Well we all know that the bigotry of the Daily ‘hate’ Mail
is pretty repulsive, and most of us know that the Daily ‘hate’ Mail supported Hitler
in the 1930’s. But what you probably
didn’t realise is how they still share common sentiments with the dead fuhrer.
of Hitler and Nazi propagandists changing ‘Jew’ to ‘migrant’. Sure enough a lot of them got through the ‘moderation’.
banned for life for not adhering to ‘community guidelines’ (a phrase originating
with the Guardian’s blogosphere). It
beggars belief what the community standards of the Hate Mail are !!
 |
| Daily Mail article 20th August 1938 |
What happens when you comment on Daily Mail articles with actual Nazi propaganda
We’ve highlighted how in the last few weeks, media coverage of
migration into Europe has
become increasingly alarmist, not helped by our prime minister
using language more
associated with the far-right.
The anti-migrant sentiment expressed in some papers became too much for the
people behind the @bestofthemail
and @dmreporter Twitter accounts,
who prefer to remain anonymous.
In
a post on Medium, they detailed an experiment conducted on the
comments section of the Daily Mail website to show the dangers of this
dehumanising language becoming normalised.
They wrote:
[We] wanted to see what level of support the
comments would get if we took some famous pieces of Nazi propaganda and changed
the word ‘Jew’ with ‘migrant’.
Here’s what happened:
Yes, that quote has received 193 up-votes.
They got more blatant, yet the up-votes kept on coming:
And then Adolf Hitler himself was quoted:
The last time they counted, they received 480 up-votes compared to 16
down-votes for right Nazi comments.
In an email to i100.co.uk, @BestoftheMail said:
“In recent weeks we were both fairly shocked by the tone of much of the
migrant debate, especially the dehumanising and hateful nature of the language
used to describe them. We wanted to illustrate how easy it is for hate speech
to become normalised and show the importance of focusing on the people and the
facts rather than resorting to prejudice.”
@DMReporter told us:
“What really interested us was the amount of support these comments were
getting. Every website gets comments like this submitted but what struck us
most was the enthusiastic manner in which they were accepted. They were just
knee-jerk approvals instead of any considered thought about what sort of
comment they were actually agreeing with.”
The Mail is hardly unique in this respect. One of worst examples in recent
memory was from Sun columnist Katie Hopkins, whose description of
migrants as “cockroaches” led to accusations she
was adopting the tone and language of the Third Reich. On a liberal medium
such as Twitter, the comments are enough
to make you despair, and even on the Independent
website.
Mail Online later stopped @DMReporter from making further comments on its
site for “going against the community guidelines”.
