If you’ve seen the term “Blue Anon” appear on social media over the past few days, you may be wondering what exactly the phrase is all about.
Featured Video Hide
*First Published: Mar 9, 2021, 12:27 pm
Mikael Thalen is a tech and security reporter based in Seattle, covering social media, data breaches, hackers, and more.
Google Translate still isn’t reliable enough to use for medical instructions for people who don’t speak English, according to a new study published last week. Sometimes, it works: it was the most accurate when translating emergency department discharge instructions into Spanish. But a lot of the time, especially with less common languages, it doesn’t — the study found it was only 55 percent accurate for Armenian. That’s a big problem when it comes to health information, where any misunderstanding can be dangerous.
“All you need is one error that creates confusion for a patient, and they don’t take their blood thinner or they take too much of their blood thinner,” says study author Lisa Diamond, a health disparities researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “And you end up with medical emergency.”
“All you need is one error that creates confusion for a patient”
Federal guidelines say that hospitals and health care organizations have to provide interpreters and translators for patients who don’t speak English. The guidelines are designed to fill a vital need — these patients are at a higher risk of medical complications because they may not understand instructions given by their doctors.
However, in practice, many hospitals don’t offer interpreters to every patient who needs one — they’re expensive, and many health care groups struggle with the cost. Even if a hospital does have interpreters on staff or a subscription to a phone interpreting service for verbal communication, they’re less likely to have a way to translate written instructions. “There’s a clear gap in the ability to provide written information for patients,” says study author Breena Taira, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCLA Health.
It’s become common for doctors to resort to Google Translate in medical settings, Taira says. “You can imagine that a well-meaning emergency department provider thinking, ‘I really want to provide my patient with instructions in their own language, and my hospital doesn’t have a mechanism to do this — why don’t I use this automated translation software,” she says.
The new study evaluated 400 emergency department discharge instructions translated by Google Translate into seven different languages: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, and Farsi. Native speakers read the translations and evaluated their accuracy. Overall, the translated instructions were over 80 percent accurate.
That’s an improvement from 2014, when an analysis found that Google Translate was less than 60 percent accurate for medical information. Google Translate improved in 2016, when it started using a new algorithm — since then, one 2019 study found that it can be over 90 percent accurate in Spanish.
But the new analysis also found that accuracy varied between languages. Like the 2019 study, it found that Google Translate was over 90 percent accurate for Spanish. Tagalog, Korean, and Chinese had accuracy rates ranging from 80 to 90 percent. There was a big drop-off for Farsi, which had a 67 percent accuracy, and Armenian, which had a 55 percent accuracy. In one example, Google Translate turned “You can take over the counter ibuprofen as needed for pain” into Armenian as “You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain.”
“You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain”
Even languages like Spanish and Chinese that were usually accurate could have Google Translate errors that could confuse patients. An instruction for a patient taking the blood-thinning medication Coumadin read “Your Coumadin level was too high today. Do not take any more Coumadin until your doctor reviews the results.” It was translated into Chinese as “Your soybean level was too high today. Do not take anymore soybean until your doctor reviews the results.”
One of the main problems with relying on machine translation is that it can’t account for context, Diamond says. The program might not recognize that a word is the name of a medication, for example. “It loses the meaning of what you’re trying to say,” she says.
Eventually, machine translation programs might improve to the point where they can accurately and safely translate medical information. But based on the way they work now, they aren’t a good approach.
Instead, doctors should write out instructions in English and have an interpreter go over those instructions verbally with a patient, Taira says. But that’s just a stop-gap — ideally, health systems should give doctors a way to get professional translations of materials. Each doctor is going to do the best they can with the resources they have available. “What we need to do, really as a system, is to make things easier for the provider,” Taira says.
