for it down the road when the bill for all of this comes due.

Is there anything people can do to mitigate the harm of disaster capitalism we’re already seeing in the response to the coronavirus? Are we in a better or worse position than we were during Hurricane Katrina or the last global recession?

When we’re tested by crisis we either regress and fall apart, or we grow up, and find reserves of strengths and compassion we didn’t know we were capable of. This will be one of those tests. The reason I have some hope that we might choose to evolve is that—unlike in 2008—we have such an actual political alternative that is proposing a different kind of response to the crisis that gets at the root causes behind our vulnerability, and a larger political movement that supports it.

This is what all of the work around the Green New Deal has been about: preparing for a moment like this. We just can’t lose our courage; we have to fight harder than ever before for universal health care, universal child care, paid sick leave—it’s all intimately connected.

If our governments and the global elite are going to exploit this crisis for their own ends, what can people do to take care of each other?

”'I’ll take care of me and my own, we can get the best insurance there is, and if you don't have good insurance it's probably your fault, that's not my problem”: This is what this sort of winners-take-all economy does to our brains. What a moment of crisis like this unveils is our porousness to one another. We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

We might think we’ll be safe if we have good health care, but if the person making our food, or delivering our food, or packing our boxes doesn’t have health care and can’t afford to get tested—let alone stay home from work because they don’t have paid sick leave—we won’t be safe. If we don’t take care of each other, none of us is cared for. We are enmeshed.

We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

Different ways of organizing society light up different parts of ourselves. If you’re in a system you know isn’t taking care of people and isn’t distributing resources in an equitable way, then the hoarding part of you is going to be lit up. So be aware of that and think about how, instead of hoarding and thinking about how you can take care of yourself and your family, you can pivot to sharing with your neighbors and checking in on the people who are most vulnerable.

Fascists Impersonate Climate Group to Say Coronavirus is Good for Earth

The white supremacist group Hundred-Handers appears to be impersonating Extinction Rebellion.

By Ben Makuch 26 March 2020


A Twitter account claiming to be the regional arm of climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) tweeted photos of an apparent postering campaign promoting the coronavirus as a natural "cure" to the human "disease", causing a swift backlash online.

The problem: The group says it does not recognize the Twitter account and tweeted "far-right groups have put out stickers with messaging" that is not in line with the group's beliefs. In an email, Extinction Rebellion spokespeople clarified that they don't actually know who is behind the account, but social media posts by a neo-Nazi group viewed by Motherboard shows them gloating about flyers and claiming that the group impersonated Extinction Rebellion in the past.

“Earth is healing. The air and water is clearing,” reads the post by an account going by @xr_east and claiming to be the East Midlands chapter of XR, which rose to prominence last year when the group organized mass climate change protests that brought London to a standstill. “Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease!”

“The Twitter account in question is not recognised by Extinction Rebellion East Midlands or Extinction Rebellion UK and we do not support in any way the positions expressed on that account," spokespeople said in an email. "In terms of the Twitter account, we aren’t aware who is behind it. XR is a decentralised, autonomous movement, with hundreds of groups worldwide. At first glance it looks legitimate – it uses XR branding, and has retweeted a number of XR tweets. But, we have spoken with our regional coordinators and they [knew] nothing about it before today."

Motherboard is aware of an anonymous white supremacist group called the Hundred-Handers, which was recently active in the UK and has already bragged online in the past of impersonating XR posters.

“Be a real shame if our latest archive contained elements and fonts required to create extinction rebellion stickers,” says a January Telegram post from the group viewed over 8,000 times, accompanying a photo with a series of anti-immigrant and racist stickers bearing the XR logo that resemble those tweeted by the @xr_east account.

On the same day the Hundred-Handers channel then posted: “Send us your best XR edits and we'll post them and include them in our archive."

The anonymous Hundred-Handers group, which is known for its stickering campaigns around the UK and the US, takes its name from a many-headed monster in Greek mythology with a hundred hands. Members are required to download racist sticker templates promoting white supremacism and nativist ideologies prevalent among the far-right.

