Pretty much the title. I certainly believe Trump, Maga, the Military, and the Police will, sooner or later, probably sooner, get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists and leftists and imprison them. How organized and effective that attempt is I am less sure of.
To be very transparent, this is something I’m pretty sure I’d be on the hook for. I have a long log of anti trump, antifascist, left sentiments, and am 75% sure I’ll be disappeared at some point in the next 4 years as I have no plans of shutting up. The only reason I’m not 100% sure is because of how expensive it would be. But hey, maybe it’s less expensive than potentially losing power? So I don’t know.
Never? Not likely? Maybe? Very? Extremely? Definitely?
Thoughts?
Given the majority of the supreme court are constitutional literalists, I’m going to stake a claim on very unlikely. That is literally against the first amendment.
Now, let’s say we live in some kind of bizaro land where you can be taken to court without the protection of the first amendment. (Difficult ti believe I know). You would still, hopefully, have a right to an attorney. If your case is high profile, or you have enough money, an organization like the aclu would help.
For people organizing protests and taking part in them, Maybe to Likely.
For people just posting things online, Very unlikely. They’ll have their hands full with all the immigrants and protesters first, and there’s far too many people who have said something leftist online.
Not likely. Trump doesn’t even know what those words mean. Temporarily jailing them and protesters is likely a different story, though.
Everyone’s like “it won’t happen” but I remember post-9/11 a specific Linux news site got hit with claims of radicalism and some folks who frequented the site got put on watch lists. For interest in Linux.
There was a reason folks like me were against all the surveillance from the PATRIOT Act back then, and this is why.
EDIT:
Similarly, the Bush admin had the FBI spying on Quakers, the only religious group that anti-violence is such a central tenet to their religion that they by default are considered conscientious objectors and cannot be drafted into the military without violating their beliefs.
Post-9/11 the government thought peaceful Quaker anti-war activists were dangerous.
That was post-9/11 in the War on Terror years… It can happen here.
Sources:
Linuxjournal gets “extra surveillance:”
Quakers being spied on by FBI:
Woooo boy! I’ll be right there in the camps with you buddy! Party time!
I don’t think it’s “Trump” thing, but the USA will probably start arresting people for the media they consume if a rapidly growing and sufficiently large portion of their citizenry spread and consume messaging they disagree with. It’ll be a side-effect of losing the narrative war. I don’t foresee it happening in the next 4 years.
I don’t see the point in publicising it. From a PR perspective, “Posted illegal content using a platform frequented by terrorists” is less likely to meet resistance than “Commented🔻on Instagram”. In fact, USA propaganda is already full of vagueties about people’s online behaviour today. Usually in the form of reporting on foreign (enemy) policing as “Helpless teen (19) arrested (fined) for Tweet (Bomb-threat to head of state)”.
get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists
They already know exactly who you are. People dont understand how pervasive online surveilance and profiling is. AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone.
Ah yes, as always, the ever-knowing magical AI. Because all the secrets of the universe can be aggregated using just few multiline prompts to the ChatGPT.
You’re distrust of AI hype is fine, but you’re missing the point. OP said AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone, meaning it’s now far less labor intensive to take all of the data being gathered by SIGINT and turn it into reports. The amount of labor required to build 10M dossiers on mostly impotent randos makes it completely unfeasible, but with generative AI being able to quickly summarize a dataset, suddenly we can have shitty, somewhat lossy dossiers on every moron shitposter.
moron shitposter
I’m pretty sure the capabilities were there before LLMs and the LLMs don’t add that much value relative to it’s cost.
The capabilities to generate summaries? Yeah, that’s probably true, I knew of AI that could summarize data into narrative years before the current LLM hype. I don’t know the underlying tech behind those things I saw though. They could have been early LLMs, they could have been some other neural network. But it was definitely a machine learning solution.
The point that machine learning can reduce the effort to produce dossiers to the point of making millions of dossiers feasible still stands though.
Not chatGPT. But AIs are good at one single thing and that is pattern recognition. And there is a lot of data to train and use those AIs on. Decades of data from your PCs, phones and tablets is on NSA servers. And yes, the NSA did shit like recording you through your notebook camera or recording your phone calls with your first girlfriend.
AI will probably never replace human workers/engineers/artists/…, but sorting through your online history is exactly what AIs excel at.
Also Dragnet policies are used by the police for a long time now. This is pretty much just that. Imo the main question is more if they want to burn that data on this task, because once they do this some people will adjust and it will get harder to get new data.
Can we all take a moment to consider the very real information the NSA has on trump and how they are doing nothing about him?
The alphabet boys must be tired of lurking in the shadows.
It’s not even an AI thing; look at how widespread domestic surveillance was back in the 60s. In the years since it’s only gotten easier to record messages and calls, match those records back to addresses or GPS-given locations, catch people on video, etc.
you don’t have to be imprisoned to have your life ruined. there are many relatively subtle ways to do that
Online? No. Online disorganized leftists aren’t actually leftists, they’re leftist sympathizers. You need to be in a leftist org to actually be a leftist.
You’re not a threat unless you’re actually doing stuff.
Likely. The federal government has SharePoint sites with information gathered about journalists and other activists who are pro immigration. To my knowledge, these individuals have not officially been disappeared.
And absolutely all of the roadblocks, legal restrictions, grownups pushing back, worry over public sentiment, etc have been eliminated. Expect it to be much, much worse than you thought.
Any comparison to what has happened in the past is out the window.
Personally, I would be worried if I was you. The first Trump term can’t be compared as he had some guardrails with his recommended cabinet picks from the traditional GOP. Now that those GOP members have been expelled from the party, those guardrails are no longer there. His cabinet picks are loyalists and is a stress test to weed out any non-loyalists in Congress.
His cabinet picks will have free will to do what they want as long as they do two things: 1) praise Trump for the popular things they accomplish and 2) take the fall or blame other groups if it’s not popular.
And it’s not the government coming after these groups that is most worrying. We all see the lengths regular citizens would go to right a perceived wrong. January 6 case in point.
We’ve all seen this film before. It doesn’t have a good ending.
Unless you’re doing actual organizing, unlikely. The DNC isn’t friendly towards Leftist orgs either, though MAGA groups themselves may become more millitant.
It’s a proud fascist country now. Be prepare for ANYTHING.
And then realize you hadn’t prepared nearly enough.
I don’t think it’s very likely. Even if it was even remotely affordable or feasible he actually needs opposition to define himself and his base ‘ruggedly independent’ and as ‘freedom fighters’.
If he’s going to go after anyone at all I think it will be high profile people for maximum media impact.
Not likely. This is hyperbole.
What is most likely going to happen is that any right-wing, MAGA cultist and whatever. They won’t be penalized for any harassment or antagonizing behaviors committed by them to those they don’t like.
That’s the reality.
