[Discussion] The Inconceivable Power of Trolls in Social Media

This is a follow-on to the nearly two year old topic "Trouble at the Kool-Aid Point." The intention is to provide a place to discuss the unreasonable power social media trolls have over women and minorities, with a primary focus on video games (though other examples are certainly welcome).

Demosthenes wrote:

So... you bought the game? Like... three years on and these morons STILL don't understand how this works.

Yeah, there's still some really basic disconnects over there.

Their frequent complete misunderstanding of how game development works would be funny if it didn't result in them harassing people.

It's darkly amusing to see that the proposal there against having choice is making choices.

Freyja wrote:

Sophie Labelle, the creator of Assigned Male, was doxxed, her work destroyed by /pol and neo-nazis for the horrible crime of being trans on the internet and making a webcomic.

That's horrific.

Trump-loving redditors have been flipping out over the Comey firing, the Russian intelligence, and the special investigator. They tried to make their Seth Rich hoax a "thing", but that didn't work and they've been catching flak for organizing harassment campaigns of reporters and other people.

I'm not sure what kind of conversation /r/The_Donald mods have had with reddit admins, but they're making threats about leaving to Voat, which they think will bankrupt reddit somehow... also Voat announced recently that they have run out of money and will close soon.

In the meantime, Trumplets are leaking out of T_D at their mods' request and spamming other subs with their typical pro-Trump/anti-Hillary nonsense.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

also Voat announced recently that they have run out of money and will close soon.

What, you mean acting as the dumping ground for banned subreddits isn't actually a viable business plan?

Yeah, it's amazing. Alt-right assholes don't want to pay for it and no one wants to advertise to alt-right assholes. *

*(With few exceptions)

/r/The_Donald's plan now seems to be actually getting banned from reddit on purpose. With that part, at least, I wish them luck.

Buzzfeed: The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan: In a few short weeks, "He Will Not Divide Us" went from celebrity-hyped exhibition to troll playground to dead. What happened tells us everything about the future of civic space and free speech in the age of the alt-right.

On January 30, 10 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the actor and artist Shia LaBeouf sent an aggrieved email to the American Civil Liberties Union. LaBeouf and two other artists, Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö, had recently debuted a piece at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Entitled "He Will Not Divide Us," the work consisted of a single security camera fixed to an exterior wall of the museum, above which was printed in four lines of bold black letters the name of the piece — a mantra that passersby were encouraged to chant into the camera. That camera fed a round-the-clock livestream video.

Perhaps most provocatively, as far as the alt-right is concerned, "He Will Not Divide Us" was participatory and livestreamed. Threads announcing the project appeared on 4chan’s /pol/ forum and other alt-right online communities within hours of the stream going live.

“The general reaction was this is going to be so fun to f*ck with,” said Kevin Adams, a 4chan poster who agreed to speak with BuzzFeed News on the condition that he be identified by his username on Discord, a chat app popular with the alt-right. And so, in a Discord group called Outer Heaven, co-moderated by Adams, 100-odd users began their round-the-clock campaign to f*ck with "He Will Not Divide Us," both in the comments section of the livestream and at the Museum of the Moving Image itself.

On the third day, a young man wearing a shirt, tie, and a gray cadet cap darted in front of the chanting crowd and, with his mouth nearly touching the camera, yelled “1488,” a white nationalist mantra. LaBoeuf screamed at him, and to the sh*tlords pulling hours-long shifts on Discord and the livestream, this was a precious reaction. Outer Heaven swelled with hundreds of new members.
"He Will Not Divide Us" revealed that our public cultural spaces are terrifyingly fragile when subjected to the norms of internet discourse. If the work’s legacy is forcing such places, which are central to the life of the nation, to develop methods of coping with these norms, is it such a leap to call the work important? To call it, well, a success?

Outer Heaven?

Jesus, these dickheads can't do anything without being complete dorks about it.

Hyetal wrote:

Outer Heaven?

Jesus, these dickheads can't do anything without being complete dorks about it.

Nor without choosing increasingly stupid, dorky references.

Outer Heaven fell when it overreached on spreading its influence and was responsible for many of its members being captured or killed.

These are the same dudes who named their misogynist movement after a metaphor for staying in the closet created by two trans women. Close reading of the source material is not a strong suit.

Freyja wrote:

These are the same dudes who named their misogynist movement after a metaphor for staying in the closet created by two trans women. Close reading of the source material is not a strong suit.

A narrative in which those who take the red pill are just as controlled by the system as those still in side it, no less... making their rebellion simply part of the plan.

