To me, it was shocking to watch the street interviews with the rioters, where they were just repeating the same exact slogans from the French protests, but badly translated to Spanish (like a literal word-by-word translation that was weird and made no sense).

Something similar has been going on in Washington, DC, but ours is organic. Someone fires up a “teen takeover” to a popular area, it floods with kids 99% of which are just there to harmless goof off and see their friends, and of course a small group of jerks starts a fight with no regard for the people around them.

The city council is treating this like a curfew issue. The problem isn’t the kids, it’s the algorithm. But nobody seems to have any power to bang on TikTok’s door and tell them to cut it out.

What would "seeing riots coming" look like?

at least at 16:30 a lego store on passeig de gracia announced that there was a demonstration starting and they were closing and police was everywhere around so looks like it was a planned protest rather than just some unexpected tiktok looting flashmob

Pro Israel media: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

yde_java pointed it out on a comment below

It even has the LLM-ism "it's not just X, it's Y" (no es solo _, es _).

It's hardly surprising that ≈0.01% of the population of Barcelona are ready to do property damage. The only surprising thing is that they managed to all be at the same place at the same time. Identifying Tiktok as one link in their organizing process doesn't mean Tiktok is to blame, but it suggests that one way to prevent future occurrences could be e.g. to have a dedicated police unit monitoring social media content so they're not caught unawares.

Or foreign influence campaigns target legitimate greviances but attempt to expand the grievance beyond all proportion, reframe the concerns from solveable to evil vs good and attempt to purposefully inflame emotions rather than solve problems in order to weaken unity and ability of rival states to act against the agitating nation.

That was interesting.

Minor spoiler: looks like the platforms found a way to mass produce the formula Robby Lefkowitz made money out of, to everyone else's detriment.

I recently stumbled on the political polarization score [1]. America hereby joined the club with Poland, Turkey, and Belarus. It's an awful club to be in. If you wonder how it looks in real life. Every discussion on history, politics, social issues immediately escalates to "us against them", "you are from among them". On every scandal and corruption the only concern is "are they from us or from them?".

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-polarization-sc...

I find it so cute when Swiss embrace rioting or vandalism. Go emigrate somewhere and let's see how tough you are.

I agree with your first statement, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here:

> there’s really no first principles reason for any legitimacy

Do you mean in this case, or are you making a blanket statement about the nature of morality and power?

I'd rather talk about whether the protests were "genuine" rather than "legitimate". Riots usually escalate from prior peaceful protests, in which protestors claim specific concerns and political factions get involved. None of that seems to have happened here, it was zero to teens rioting.

Yes, there are. A popular protest (and even riots!) should come entirely or at least in the vast majority from a sentiment spread across the people. If it's 500 youngsters that come out of the blue following a campaign orchestrated most probably by a foreign state actor, then it's not legitimate.

Yes, we could start doing verbal and mental gymnastics about how an external actor could be legitimately interested to try and drive the political landscape of a country one month before elections, sure. But it's not the point here.

> What I will say is that getting tiktoks in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a coordinated way isn't easy

Literally trivial: https://getstarted.tiktok.com/gofulltiktok?lang=en

> and they won't come out if they weren't already passionate about something

First time protesting and/or rioting in Barcelona? There is definitively always people taking advantage of our peaceful protests to cause chaos and mayhem, this happens every time there are protests, and especially once the police wants to shut down the events but people want to keep on partying.

> they should subpoena tiktok for exact records

Absolutely, straight up attempts to subvert democracy, should be met with investigations immediately.

would be nice if organizers were actually arrested and investigated

Wherever there's change, there's money to be made. We just don't really care about people making the dosh from changes we like.

poster designs came from an ai subscription which, even if free, is still a better trail than "the money"

> On the other hand, can’t these things also legitimately arise from disenfranchised groups without needing to point to a boogie man?

I think that's the crux, they do, constantly! We have "real riots" in Spain all the time, and protests, both peaceful and violent ones. We have experience of the actual process of seeing people getting more and more frustrated, and things slowly bubbling until it reaches a threshold, then bubbles over.

This doesn't seem to be that. There is zero political parties/groups involved, which is very uncommon, we have strong groups that are always up for causing some property damages and similar things, when these "real riots" happen, but none of these were involved.

When you have basically groups of individuals all acting in uniform way, based on the same misinformation, with zero association or relation to our existing political factions, then it's quite easy to see that things didn't happen as they "normally" do, that's why people are asking questions right now about it.

This is because they are baffling. I still don't understand BLM. Those women came out of nowhere; everybody organic who initiated the initial Ferguson protests was executed, and the media went all in. I am a black American and I know very few black Americans who participated, but tons of white liberal types. All of the black American people I know of who tried to get involved and started their own local chapters of BLM got no support or money from the national organization, other than disapproval of protests that they wanted to do on their own about local issues that they cared about. The national organization was drowning in institutional money.

Everything about it was just bizarre. I still can't deny that it was a color revolution to unseat Trump, and I wish I could.

Also, I still have a weird video of some strange masked and "tactically dressed" man who walked into the middle of the protests in some town and just started breaking the windows of businesses (an Auto Center iirc) without speaking to anyone who was actually protesting (peacefully), while they were yelling at him to stop. He then just leaves, and while one guy is walking after him and questioning him, he threatens the guy until he stops following.

There's also the weird French stuff where "black bloc" people are doing damage or in one case throwing a flash bang grenade, police rush in, a few words are exchanged, and then this "black bloc" leave with the police.

The blaming of the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs is the real conspiracy. What it looks like to me is that people may be engineering protests to justify crackdowns, or turning existing protests violent in order to shut them down. The masking that has been done since the "black bloc" started ruining protests and escalated greatly after covid just makes it too easy. Also the fact that these protests are generally slacktivist and not organized, so people don't expect to know each other. They get messages on social media that say that there's going to be a protest about some subject, and they feel obligated to show up - but they have no connection to each other.

It's weird that that's how it's expected to be now. This "protest" ritual has gone to the limits of artificiality. The "No Kings" "protests" in the US are directly run by Democratic contractors, and they text spam relentlessly from voter lists (I've gotten dozens, if not a hundred or two.) It isn't like grassroots people get together, discuss their grievances, and decide to coordinate a protest. It's completely top-down, coordinated with elections, and has no articulable grievances, just slogans.

Alienating, isolating, dislocating people, and shattering communities and families has resulted in people who are completely subject to centralized control. The state thinks the most dangerous issue in the world is that people might be able to speak to each other in an unmediated fashion. Can a state like that ever be happy about family, friendship, or community?

> when Israel has the most advanced propaganda machines globally ?

What an interesting claim. Unless you're saying that despite Israel having the "most advanced propaganda machines" (whatever that means), it's failing miserably. The amount of hate towards Israelis and the Israeli government is at all time high.

Israel are easier to blame than the reality, which is some people are entirely feral and will turn legitimate protests into an excuse to riot and loot. It doesn’t need a state actor to amplify this stuff. Just a bunch of idiots in social media bubbles.

Pro-Israel organizations like this one suggest what you say is true: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

I found it interesting that two of the AI posters in the article have the three-pointed “no kings” crown, and one has a two-pointed version. The AI hallucinated icons from American partisan propaganda into an EU context in a country with a monarchy.

Maybe try reading the article, it isn't claiming "all protests in Spain are fake".