Though Motherboard can’t confirm that the latest posters in the East Midlands were the work of the Hundred-Handers, another recent post by the group points to more impersonations of XR.

On March 7, a photo posted in its Telegram channel shows a sticker posted in what appears to be the London Tube bearing the the XR symbol with the slogan: “White Brits a minority by 2066, preserve an endangered species.”

Some of the propaganda Hundred-Handers espouses centres on the absurd ecofascist principle that overpopulation in countries outside of Europe and North America has caused the brunt of the climate crisis.

Fascists co-opting the novel coronavirus pandemic to their advantage isn’t new. Last week, Motherboard revealed how neo-Nazi accelerationists see the global crisis as an opportunity to hasten the collapse of society, plotting to use the climate of fear surrounding the pandemic to carry out terrorist attacks.

Extinction Rebellion itself is controversial among environmentalists, activists, and leftists, with critics saying that it naturally lends itself to ecofascist ideologies; in the past, ecofascists have used the organization's name to spread their racist views. The group is also overwhelmingly white, with activists of color saying that one of its core mechanisms of action – asking people to get arrested during environmental protests – is inherently unsafe for people of color, who disproportionately have violence perpetrated against them by the police.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Experts Say Neo-Nazi 'Accelerationists' Discuss Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Crisis
"While this is online chatter, the fact that it’s seeking to take advantage of and exacerbate a crisis is alarming."By Ben Makuch Mar 18 2020

AN IMAGE FROM A MILITANT NEO-NAZI TELEGRAM CHANNEL.

While ISIS has instructed its members to steer clear of Europe and to constantly wash their hands in hopes of avoiding contracting the novel coronavirus, far-right extremists are discussing how this could be their moment to capitalize on what they see as a potential collapse of society.

The conversations, many of which are taking place on encrypted and closed Telegram channels, gives a glimpse into how the militant neo-Nazi movement—the organized sections of which have been facing increased pressure from federal law enforcement—is reacting to the global pandemic.



Though a lot of the talk is wrapped in troll culture with users sharing absurd anti-semitic theories for the virus’ origins and memes about the supposed hygienic superiority of Nazis, some online neo-Nazis are openly seeing the potential opportunity the pandemic brings to their movement: the chance for violent insurgency if authorities struggle to maintain control over society during a prolonged lockdown of the public.

“I hope it’s almost time boys,” reads one Telegram post on a known neo-Nazi account viewed hundreds of times and featuring the selfie of a man clad in military attire, combat vest and a skull mask.

Another post from an infamous channel linked to neo-Nazis fighting in eastern Ukraine shows a man with a hazmat suit, gas mask, and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle with the words (in Ukrainian), “ready for virus and parasite control” while standing with a portrait of the Christchurch shooter hanging to his right.

The same account tells followers in Ukrainian to: “Buy ammo and get ready to rob banks. All is well.”

That neo-Nazis are at least discussing they want to be violent during times of pandemic isn’t altogether surprising nor is it evidence that actual physical violence is likely—online chatter is often purely hypothetical, though disturbing nonetheless.

In recent years, adherents of ultra violent brands of white supremacism have preached ‘accelerationism,’ which holds that western governments are currently teetering on disintegration and vulnerable to operations sowing chaos and creating societal pandemonium. Neo-Nazi movements have always tried to take advantage of times of great uncertainty, and some members of far-right extremist networks see the pressure of coronavirus as a possible trigger for the “boogaloo”; a hypothetical second civil war.

“Extreme right-wing accelerationist and neo-Nazi Telegram chats and channels have increased their frequency of calling for violence related to the coronavirus since the president’s declaration of a national emergency on March 13,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a research analyst at the Counter Extremism Project, a U.S.-based terrorism watchdog. “The violent rhetoric also increased on March 16 as economic damage from the coronavirus has increased.”

In a post captioned “ACCELERATION REMINDER,” one well known neo-Nazi channel that provides tradecraft to evade authorities online warns followers to beware of the possible presence of National Guard units across the country if the pandemic worsens and the Trump Administration deploys troops inside the U.S.