TipRanks
Anyone trying to keep track of where the markets might be heading, could be forgiven for displaying signs of dizziness. The markets are being violently pulled in opposite directions lately, making it difficult to form a coherent investing strategy. It is in time like this that some expert advice might provide a clearer picture. Hardly any on the Street come more highly regarded than billionaire David Tepper. The co-founder of global hedge fund Appaloosa Management, Tepper is known for his brash and confident style, traits which could come in handy in today’s confused climate. Tepper made his fortune – and built his hedge fund – by investing in distressed assets and profiting mightily when markets reversed later on. And with $14 billion worth of assets under Appaloosa’s management, it’s natural for Wall Street to take notice when Tepper has something to say. “Basically, I think rates have temporarily made the most of the move and should be more stable in the next few months, which makes it safer to be in stocks for now,” Tepper noted. The billionaire believes the rising rates should settle and points out that with the Senate’s approval of the coronavirus fiscal stimulus package, it is currently “very difficult to be bearish.” With this in mind, we’ve opened up the TipRanks database to get the scoop on two of Tepper’s recent new positions. These are Strong Buy stocks – and perhaps more interestingly, both are strong dividend payers, with annual yields exceeding 7%. We can turn to the Wall Street analysts to find out what else might have brought these stocks to Tepper’s attention. MPLX LP (MPLX) We’ll start with a long-established name in the energy sector. Marathon Petroleum, one of the giants of Big Oil, operates across the US, in the Rocky Mountains, the Midwest, and along the Gulf Coast, moving oil and natural gas products from the wells to the storage and distribution facilities. MPLX has benefited from the general economic reopening in the second half of 2020, with the stock gaining as more people returned to work and demand for fuel increased. Overall, shares are up 98% in the last 12 months. At the top line, revenues have rebounded from a dip in 2Q20, gaining 8.5% to reach $2.17 billion by Q4. Earnings, which turned sharply negative in 1Q20, rose steadily through the rest of the year, and came in at 64 cents per share in Q4. But perhaps the most important metric, for investors, was MPLX’s net cash position – for the full year 2020, the company generated $4.5 billion in cash, and returned over $3 billion of that to shareholders. In its most recent dividend declaration, the company announced a 68.75 cent payment per common share, or $2.75 annualized. This gives a yield of 10.5%, far above the average yield. And David Tepper, in the last quarter, bought heavily into MPLX, picking up more than 3.45 million shares of the stock. At current prices, these shares are now worth $89.77 million. As noted, this is a new position for Tepper, and it is a substantial one. Covering this stock for RBC Capital, 5-star analyst TJ Schultz believes the company’s strong balance sheet justifies a positive sentiment. “[We] think MPLX is well positioned to continue steady cash flow and distributions into 2021+. Management reinforced MPC's commitment to MPLX contract renewals. Some modest price slippage on near-term barge renewables, but the chunkier contracts were either set more recently (longer runway) or are already tied to FERC oil dynamics. We like MPLX's improving FCF profile and solid balance sheet, which we think gives management more options for returning value through unit buybacks over the next year," Schultz wrote. To this end, Schultz gives MPLX a $29 price target, implying a 12% upside, to go along with his Outperform (i.e. Buy) rating. (To watch Schultz’s track record, click here) MPLX’s strong share appreciation has pushed the stock price close to the average price target. Shares are selling for $25.92 now, with an average target of $27.67 suggesting room for ~7% further growth. The stock holds a Strong Buy consensus rating, based on 5 Buys and 1 Hold given over the past 3 months. (See MPLX stock analysis on TipRanks) Enterprise Products Partners (EPD) Sticking with the energy sector, we’ll look at another midstream company that caught Tepper’s attention. Enterprise Products Partners, with a $50 billion market cap, is a major player in the midstream segment, and operates a network of assets including more than 50,000 pipeline miles, storage facilities for 160 million barrels of oil and 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas, and shipping terminals on the Gulf Coast in Texas. The story here is similar to that for MPLX. Enterprise was hurt by the lockdowns put in place to combat the COVID pandemic, but in the last six months has seen a rebound in share value and revenues. Shares are up 40% in that time, while revenues in Q4 broke back above $7 billion. Overall, Enterprise’s 2020 performance showed declines from 2019 – but one important metric showed a gain. Of the company’s total cash flow, $5.9 billion, $2.7 billion was free cash flow (FCF), or cash available for distribution. This was up 8% year-over-year, and allowed the company to keep up its regular dividend payment – and even to raise the payment in the most recent declaration, from 44 cents per common share to 45 cents. With a $1.80 annualized payout per share, this gives a robust yield of 7.7%. Tepper’s new position in EPD is substantial. The hedge fund leader bought up 1.09 million shares of the stock for his first position, a buy that is now worth $25.23 million. Analyst Matt O’Brien, of JPMorgan, sides with the bulls, reiterating a Buy rating and $28 price target. This target conveys his confidence in EPD's ability to climb 20% from current levels. (To watch O’Brien's track record, click here) “With capex needs slowing, EPD expects to reach positive discretionary free cash flow in 2H21, enabling fully funding capex, growing cash distributions, and opportunistic buybacks... Overall, we continue to believe EPD offers the optimal mix of offense and defense, with attractive embedded operating leverage, notable barriers to entry, low leverage, and best-in-class financial flexibility,” O’Brien commented. Wall Street’s analysts can be a contentious lot – but when they agree on a stock, it’s a positive sign for investors to take note. That’s the case here, as all of the recent reviews on EPD are Buys, making the consensus rating a unanimous Strong Buy. The analysts have given an average price target of $27, which indicates ~15% upside from the current share price of $23.38. (See EPD stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for dividend stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
By Allison Proffitt
March 8, 2021 | The problems are common in any large, data-centric organization. We don’t know what we have. We don’t know where it is. We need to be able to clean, combine, and search our data assets. A favorite solution is a data commons, an architecture for holding all of an organization’s data in common with well-defined connections. The idea is to make the data within an organization FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
The foundation of a data commons is the data dictionary—the map or model populated with all of the data within an organization and the relationships between them. The hardest part of FAIR is the “I”—interoperability, says Bill Van Etten, senior scientific consultant at BioTeam. The data dictionary is what brings you from FAR to FAIR.
