Much as I’d love to claim the bragging rights, checking Twitter, thuggerati turns up sporadically over the last six years to describe a targetted badgering of individuals who speak against a given party or even a government’s position.
Although the behaviour is prevalent here it is not specific to Northern Ireland. It is associated with authoritarian leaderships of both left and right and its specific aim is the organised suppression of dissent. This was my own first use of it on Twitter…
https://twitter.com/mickfealty/status/1245223439050452994
It’s an extension of the ‘fair game‘ rule (well documented in earlier posts in the Glossary category here on Slugger). It is an often well-organised part of a ‘re-tribalising’ process as described in Jamie Bartlett’s The People vs Tech:
…opponents can only be incoherent babblers, sinister Machiavellians, oppressors who don’t understand your suffering. Disagreement over practical issues starts to involve purity and impurity: at which point there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalities. ‘We’ are good and pure, while ‘they’ are evil and corrupt.
Anonymous Thuggerati operate as a sort of “fog machine” aimed at sowing doubt and discouraging critical discussion of otherwise tractable realities. It features the introduction of taboos on specific forms of information or categories of news.
It involves the simplification of complex matter of common interest, confirmation of ingroup bias and endless repetition of memes in order to inculcate favourable views towards a given party or government and isolate and ostracise unfavourable ones.
Thuggerati behaviours are also associated with controversies like Gamergate and the use of forums like 8Chan to co-ordinate and pre-prove attack lines on targets, which can scale the antisocial effect of the outputs of a relatively small number of players.
This behaviour thrives in unmoderated network platforms like Facebook and Twitter that have, by default, become the backrooms of western democracy. It is a shadow opportunity provided by their homophilous filter bubbles. So it’s a feature, not a bug.
Its overall effect is to increase cynicism and apathy while it reduces available opportunities for purpose-led debate, materially engaged conversations amongst peers and open-ended, tolerant and transformative dialogue between opponents.
Photo by MetsikGarden is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty