Hello??? For The Love Of God Hello?????

just looked at my phone, screamed loudly for 8 seconds and jumped up to show Saga and they looked at the phone, saw Gale, and said “ah, I figured.”

my friend’s flying here today and i wanna look great. time to cut my own bangs with no time to fix them methinks

I just read an article (linked at the bottom of the post) and went looking for this old post I made sometime last year. I wish I’d gone through the tags last year, and I might have seen a tag like this and brought attention to the issue much sooner. I don’t think I’m by any means the best voice on issues of antisemitism, but I think it’s my responsibility to acknowledge my own susceptibility to antisemitic online trends, and likewise the susceptibility of many of my followers who read this:

While mainstream participation in the trend “Gnomes vs. Knights” was—for many—a fantasy LARP & cosplay meme, it extends from an earlier TikTok trend, “Gnome Hunting,” which either became, or even began as, an antisemitic dogwhistle, in some cases, and absolutely overt Nazi content in others (source) (more reading on it)

TikTok misinformation researcher, Abbie Richards (and contributing authors, credited in the article), writes in the article linked at the bottom of this post, “Although this content originally emphasised a desire to ‘find the gnomes’, portrayed as benevolent creatures and symbols of pre-modern Europe, the current gnome hunting trend shows that gnomes have since been reconfigured as adversarial actors – specifically Jewish people.”

Numerous sounds by Nazi creators were used in the ‘Gnome Hunting’ trend. The problem with TikTok is that videos are fed to users by an extremely focused algorithm, so people who aren’t seeking or knowingly engaging with extremist content (but who still are) often only see either ‘mainstream’ evolutions of these trends—such as the Knight/Gnome battle—and/or dogwhistles they don’t recognize.

When I used TikTok, I largely interacted with the cosplay, SCA, and LARP community, which is how I was personally ‘exposed’ to this trend. (more on the use of TikTok to spread extremist content from other platforms, “sanitised for the purpose of ban evasion and appealing to a more mainstream audience.”)

This is often a problem on TikTok, where trending audios are often posted by random users, unlinked to the original artist, so once they’re trending at-large, many people don’t know the sound’s artist/source. This is not even close to the first time a sound has been linked to bigoted creators and/or trends, only to become popular among unwitting, wide-scale audiences.

Worse, videos by creators explaining the issues with trending sounds and the memes which accompany them are often buried, receive little views, or—even with many views—don’t appear on nearly as many users’ feeds as the videos promoting these audios & accompanying memes.

I’m not saying any of this to excuse my own participation—by liking and sharing the videos—but to highlight how & why these dogwhistles are so pervasive. I liked to consider myself knowledgeable on such dogwhistles, like double lightning bolts, the number ‘14,’ and portrayals of goblins in fantasy media, but here I failed to recognize one anyway, along with hundreds of thousands of other users.

The responsibility is also on TikTok itself, to identify and moderate extremist messaging on its platform, as highlighted in the conclusion of the aforementioned article:

I’m going to turn off reblogs for the original post to prevent further sharing of the meme, and also this one, because I’ve been reading on this across social media, and it continually descends into people getting angry about “over-thinking” the meme/trend, insisting it’s not at all antisemitic, and devolving into antisemitic rants. I want to share this information with the original post, but I don’t want to create a forum here for ugly comments and antisemitism-denial.