Better not member (berries)

It’s extremely dangerous to linger on the past.

Around the New Year’s holiday, many people from my bubble started sharing how many books they had read in 2025, and what they (dis)like the most.

While the trend is slightly annoying, mostly just reminding me that my own reading year was a bit meh, these people are rare birds. Reading folk are a species we should not only preserve, but we should also look into how to increase their population.

Many people imagine they know what’s going on in the world from simply reading the headlines or watching vertical 60-second videos. A little scroll during a bathroom break is enough to form a strong opinion on the issue of the day.

Probably for the past two years, we here at Cybernews have noticed a tendency for pro-Nazi content to go viral. The internet went crazy after AI-translated Adolf Hitler speeches showed up online, with big tech platforms turning a blind eye to the content.

And Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok even praised Hitler as the best person to deal with vile anti-white hate.

Every article we’ve ever covered related to the Nazis has done relatively better than others in terms of readership and engagement. For example, just last week, our piece “Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed, went viral with hundreds of thousands of readers devouring it.

What happened was that an investigative journalist had infiltrated the white supremacist dating website WhiteDate and exfiltrated over 8,000 profiles and 100GB of data. Photos and other sensitive details have been made public.

“So it's ok to have black only sites, gay-only, trans-only, Jews have PayPal, but not white only.... sounds like prejudice to me. Whatever happened to personal preference being personal?” one comment online said.

Do you remember the member berries from South Park? While at first they uttered nostalgic innocent phrases like “member Chewbacca,” soon it became very political, reminiscing about the Reagan Era, remembering times when there “weren’t so many Mexicans.”

How far are we from watching Hitler videos for educational purposes to arguing for the segregation of people and deciding who’s worth it?

Just as cancer doesn’t grow where there’s no life, ideas don’t become popular in a vacuum. Simply amplifying a certain idea can give a wrong impression of how many people actually support it, and lead to rash actions against humanity and our shared values.

After asking the design team to craft me a picture for this newsletter, I went on Google to see if it’s actually OK to use the swastika symbol. To my disappointment, I discovered quite a few very recent examples, from California high schoolers forming a human swastika to a chocolate swastika appearing on a Jewish customer’s coffee.

If we’re taking lessons from the past, let’s at least take something good. And remember how many people sacrificed themselves to create the world we have today.

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