Some posts are less violent, but recommend things like aimlessly firing off their guns in city centers, without a target, to promote panic among the public.

The many far-right extremists populating these Telegram channels are taking advantage of the moment to ramp up their rhetoric, but as Fisher-Birch cautions that, so far, is only online chatter.

“As more Americans have been reported as infected in the past few days and stock exchanges have fallen, the administrators of these chats and channels seem to have realized that this is a moment to increase their calls for disorder and advocacy for violence, whether it is against the government, against people of color, or against Jews and Muslims,” said Fisher-Birch. “While this is online chatter, the fact that it’s seeking to take advantage of and exacerbate a crisis is alarming.”

Of late, accelerationism has become more organized. For example, members of The Base and Atowmaffen Division, two neo-Nazi terror groups under a recent nationwide FBI probe resulting in several arrests of members who plotted assassinations and mass shootings, are major proponents of accelerationism.

Both groups undertook several paramilitary training camps with dozens of members in the U.S. and preached the values of survivalism in preparation for when, “shit hits the fan”—or a time of complete social decay—and plotted ways to hasten it.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ECOFASCISM

Coronavirus Has Transformed the Climate Movement Into Something New

Activists are scrambling to deal with the pandemic while trying to make sure no one forgets about global warming.

By Mike Pearl 07 April 2020
This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Normally, Vishal Chauhan, a 30-year-old in London, would be spending his days organizing and protesting for the radical climate direct action movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), famous for its public spectacles—things like shutting down major streets and blasting the UK Treasury with a fake blood firehose. “I’m in Extinction Rebellion because I think we need a regenerative culture. We need a culture which helps human beings achieve our potential as connected, compassionate, kind beings,” he told me.

But thanks to COVID-19, Chauhan is stuck in his flat in Tottenham, one of the poorest areas of London. Like other climate activists around the world, he's suddenly limited in what he can do for the cause. In some ways, he says, the pandemic is “a blessing in disguise.” He’s used to people saying XR wants to change things too much, or too quickly. “What we're seeing here with the COVID health crisis is how quickly we can transform any part of the way in which we live our lives when we see the threat coming,” he said.

But Chauhan knows all too well how grave the threat of this virus is, because he’s a doctor who used to work in an Accident & Emergency (A&E) department, the British equivalent of an ER. About a year ago, in response to the climate crisis, he bailed on practicing medicine to dedicate himself to activism full-time. In response to this fresh crisis, he is now trying to return to his old job. “I’m starting to get my study books out to go back because…” he told me, pausing, seemingly in search of an explanation, but no explanation seemed necessary. “Yeah, I gotta go back,” he said.

The pandemic has brought the entire world economy to a screeching halt, as states and cities have instituted unprecedented lockdown orders. It's also presented a challenge for activists like Chauhan, who felt that they were finally making progress in the fight against climate change. Just as they were getting the world's attention, they have once again lost it. The question is, can they get it back when this is all over?

“Clearly, like every other human enterprise, the climate movement has had to slow and adjust to the virus,” veteran climate activist Bill McKibben said. “There was a ton of momentum, especially in the fight against financial institutions, and some of that has been lost.” Over the past few years, the European Investment Bank has announced an end to loans for oil company projects, and New York City and oil-rich Norway have divested from fossil fuel investments. Recently, investors in Barclay’s Bank—a huge investor in European fossil fuel projects—began pushing the company to follow suit, and activists are demanding that BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, cut back on fossil fuel investments.

Before the pandemic, there was evidence of a new public focus on climate change. In the early days of the Trump administration, sometime between the publication of David Wallace-Wells’ heart-stopping, viral New York Magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the IPCC’s pessimistic 2018 report on the vanishing likelihood of our species meeting the targets necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, something seemed to snap in people’s brains. In 2019 the urgency of acting on climate change truly broke through the noise and became the media phenomenon activists had long hoped it would become. Much of humanity responded to the flurry of haunting news stories and scientific reports with despair, but some were moved to thundering rage. It may not have been enough, but it was, at long last, progress.

