"Hate-filled posts" on the internet are often fake

One of the left's favorite tactics is to do something outrageous, provoke a response, and then cleverly style that response as if it were the norm -- and then use it to justify increased power for leftists. You can watch this phenomenon in action here:

But it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies. They addressed him with racial slurs and called him a monkey. One had an image of the president with his neck in a noose.

The posts reflected the racial hostility toward the nation’s first black president that has long been expressed in stark terms on the Internet, where conspiracy theories thrive and prejudices find ready outlets. But the racist Twitter posts are different because now that Mr. Obama has his own account, the slurs are addressed directly to him, for all to see. - Pravda-on-the-Hudson

The article, provocatively entitled Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled Posts, is designed to make you think that there are millions of angry people out there just waiting to say nasty racist things to the president.

This forgets two vital details about the internet: first, people on the internet say nasty things about everyone, and they use whatever they can against you. If you're carrying extra weight, it's fat hate. If you're white, you get called a wimp. And if you're black, they might even use that against you.

But the second factor is even more important: much of the content on the internet is fake, not just in the usual sense of being cut-n-paste gobbledegook from elsewhere, but in that the people commenting are not who they say they are. Often, they are astroturfers promoting corporate or government interests as if "grass roots" interest, or "false flag" style agitprop, in which case they are pretending to be from the other side so they can say nasty stuff and have their enemies take the blame.

Witness this statement from an administrator of internet hive-mind Reddit:

Some people have even been performing what's often referred to as a "false flag", where even though they're actually normally a contributing member of the subreddit, they've been creating alt accounts to make or upvote harassing comments/messages in order to make that issue seem more prevalent than it actually is. - Deimorz

In the case he describes, a part of the site claimed it was under attack -- and provided "proof" in the form of its own members pretending to be adversarial parties and posting stuff that was clearly over the line. This is a classic false flag approach, much like the Gulf of Tonkin incident where an attack by a presumed adversary justified a war.

The people performing this false flag attacks are leftists. The people reporting on it are leftists. The government instigating it is leftist. What does this tell us? For leftists, truth is optional; what matters is appearances. So they create a fake crisis, report it as a real crisis, and then demand we all "do something" about this entirely fictitious debacle.