lrts: this is exactly how they operate, and this is a perfect analogue for twitch chats. you know stuff like pepe? how those are a registered hate symbol? but people can use them with plausible deniability because they're such a popular emote on twitch? yeah.

alt-right people specifically love to flaunt how much they can straddle the line of respectability without being banned because they're not *technically* breaking rules or being a bigot. they love to use coded, deniable symbols to signal to other alt-right people their intent

and to taunt people who are familiar with it because there's nothing they can do about it most of the time without sounding like a hypersensitive harpy reading too far into things like an innocent little OK emoji.

this is why we were so pissed when zina b-sh did the ok hand

this is where the term "power l-vel"/"hiding your power l-vel" comes from. it means being alt-right, usually a supremacist, and blending in w 'normies' while disguising that you hold these views, but perhaps occasionally signalling you hold them to others similarly "hiding".

they have entire systems of language built around this, it is incredibly deliberate, the plausible deniability is incredibly deliberate, and they absolutely laugh at people like me who are aware of it and have to side-eye everyone who uses a p-pe emote in a twitch chat.

this is also similar to 'dogwhistles' which have been standard in politics for ages. something that might sound relatively sane on the surface, or which is void of explicit mention but obviously targeted towards a group. you can see this with the stupid h-rper's magazine letter.

it talks about blah blah free speech cancel culture and sounds pretty sane/generic at face value.

but it is talking about people being punished for, you know, being hideously transphobic, e.g. jk rowl et al, and several of its signers have balked at discovering the true meaning

this is why you need to be acutely aware of this shit and actively suspicious of it or you can end up endorsing something that is actually a giant dogwhistle for bigotry. and you can end up letting bad actors into your community who will rot it from the inside.

this is not to be confused with twitch user BadAcktor who is in fact a normal and nice individual. you can let them in, it's fine, i'm talking about nazis in plainclothes. lol

remember: they're just as smart as you. they know exactly what they're doing. you're not being paranoid

and if you're looking at a twitch chat wondering how it got so toxic despite mods, this is how.

bigots snaked their way in under the guise of plausible deniability, and weren't punished because they didn't 'break the rules', and pushed everyone who knew what was up *out*.