IMAGE(https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2d0c5bd93a9d85ed278311bda87bc5c9)

Freyja wrote:

These are the same dudes who named their misogynist movement after a metaphor for staying in the closet created by two trans women. Close reading of the source material is not a strong suit.

And the same dudes who named one of their "ops" to go after a woman "azure orbs".

IMAGE(https://i.redditmedia.com/awGum0yWwPVztJNYFxHBFQOGE7QEWnT0wZZ2RzSvOoQ.jpg?w=618&s=9c5801e4d446a84e8a715707e02750be)

Yes, the special rules were imposed only to marginalize those anti-establishment heroes.

Or maybe the rules were imposed because they are flaming dingleberry douche nozzle poo flinging knuckle draggers.

At any rate, it's good to see reddit continuing to drive the miscreants underground.

And of course they're spilling out into all other subs again, acting like this was something done to them instead of something they did to themselves. Lots of whining about free speech... oh, did I mention that the The_Donald banned me despite never posting there? The mods were angry that I was discussing in a different sub how The_Donald mods fell for a fake presidential poll.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

did I mention that the The_Donald banned me despite never posting there? The mods were angry that I was discussing in a different sub how The_Donald mods fell for a fake presidential poll.

What kind of psychosis makes someone search other subreddits looking for mentions?

Hiding in plain sight: how the 'alt-right' is weaponizing irony to spread fascism

“Are they actually bigots?”, Yiannopoulos asked rhetorically. “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”

Of course Milo is lying here and he knows it. After all, he's a bigot himself.

What Yiannopoulos left out, according to Marwick, is that these spaces increasingly became attractive to sincere white supremacists. They offered them venues for recruitment, and new methods for popularising their ideas.

And what the article leaves out is the response of alt-righters to Milo: they are bigots and they don't much care for Milo either.

“Every time you see a viral video of somebody shouting down a person of Muslim descent in a supermarket line, what you’re seeing are the effects of an environment where it’s increasingly normal, increasingly accepted and expected to speak in this register, whether or not that started out as a joke.”

Whether or not the racism on 4chan's /pol/ started out as a joke or not, it has signaled that it is a safe space for bigots and hatred. Naturally they have flocked there in response. The same goes for The_Donald and every other similar discussion area: if you normalize bigotry, you will end up packed with bigots.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”"

Guess which videogame-based ideological hate group is in the news again?

A GG supporter is making a videogame about fighting against "oppressive feminists", which was shown at E3.

Notch also decided to get involved.

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCFtwtZV0AEcZti.jpg)

Wait, shown AT E3 with like, a booth and everything? wtf? Is there a source for this?

I see Notch is still playing the bitter, angry billionaire with no friends angle.

pyxistyx wrote:

Wait, shown AT E3 with like, a booth and everything? wtf? Is there a source for this?

It was shown during the Microsoft press conference. Microsoft picked it to be an Xbox Console Launch Exclusive.

He's talking about The Last Night. The dev supported GG.

The flipside is the dev saying this:

garion333 wrote:

He's talking about The Last Night. The dev supported GG.

I didn't want to mention it by name, since my original focus was on the full-court-press harassment that sprang up last night. And I didn't want to focus on the developer, since he didn't appear to be involved in the harassment. But I guess more context is better, and I maybe should have spelled it out explicitly.

If the developer has changed, and his game no longer reflects his past views, then I fully support his new leaf...but I'm going to wait to see evidence.

Gremlin wrote:

If the developer has changed, and his game no longer reflects his past views, then I fully support his new leaf...but I'm going to wait to see evidence.

This, from two months ago, does not make me hopeful:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCFD-7iVoAA4XbG.jpg)

And I've yet to meet anyone who was all about GG back then who isn't still a complete jackass today, even if they have abandoned the "cause".

Raw Fury (the games publisher) posted this response which basically says his old GG tweets were poor and naive and that Tim Soret didn't come off like that while they were working with him.
But this has links to many more recent tweets that indicate he's still raging against straw-feminism personally, if not professionally.

Oh, THAT game. Damn that's a shame - had a nice graphical style to it. OH WELL.

I'm less concerned about his views (which would only affect whether I bought the game) and more concerned about the harassment that's bubbled to the surface as harassers are using this as an excuse to attack people who pointed this out (plus retargeting Zoe Quinn and other past targets). With the added loveliness that Breitbart has chosen to jump in on it.

With the added loveliness that Breitbart has chosen to jump in on it.

I mean, that's not really added, so much as just a return to the old normal. That is where Milo found the fame he so desperately craved and helped deliver a bunch of angry men right into the alt-right's waiting arms.