Margaret Klein Salamon, co-founder of the organization The Climate Mobilization and one of the leaders of the high-profile movement to persuade political leaders to declare climate emergencies, has a book coming out called Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself,and it has an auspicious release date: the day before the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. That April 22 event is now likely to be muted. “The plans going into [Earth Day] were absolutely huge: three days of huge strikes led by youth. I was so excited. I think this was going to be the biggest moment for the climate emergency movement,” she told me. “Instead, it's all going to be virtual. It's going to be a livestream.”

What can the climate movement really accomplish from home? And when this is all over, will it be able to return to its full strength?

A MAN STANDS UNDER A GRETA THUNBERG MURAL IN ROME. THE QUOTE READS, "YOU'RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO SAVE THE WORLD." PHOTO BY ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP VIA GETTY

“We have actually achieved many things,” Greta Thunberg told a small group of fellow activists in a livestreamed video chat in late March. “Maybe not what we wanted, but at least we have done something, and sometimes you just need to allow yourself to be—I dunno, proud? Or something like that.” One of the activists in the group felt it might be helpful to recount past successes, but Thunberg didn’t seem at ease in self-care mode. Her overall message was that in this moment, climate activists need to do what they always do: “Listen to the science.” During this crisis, that means social distancing, while keeping in mind, as she noted toward the beginning of the conversation, “the climate crisis is not going away.”

But much of the movement’s progress in fighting the fossil fuel industry might go away—and soon. According to the Sunrise Movement's political and legislative coordinator Lauren Maunus—who said on the Hill’s morning show-style livestream Rising that the 2020 election was “the last, best chance” for he U.S. to meaningfully fight climate change—the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists are up their usual tricks. “Employing kind of disaster capitalism, pitting us against each other, using government as a force for bad,” was how she described it.

In the interest of speeding up the return of revenues lost due to the crisis, China’s ministry of the environment has in many cases abandoned inspections of potentially polluting factories. On March 26, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not enforce any regulations, as long as violations can be connected to the COVID-19 crisis, a decision that followed a massive lobbying effort from oil companies. A similar lobbying effort aimed at restoring the reputation of petroleum-based single-use plastic bags appears to be working. A federal bailout for U.S. fossil fuel companies hasn’t materialized but one is thought to be likely.

Perhaps the most vivid example of all is the effort in Canada to jumpstart construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, as announced by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on March 31. “To make sure it gets done,” Kenney tweeted, “Alberta is putting our money where our mouth is—with a $1.5 billion equity stake, and a $6 billion loan guarantee backstop. Construction begins immediately—starting tomorrow.” The move came two days after restrictions on gatherings of Alberta residents were tightened from 50 people down to 15—a totally understandable safety measure amid the pandemic that will also guarantee that no effective protest can be legally mounted against the new construction project as it charges ahead.

Montana-based indigenous activist Kandi White, the climate campaign coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), doesn't plan to just sit around while such pipeline projects move forward. “Everyone’s busier now than we were before, because it's almost like our hands are tied,” she said. “The IEN has been fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, and now they're trying to build it, and try to push it through because we're under this mandate to not be out doing activism.” Protesters can’t employ what is self-evidently their most effective strategy—showing up at construction sites and protesting—but, she said “We have been doing webinars, and we have been doing online platform work to get information out to our people.”

EXTINCTION REBELLION MEMBERS IN BERLIN DELIVERING FOOD TO THE NEEDY. PHOTO BY FABIAN SOMMER/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY

At the same time, climate activists—who often tend to be more science-focused than the general population—are concerned about telling people about the dangers of COVID-19 and helping out with the more pressing crisis now facing the world.