The data dictionary includes both technical information—for instance, the path to an S3 object URL, who owns the data, when they were created—as well as the research metadata—project names, study names, analyses, demographic data, clinical data, etc.—Van Etten explained last year. Since 2019, he and BioTeam have been working with Bristol-Myers Squibb to build their new data commons, the BMS Genomics Data Hub.
That’s a lot of content to gather, organize, and arrange. And in the past, building such data dictionaries took a great deal of time, Van Etten said. Early on in the process of building the BMS Genomics Data Hub, there would be lots of meetings where user groups discussed the data dictionary, defined by node.yaml files, then ran tests and circled back, he said. Eventually the yaml files would be transpiled to json schema files and sent to an Amazon S3 bucket. Gen3 microservices—the platform on which the BMS data commons is built—would need to be restarted to ingest the new dictionary, and the process would start over for any new changes.
It was a tedious development cycle, slowed by meetings between individuals from unrelated groups.
But Van Etten and John Jacquay, Scientific Systems Engineer at BioTeam, have been developing something better: collaborative dictionary authoring with GitHub and Travis integration.
We’re applying standard software development techniques to data dictionary development, Van Etten explained. Instead of everyone having to agree on a common dictionary from the start, they can branch the dictionary and add or modify dictionary nodes specific to their research domain. Using git and continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) practices automates the building, testing, and deploying of data dictionaries. Now, Van Etten said, the process takes about 30 seconds.
GitHub and Travis bring different functionalities to the new process. Users can modify the data dictionary directly through GitHub, Van Etten explained. But even better is the continuous integration Travis offers. Within a few seconds of committing changes, Travis will test the dictionary, deploy it to S3, and offer a visualization of the new dictionary (using React components from Gen3) as a serverless web application from a static S3 website.
Data Dictionaries For All
While the functionality was built specifically for collaborative dictionary authoring for the Gen3 platform, Van Etten emphasized that there is value here for any organization. Every group needs to understand how their data relate, he said.
Even without all of the Gen3 microservices, this open-source, serverless, collaborative data dictionary development tool allows users to visualize their data relationships graphically revealing how all the data are interrelated.
Anyone can build a data dictionary, Van Etten contends. The only skill needed is the ability to author a yaml file. At BMS, some research groups are authoring the yaml files themselves; other groups are getting help from BioTeam.
There will be foundational terms that must be defined, Van Etten said. For instance, at BMS, “We are calling a study a study. We agreed what ‘biospecimen’ vs ‘sample’ vs ‘patient’ means. We agreed on the definition of ‘subject.’” But in general, Van Etten advocates for just letting people get started. Any connections can be fixed after the fact. “Like in software engineering: carve out a part of the problem for yourself, fix that problem, and submit a pull request.”
BMS has made the feature open source. Anyone can clone the repository and use it to develop their own dictionaries. In fact, Van Etten pointed out, anyone can look at the data dictionaries of the Gen3 data commons listed at stats.gen3.org. Append /DD to the end of the URLs to explore each group’s dictionary. Toggle between graph and table view in the left column. Anyone can see (and use!) the nodes each commons has defined.
Of course that begs the question: is there any security risk inherent in exposing your data organization model this way? Absolutely not, Van Etten says. No one is sharing their data; they are only sharing the schema. In fact, Van Etten and others hope that all of pharma will coalesce on a common dictionary. “A dictionary is not a competitive advantage,” he said. “Two pharma could share the same dictionary and still be competitors.”
