Libsoftiktok - The Right's Newest Weapon in the Culture War
Libsoftiktok seeks to create a culture of fear for Lefties in social media, similar to the culture of fear Righties experience on campus.
“All’s fair in love and war.”
The Rightwing view of media, social media, and the universities is that they’ve been held down in a culture of fear, created by progressives. On campus, conservative and heterodox students are afraid of their peers, their professors, and their administrators. In corporate media they feel that they’re always depicted as villains, presumed guilty of hatred towards women, minorities, and the LGBTQIAA+ community no matter what they say or do. On social media they’re banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, and perceive themselves to always get the short end of the stick when moderators censor their content, but not that of their opponents. They’ve been really mad about this for a while.
Enter the Libsoftiktok Twitter account - dedicated to finding the most controversial, angering, upsetting, and threatening Lefties they can, and reposting their videos without edit. The Washington Post doxxed the owner of the account, and the Righties responded in kind by doxxing the reporter.
How the weapon works:
Confirmation bias: Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to interpret new information as confirmation of your preexisting beliefs and opinions. Conservatives have been primed to see Progressive educators as threats, looking to teach their children Critical Race Theory and to encourage them to socially and medically transition, beginning in Pre-K. It doesn’t matter if this belief is true or not.
Moral Contagion Theory suggests that threat perception is shared between like objects, such that if the teachers featured by Libsoftiktok advocate for prejudice against White students or want to medically transition as many pre-pubescent children as possible without their parents knowing, then some Conservatives will be prompted to believe that all public-school teachers probably support these programs. Again, it doesn’t matter if this is true or not.
Perception of threat is linked to conspiratorial thinking (Nauroth et al. 2017). They are convinced that Lefty teachers look at their children as potential activists who can be turned into weapons against them, and potential persons that can be medically and socially ‘groomed’ to embrace new sexual and gender identities, behind their parents’ backs. Libsoftiktok is spreading conspiratorial fear that Lefties are intentionally looking to harm Righties’ children.
Moral Emotional Language - Discussion of politics does 3 things: It shares factual claims, it shares emotions, and it signifies in-group status.
Example - Someone says, “Trump is such a sexist. He said ‘Grab them by the pussy’ and still got elected. Disgusting!” When someone says this they are stating a factual claim (what Trump said), sharing an emotion (disgust), and seeing if the person they are speaking to is on their same team.
From my dissertation (2022), looking at Rightwing media coverage of universities:
Rozin et al. (1999) linked contempt, anger, and disgust with moral codes regarding community, autonomy, and divinity. When these emotions are evoked and spread within social communities, they register as threats to the existing social order. Whereas most species react to threats via dyadic relationships within groups, humans, chimps, and bonobos all experience third-party morality where uninvolved individuals react emotionally to both social order violators and those violated, and these reactions have long term effects. Because humans have such wide social networks via media and social media, any sense of social order violation can be emotionally broadcast out to the entire network. This means that any moral-emotional messages about universities being threats to social order will spread and color the conservative social network’s perception of higher education itself as a threat, triggering psychological threat responses.
Libsoftiktok puts Lefties in a difficult position. They can:
Disavow the teachers being featured, causing internal fissures among their tribe.
Support the teachers being featured, risking being included as part of the threat.
Personally attack Libsoftiktok, as the Washington Post sought to do. This only galvanized support for the account, with many major Righties rushing to their aid.
Dismiss Righties’ concerns and implicitly or explicitly support the policies being promoted by the teachers.
None of these are great strategic options. At some point someone who genuinely believes in these educational policies is going to have to engage parents and the Rightwing media and defend these programs, including the need to keep children’s information secret from their parents. That’s going to take a pretty brave soul.
What the weapon designed to do:
On a surface level, it’s to make Lefties afraid to speak out in public and self-censor. At the macrolevel, I believe the goal is to help collapse the education system the Lefties have created by encouraging parents to withdraw their children from public schools. By ending public education, or ‘government education’ in Righties’ terms, the public investment in public schools can be rerouted into private and charter schools, and homeschools, which uphold Rightwing moral values. An added bonus would be the destruction of teacher unions, who typically help fund the Democratic Party. The more parents pull their children from public schools and enroll them in private and charter schools, the fewer funds go towards these schools.
What if the weapon succeeds?
The Right is creating a parallel America. Alternative K-12 private and charter schools (Hillsdale College charter schools), alternative universities and trade schools (U. of Austin, Ralston College), alternative children’s books (Tuttle Twins), alternative payment processing systems (Give Send Go), alternative banking (Gab, crypto currencies), alternative economies (I’m seeing more and more encouragement for direct trading of goods without paperwork).
Remember this picture that Elon Musk retweeted from Colin Wright in May 2022? (Colin Wright wrote an op ed about it in the Wall Street Journal here). Libsoftiktok is like a bomb going off at the 2021 center mark, and the goal is to induce panic to stampede former liberal Middles and moderates to the right, because the strength of this parallel America depends on how many people can be convinced to leave the institutions dominated by the Left.
Moral Questions -
First - It seems evident to me that whatever one side does, the other side will feel justified in doing the same. The Right goes into the capitol building on Jan. 6 to intimidate lawmakers, the Left protests outside of SCOTUS judges’ houses to intimidate them. Hillary Clinton didn’t accept 2016 as legitimate (Russia), Trump isn’t accepting 2020 as legitimate.
What are some lines that neither side should ever cross?
Second - How could we get out of the culture of fear, where there is so much self-censorship? I personally advocate for agonism within Habermas’s ‘Ideal Speech Situation' (from Discourse Ethics):
Members of the public sphere must adhere to certain rules for an "ideal speech situation" to occur. They are:
1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c. Everyone is allowed to express their attitudes, desires and needs without any hesitation.
3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2)
Third, The activists on both sides feel justified in imposing a culture of fear on the other. What can moderates and Middles to to create spaces for themselves away from these conflicts?
Fourth, Because a lot of Libsoftiktok material is teachers talking about helping children transition their gender without their parents knowing, do schools have the right to do this? Should the parents be made aware of this, even if they don’t accept transgender ideology? Do teachers have the right to ignore parents requests to use the names and pronouns they gave their child?
Note on an edit - In Point 2 I originally stated that Conservatives perceive threat differently due to negativity bias, based on Hibbing, Smith, and Alford (2013). That has been challenged by Johnston and Madson (2022) and Brandt and Bakker (2022), which occurred after I had written the dissertation. Hibbing et al.’s claim that social Conservatives are more likely to be hard categorizers and Liberals be soft categorizers appears to still be correct, according to Meyer (2020).
This is good Nathaniel, as are all your entries. Two possible qualifiers. 1. It was Colin Wright who first posted that cartoon (of how the left has moved), Elon just retweeted it (Colin has a whole WSJ op ed on this and the larger points). 2. Whether the right is generally more sensitive to threats is in the process of being walked back. I'd say the status of that as a general conclusion is unclear at best (it likely reflects a manifestation of political bias in study construction), but, regardless of my opinions: i. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661322000419 ii. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01327-5
Something about the characterization of LibsofTikTok as a 'weapon' seems wrong to me.
It's a partisan social media account. It generally rebroadcasts material that others have already posted and sometimes adds some context as to who what and where.
It is effective only as far as showing a conservative/moderate(?) audience a growing cultural movement that they were largely unaware of.
If 'LibsofTikTok' is a weapon, why aren't the social media accounts of people and organizations that see the world through a left wing lens also considered 'weapons?' Is it because we are already so used to seeing this perspective that we are accustomed to it?