“I have uncles, cousins, and brothers that work in the [oil] industry, which is also why I know how bad it is—how many spills go unreported, how people are getting sick—and it’s the same with this crisis. Getting the information to the people in a way that they understand, so that they have a trustworthy source, has been very difficult,” White said. It’s a role made all the more difficult, she explained, by the three tribal nationalities sharing land on her reservation—Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. “My sister, and people that I know are still going to work, they're still going to the office. They're still going into the tribal building,” she said. “It's like they're not even taking it as seriously as I feel it should be taken.”

But the ways in which the pandemic dovetails with the climate crisis can also be seen as an advantage, according to McKibben. The similarities, he hopes, will bring the climate crisis to life for people who couldn’t previously wrap their heads around it. “We see what Trump's failure to 'flatten the curve' means for the virus; our failure, 30 years ago, to start flattening the carbon curve leaves us in much the same place," he said. "Now we have to work harder and faster, and there will still be huge damage.”

Until the quarantines are lifted and protesters can once again take to the streets, the climate movement can probably coast on momentum to some degree—scoring up a number of wins and PR victories that were long in the works. A federal judge’s ruling effectively rescinded permits for the Dakota Access pipeline on March 25. Marie Newman, a Sunrise-backed candidate, defeated Illinois Democratic Representative Dan Lipinski, one of Congress's most conservative Democrats, in the state’s primary on March 18. With Earth Day coming, the issue of climate change graces the current covers of Rolling Stone, National Geographic and Fortune magazines, even as the pandemic grips the world.

Moreover, terms like “Green New Deal” have recently transformed into everyday inside-the-beltway vernacular, to the point where President Trump referred to some mild pro-environmental policies in the House bailout bill as “green new deal stuff,” and blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for their inclusion. (Pelosi once dismissively referred to the Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever they call it.”) Amid a growing chorus of calls for a New Deal-sized public works project to help Americans out of the current economic crisis, this sort of confusion could redound to the benefit of the climate movement.

For Maunus and the rest of the Sunrise Movement, which made a name for itself by protesting inside Pelosi’s office in favor of the Green New Deal in 2018, “this is really a moment of unprecedented opportunity for change.” That doesn’t just mean legislation—projects in the works at Sunrise include “free painting of, Green New Deal signs, motor processions, and six-feet group protests,” Maunus said.

In light of the political and economic instability this crisis has brought to light, some activists would rather just toss out the present governmental and economic systems altogether. “A lot of the old-school anarchist people have been dreaming of this kind of anarcho-federalist model,” Chauhan told me. “Going to small communities, or like having assemblies like the Rojava model, where decision-making is devolved to the most local level possible, and people feel empowered because they're making decisions.”

In fact, he told me his Tottenham flat is meant to be his organizing base of operations, “because I thought if there was gonna be a revolution it would be here. Or maybe not revolution, but social upheaval, disenfranchisement of the poor and minority groups, and so I wanted to be organizing here. Meanwhile a lot of my mates all left. So the house I am in usually has eight people in it, only two people are left ‘cause everyone else went back to smaller towns or the countryside to be safer.”

No large-scale uprising has occurred, to be sure, but according to Chauhan, wherever local activists in the UK have begun operating in earnest, XR members—known internally as rebels—are participating as needed, a part of the organizational theory of mutual aid. “In the UK, 3,500 local mutual aidgroups have been set up in the space of three weeks. Fucking amazing! Huge! Nothing to do with XR, but a lot of XR rebels are doing it.” The purpose, he said, is simply, “planting the seeds in those spaces, or making the right interventions.”

Across all the activist organizations I spoke to, the theme of gardening in quarantine appeared again and again. “I’ve been telling folks it's a really good time to get your seeds going and get your gardens going. Spring is coming. My crocuses have bloomed,” White said. “The fact that the whole entire world is waking up to indigenous knowledge now is great, but it's not new. If you go stand on the grass without your socks and shoes on, or if you're in a forest next to a tree, you actually start to feel better.”

“People are so disconnected from these very basic concepts, and that is capitalism,” she continued. “That is colonization—to get your mind off of very basic and true concepts of our relationship with and our connection to the land.”

Mike Pearl is the author of The Day It Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other Possible Phenomena. Follow him on Twitter.