"Blue Anon" is a term coined by conservatives attacking those who push "left-wing conspiracy theories." The phrase returned to the Urban Dictionary website after it appeared to have been temporarily removed.
"Blue Anon" has been used by a number of right-wing personalities in recent days, including political commentator Candace Owens and Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The phrase is a play on the name of the radical conspiracy theory QAnon, whose supporters believe that Donald Trump is secretly battling a cabal of satanic pedophiles. The group were among those who stormed the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.
The term Blue Anon is used to attack those who push what the right refer to as "hoaxes," such as the investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 election and allegations that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.
The phrase was so widely used that it saw an entry on Urban Dictionary—a website with user-generated content that lists popular slogans and slang.
The “journalists” obsessed with Qanon are a cult.
They’ve been spreading conspiracy theories for years.#BlueAnon
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) March 4, 2021
If you believe:
-DC is under military occupation because there are non-stop threats from Trump supporters.
-Joe Biden is the most popular American President of all time.
-Russia, Russia, Russia
You might be #BlueAnon
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 7, 2021
BlueAnon is getting worse than QAnon.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 6, 2021
The term was removed from the site over the weekend with no explanation.
Jack Posobiec, the far-right figurehead who helped spread the QAnon-linked "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, was one of those who noticed Blue Anon had been removed.
"I have never even heard of a word being banned from Urban Dictionary before they banned Blue Anon," he tweeted on March 7. "And everyone knows they will list literally anything. Until now."
Other conservatives figures and websites such as The Daily Caller and The Post Millennial claimed it was another example of censorship against the right.
By Monday, the Blue Anon entry returned to Urban Dictionary. Users vote on the best definition for phrases, and currently the top definition with 625 votes described the phrase as a "loosely organized network of Democrat voters, politicians and media personalities who spread left-wing conspiracy theories such as the Russia Hoax, Jussie Smollett hoax, Ukraine hoax, Covington Kids hoax, and Brett Kavanaugh hoax."
The Blue Anon listing also describes its advocates as those who believe right-wing extremists are going to "storm Capitol Hill any day now and 'remove' lawmakers from office, hence the need for the deployment of thousands of National Guard stationed at the U.S. Capitol."
The description is an apparent reference to the fears that QAnon supporters were going to return to D.C. on March 4 believing that Trump would be inaugurated as president, which failed to take place as a number of influential figures of the movement distanced themselves from their latest prediction.
It is unclear why the Blue Anon term was removed from Urban Dictionary in the first place. In a blog post from September 2020, the site said it will not ban certain words, but will be updating their guidelines to consider certain submissions.
"Knowing an offensive word's meaning can combat inequality and abuse," the post said. "But there is a difference between using Urban Dictionary to document the meaning of an offensive word and using it to celebrate or endorse an offensive meaning."
Urban Dictionary has been contacted for comment.
When a big news story happens, Peter Sokolowski can usually tell. One of his duties as editor at large for Meriam-Webster is to keep an eye on traffic to their online dictionary. He learned years ago that when a story is big enough, certain words will capture the attention of thousands upon thousands simultaneously, and lookups of those words in their dictionary will spike dramatically.
“Normally you see a few of the words from the headlines that rise to the top,” said Sokolowski.
But on March 13, 2020 — Friday the 13th, of course — Sokolowski saw something he had never seen before. A single-story dominated the collective consciousness. The burgeoning COVID-19 crisis was driving unprecedented traffic to their online dictionary — and would, eventually, drive the creation of whole new words at blazing speed.
Sokolowski said the top 30 to 40 words looked up that Friday were all related to the pandemic.
“We have never seen a news event that was every single look up like this,” Sokolowski said. “[Not] Michael Jackson's death, 9/11, the Newtown shootings, the Boston Marathon bombings, Robin Williams’ suicide, Trump's election victory.”
A Remarkable Thing
The list of top lookups from March 13, 2020 reads, today, like a snapshot of a country suddenly coming to terms with the magnitude of an unprecedented, and largely unknown, new challenge.
“It was this story and this story only, but different facets of it, different angles on it," Sokolowski said. “The words [looked up] encapsulate a few different categories.”
Among the words and terms that saw outsized interest were medical ones — like "pandemic," "coronavirus" and "corona." There were terms related to the response by public officials — including "quarantine," "draconian," "lockdown" and "martial law." And there were words of a more personal nature, suggesting people grappling with an unprecedented situation — including "apoplectic," "calamity" and "Kafkaesque."
