If you’re on twitter a lot(like I am) you might have heard of this recent trend of people praising Osama Bin Laden.
It’s one of the more popular topics at twitter in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. If you searched for Bin Laden on twitter during that time, you’d have seen pages and pages of people talking about the trend.
This seems to goes beyond just talking about blowback, which is the idea that foreign intervention often ends up making you enemies. Apparently some people are unironically saying that Bin-Laden was right, or even that he was justified in carrying out 9/11. It’s good to understand blow-back, but there’s no justifying what Bin Laden did.
To the casual twitter user, this might seem like a disturbing trend. A lot of people are seemingly defending Bin Laden. But something about this phenomenon is strange to me. If so many people are unironically defending Bin Laden, then why haven’t I encountered any of them in the wild? I have encountered people in the wild talking about blowback, but so far, every post I’ve seen where someone is actually defending Bin Laden was brought to me by someone else.
If encountering an ideologue “in the wild” means that you’re encountered them first hand, then encountering them second-hand is analogous to encountering them in a zoo. If you go to an actual zoo, you can be sure that you’ll see some lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas, and any number of exotic animals. However you’d be hard pressed to find those same animals out in the wild. Even if you go to their known habitats, actually seeing one isn’t always a frequent occurrence.
When people share the posts of their ideological opponents, they tend not to share the more reasonable posts. They’re motivated to share the most outrageous ones they can find so that they make their opposition look bad. They’re also trying to drive engagement, and outrageous posts are good at driving engagement.
The first twitter post I referenced in this entry was brought to you by Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok is a conservative social media personality that’s dedicated to sharing the most outrageous-looking posts and actions on behalf of liberals. Usually they focus on trans issues, but over the past few months they’ve been posting about Israel–Hamas war. Libs of TikTok is a sort of ideological zoo. Just like you can go to a real zoo to see the lions and elephants, you can go to one of Libs of TikTok’s social media accounts to see the people who praise Bin Laden.This is not to say that Bin-Laden-praisers don’t really exist. They clearly do exist. A lot of people have encountered them, and you can probably go track down some of those posts right now if you really wanted. But they might not be as frequent as they seem. Libs of TikTok, and other similar accounts signal-boost the ones that do exist. They present a distorted view of the ideological landscape, and make things like Bin-Laden praising seem more common then it really is.
This an application of Alyssa Vance’s Chinese robber fallacy: There are over 1 billion Chinese people. If one out of every ten thousand of them are robbers, that would result in more than a hundred thousand Chinese robbers. That’s a lot of robbers, and if someone wanted to make you think that Chinese people were robbers, they could easily share true examples of Chinese robbers until your attention span was depleted, even if only 0.01% of them actually were robbers.
No outright fake news is needed in order to have this effect. If given a large enough world, there are almost always enough examples of a rare ideology to cherry pick in order to make it seem like a common one.
There are many other examples of zoos on the internet. Reddit_Lies on Twitter is a zoo. /r/ChoosingBeggars on Reddit is a sort of zoo. The algorithms on the typical social media site, that feed you the most high-engagement content have the effect of a zoo. Even a normal news publication is a sort of natural zoo. The news doesn’t tell you about every day normal events. It tells you about rare, exceptional events. As John B. Bogart said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
I will admit sense-making based entirely on your personal experience isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reason I don’t encounter Bin Laden supporters in the wild is because of my personal internet habits. A lot of the discourse seems to mention TikTok, which I don’t use. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, so relying only on your personal experiences does have it’s flaws. But it’s still better than relying on a source that’s distorted in a particular direction.
It’s perfectly fine to do your sense-making based on second-hand information, but you have to be mindful of the forces that bring that information to you. You should understand how the information might be manipulated, intentionally or even unintentionally. You should be aware of the motivations your sources have, and the ways in which they’re likely to spin information. You should understand how they can cherry pick true information in order to distort the bigger picture. If you don’t, then you may find yourself an easy target for manipulation.
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Notes -
Is it really hard to gauge? I don’t think I know anyone who thinks bin Laden was pretty cool. That includes my zoomer siblings and their friends. Maybe they’re just hiding it? If so, we’re back to asking why it’s showing up on the not-particularly-anonymous TikTok. I have no reason to believe that this fad, out of all of them, is the moment the mask comes off.
Radical Islam never got the same level of countersignaling cred as communism. In part because Che and friends had some mystique, because of the limited information reaching the West, and because of that promise that the reds were totally going to win out any day now. But Real Sharia has, in fact, been tried, and it kind of obviously sucks to most Westerners. That’s not very fertile ground for the casual teenage rebellion.
So I really wouldn’t expect bin Laden to become a positive figure in any enduring sense. Even among edgelords who think the US deserved 9/11.
Well, I guess that at minimum, probably a very large fraction of Westerners who support Hamas against Israel also support bin Laden against America, that is if they even know who bin Laden was. I don't see why they wouldn't. In both cases it would be supporting a daring resistance group that launches a successful raid against both the military assets and the civilians of a white-coded power that they view as oppressive.
There are also Westerners who might not support Hamas or even care about Israel/Palestine, but who hate America for various reasons.
I think there are some people who support Al-Qaeda, but most of the pro-Hamas crowd sees them as acting legitimately to defend themselves which doesn't apply to Al Qaeda.
You might be right. I think a lot probably depends on where you live. Here in the US, 9/11 seems more of an immediate attack and what Hamas did seems more distant. If you lived in Israel, it would be the reverse.
I'll also note that, here in the US, if you went around praising bin Laden, you'd have a pretty good chance of getting punched, whereas you would have a much lower chance of being punched if you praised Hamas. However, if you lived in Israel and went around praising Hamas, you'd probably have an extremely high chance of getting punched. This might subconsciously and/or consciously affect people's willingness to support one group or the other.
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My instinct is to say that the even the pro-Hamas crowd doesn’t like bin Laden or the Taliban. But I recognize my model of why someone would support Hamas—and not just Palestine—is pretty lacking. Do you know of any decent polling on the subject?
Off the top of my head, I don't. And it might be a bit hard to find meaningful data, since 9/11 was over 20 years ago, whereas the Hamas/Israel war started just three months ago.
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