But of all the words looked up that day, Sokolowski finds particular poignancy in a familiar one that, at first blush, seems like a bit of a head scratcher: The word "cancel."
As in, “this weekend’s concert is canceled,” or “all programs are canceled until further notice.”
"The dictionary serves this higher plane of intellectual curiosity, but it also sometimes serves the very basic spelling function that we all use day in and day out,” Sokolowski said.
Sokolowski notes that the word "canceled" has one "l" in American English but two in British English, a quirk that is a not infrequent source of confusion. And that "cancel" saw such a surge of interest that day is a reminder of just how much of what was once everyday life came to a grinding halt last March.
“You're making a sign for your window, you're making an announcement and you say, ‘Oh, is that one'l' or two? You look it up in the dictionary, and that causes the word to spike,” he said. “That is a remarkable thing. And, I think, a very poignant thing.”
Language Usually Doesn't Move This Quickly
The World Health Organization coined the term COVID-19, a shortening of COronaVIrus Disease 2019, in February of 2020.
“It suddenly became a term that was used everywhere by journalists, by all the medical professionals and by everyone who's paying attention to this story,” Sokolowski said.
But the term — like the virus itself — was brand new and, therefore, not in the dictionary. That quickly became a problem.
“In our data we saw many people looking this term up in the dictionary and getting nothing in response, because the word was not yet entered,” Sokolwski said.
And so the team at Meriam-Webster did something they have never done before, responding at a pace previously unheard of in the fastidious, slow-moving world of dictionaries.
“We decided for the first time to have an emergency release, to release a couple of dozen entries because the public was seeking information on these words," Sokolwski said.
"COVID-19" was, of course, among the new entries. It went from being coined to being added to the dictionary in just 34 days. No word in the history of the English language had done that faster.
Sokolowski said that within five minutes of being added in March, "COVID-19" was the single most looked up word in their online dictionary. Other new terms also saw immediate spikes in interest, including "super-spreader" and "self-quarantine."
It wasn’t just that new words emerged, according to Sokolwski. Old words and terms also quickly took on new meanings and needed similarly speedy updates.
“Language usually doesn't move this quickly,” he explained. “We see words evolve very quickly, and their meanings have changed almost at the snap of a finger.”
The word "lockdown," for example, had previously been associated with security and crime.
“And now we have added a new sense to the dictionary that has to do with a temporary condition imposed by governmental authorities, as during the outbreak of an epidemic disease, in which people are required to stay in their homes,” Sokolwski said.
"Bubble," in a metaphorical sense, had previously been used to describe an insular set of ideas, such as a political bubble or ideological bubble.
“But now we have this new sense where a bubble refers to, for health purposes, retaining a small group or a family group together who refrain from contact with others,” Sokolowski said.
A Natural Experiment
How language changes over time is a major focus of researchers at Michigan State University’s Sociolinguistics lab. And when the pandemic hit, linguist Betsy Sneller said that she and her colleagues saw a unique opportunity.
"This is a natural experiment, and we have to start collecting this data,” Sneller said of her thinking in the early months of 2020.
And so the Michigan COVID Diaries project was born.
Since March, dozens of participants have been recording regular audio diaries.
They tell stories of their experiences and answer a series of questions posed weekly as prompts from Sneller and her team. The results are all cataloged and will be a veritable treasure trove of raw linguistic data that will be able to be analyzed for years to come.
As for Sneller, she wants to answer a simple question that could have big implications: “Does social distancing as a result of the pandemic affect how people talk?”
One area where Sneller has already seen a clear, immediate impact is pandemic-related vocabulary.
At the outset of the project, Sneller said she regularly heard more than a dozen terms being used by participants to describe the pandemic — everything from "the lockdown" to "social distancing," "the 'rona'" to "the pandemic" and the once-popular euphemism "the current situation."
Similarly, when the school year began in the fall of 2020 with many children attending remotely, a diversity of terms began popping up regularly — including "quarenteam," "family bubble," "learning pod" and "pod."
But within a matter of months, Sneller said the variation in those terms began to narrow and, as she put it, “clear winners” emerged.
"The pandemic" beat out the others as the descriptor of the era we are now experiencing. As for a group who remains together even amidst social distancing? It deinfitiely a "pod."
That certain terms emerged as clearly more popular does not surprise Sneller. That it happened so quickly during a time of social distancing, however, is notable. She posits that one factor could be the way in which people have stayed connected while remaining socially apart.
“We know that the internet, especially social media platforms like Twitter, where you are interacting with people who you don't know, have this effect of accelerating vocabulary changes,” she explained.
Whether these “winning terms” are specific to the Michigan region or have also been more universally accepted is still unknown.
Other question remain, too. While pandemic-related vocabulary has clearly converged, what about non-pandemic-related vocabulary? How has social distancing impacted things like accents, inflection and pronunciation?
“Our project is going to continue,” Sneller said. “I think it will be really interesting in the year after the pandemic [ends] to see.”
'Still In The Middle Of It'
There are still plenty of open question for the folks at Meriam-Webster as well. For every new word and definition they’ve added to their dictionary, there are scores of other trending terms that they have yet to — but will continue monitoring. Which of these will have staying power in the language is anyone’s guess.
Will people five years from now still say they are “zooming” when they conduct a video meeting online? Will slang terms like "doomscrolling" and "covidiot" make their way into wider use or be little-known relics from a brief moment in time? Will "COVID-19," in all-caps, be the preferred styling? Or will it be overtaken by "Covid-19," in lowercase, a styling many news organizations have started using?
Sokolowski points out that in 2009, in response to the market collapse the previous year — and the subsequent global financial crisis that would become known as the Great Recession — Meriam-Webster named "bailout" as their word of the year.
"However, when we talk now about that period, we don't call it 'the bailout,'" he said. "This period, we will probably call the pandemic, I'm guessing, but it's still a guess. We're still in the middle of it."
Conservatives are celebrating a culture war victory after "Blue Anon," the embarrassing new branding of left-wing conspiracy theorists that plays on the ‘QAnon’ smears used by the media, was restored to the Urban Dictionary.
The term and its crowdsourced definition were put back in the Urban Dictionary on Monday, after being disappeared over the weekend. The updated definition begins with calling Blue Anon "a loosely organized network of Democrat voters, politicians and media personalities who spread left-wing conspiracy theories, such as the Russia Hoax, Jussie Smollett hoax, Ukraine hoax, Covington kids hoax and Brett Kavanaugh hoax."
Also on rt.com Conservatives snicker as Urban Dictionary censors term ‘BLUE ANON,’ the hot new label for left-wing conspiracy theoristsConservatives celebrated the restoration after mocking "wokies" for censoring Blue Anon. "Culture war victory," proclaimed journalist Libby Emmons. "Conservatives take the win on this one."
CULTURE WAR VICTORY: Urban Dictionary restores 'Blue Anon' entry after backlash to censorshipConservatives take the win on this one https://t.co/Y4VbtwgrLH
— libby emmons (@libbyemmons) March 8, 2021
Journalist Jack Posobiec, who has promoted the Blue Anon term, was similarly celebratory: "Ladies and gentlemen, we did it."
The definition seems to have originated in a Twitter thread started in early February by author Max Nordau. Suggested Blue Anon theories included such allegations as: ‘police collaborated with rioters in the US Capitol attack on January 6’; ‘Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a gang rapist’; ‘former First Lady Melania Trump has a body double’; ‘Stacy Abrams won the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia’, which by the way isn't an incitement to insurrection; ‘the 2004 presidential election was rigged’ (also not an incitement); ‘Russia paid bounties for killing of US soldiers in Afghanistan’; and ‘US border agents told detained migrants to drink from toilets if they're thirsty.’
WHAT DOES "BlueAnon" MEAN?"Who paid Brett Kavanaugh's debts?""Why did Justice Kennedy resign?""The Capitol riot was planned by Republicans, and Capitol police collaborated.""Detention centers are concentration camps."and, obviously: "Trump is a Russian asset."Any others? https://t.co/lSl9NJTvN9
— Max Nordau (@MaxNordau) February 2, 2021
Urban Dictionary had removed the entry for 'Blue Anon' despite the fact that the site typically doesn't ban terms for offensiveness. For instance, several anti-conservative terms, including "Republic*nt," have remained in the slang dictionary unscathed.
Also on rt.com House CANCELS March 4 session after Capitol Police cites ‘possible plot’ by militiaWhile Urban Dictionary may have reverted the censorship, the term 'Blue Anon' apparently doesn't exist in the eyes of the world's largest online search engine. Google searches for the term mostly return links to skiing goggles and snowboarding equipment. That's not the case on other search services, such as those offered by DuckDuckGo and Bing, which seem to return relevant answers.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
