[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).

Gremlin wrote:

Part of this is not really knowing what postmodernism is.

It's Monday through Thursday, at 11:30 PM

An avalanche of hate: How a Montana mom became the target of a neo-Nazi troll storm

By "troll storm" they really mean a constant barrage of violent threats against her and her family.

Previously, Cheong had been editor-in-chief of Gameranx, a third-tier gaming news website that remains active in spite of unbelievably bad web design. (Seriously, look at it.) In 2014, Gameranx was decidedly opposed to the Gamergate movement and published numerous articles about the death threats and harassment experienced by its targets. Cheong himself was one of Gamergate’s most prominent critics, and his strident articles and tweets at the time drew frequent ire from right-wing gamers. He sparred with Milo Yiannopoulos, the unofficial head of the movement, and at one point called him out specifically for mocking trigger warnings. Cheong’s anti-Gamergate advocacy made him one of the most maligned people on the internet. Then, a few months later, Cheong softened his stance. Despite having previously tweeted about Gamergate more than 300 times, he tweeted that it was “a little sad seeing some people just tweet incessantly about how much they hate GamerGate.” His politics moved steadily rightward until they became a mirror image of his old views — where he once accused Yiannopoulos of personally harassing him, he now accused Yiannopoulos’s critics of censorship. This change of heart endeared him to Heat Street’s management, and they hired him in July 2016 as their resident critic of SJWs in the game industry.

THAT is the part that still confuses me to this day. What the hell happened to Cheong? He jused to joke with Arthur Chu about how GGers were too stupid to tell the two of them apart. GGers used to call him a rape apologist for not reporting a rape reported to him by the victim after she told him she didn't want to report it to the police.

And somehow, through some means that still don't make sense... he completely flipped and seeks the approval of those that sent him death threats a year prior. What the absolute fuuuuuuuuu...

Robear wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

And I've stopped taking people seriously when they see the ghost of postmodernism looming behind everything. But that's another discussion.

One that is worth having. As a student of philosophy of science and related topics - thinking that relates directly to how we understand the world in a very real way - it's my opinion that Postmodernism has diverted far too much brainpower into actively working to tear down the way we know the world and share it with each other. And social movements that look to turn people away from egalitarianism and opportunity to exclusion and servitude make use of it to disrupt, disturb and ultimately work to destroy the underpinnings of a cooperative world, by removing the idea that we can know anything at all about the world and the way it works. They replace that with their own internally derived worldviews which are crucially disconnected from the consensual understanding in ways that benefit them where they wish it to.

It's hard to underestimate the damage of this ultimately anti-intellectual breed of intellectualism over the last 60 years or so. And I firmly believe that the "skepticism" and nihilism and self-centeredness of the modern PUA or Men's Rights Activist or "Climate skeptic" or "State's Rights" advocate or modern "screw you, I got mine" fake libertarian (and many other movements) owe a great deal to the justification of subjectivity over objectivity that comes with Postmodernism as a cultural influence.

I would love to read that discussion. Not sure how much I could participate it. I think I would be out of my depth, but that's part of what got me interested yesterday. I didn't know that postmodernism was a dirty word and why. But it was apparent that there was a throughline there.

Demosthenes wrote:
Previously, Cheong had been editor-in-chief of Gameranx, a third-tier gaming news website that remains active in spite of unbelievably bad web design. (Seriously, look at it.) In 2014, Gameranx was decidedly opposed to the Gamergate movement and published numerous articles about the death threats and harassment experienced by its targets. Cheong himself was one of Gamergate’s most prominent critics, and his strident articles and tweets at the time drew frequent ire from right-wing gamers. He sparred with Milo Yiannopoulos, the unofficial head of the movement, and at one point called him out specifically for mocking trigger warnings. Cheong’s anti-Gamergate advocacy made him one of the most maligned people on the internet. Then, a few months later, Cheong softened his stance. Despite having previously tweeted about Gamergate more than 300 times, he tweeted that it was “a little sad seeing some people just tweet incessantly about how much they hate GamerGate.” His politics moved steadily rightward until they became a mirror image of his old views — where he once accused Yiannopoulos of personally harassing him, he now accused Yiannopoulos’s critics of censorship. This change of heart endeared him to Heat Street’s management, and they hired him in July 2016 as their resident critic of SJWs in the game industry.

THAT is the part that still confuses me to this day. What the hell happened to Cheong? He jused to joke with Arthur Chu about how GGers were too stupid to tell the two of them apart. GGers used to call him a rape apologist for not reporting a rape reported to him by the victim after she told him she didn't want to report it to the police.

And somehow, through some means that still don't make sense... he completely flipped and seeks the approval of those that sent him death threats a year prior. What the absolute fuuuuuuuuu...

Formicaries don't pay for themselves.

Me, on reading the article: Heat Street...which one were they again? Oh. Louise Mensch. It all makes sense.

Having some insight into how both sides of the spectrum think, I'm continuously disappointed by how bad the mocking imitations of the supposed outrages of the other side are.

Robear wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

And I've stopped taking people seriously when they see the ghost of postmodernism looming behind everything. But that's another discussion.

One that is worth having. As a student of philosophy of science and related topics - thinking that relates directly to how we understand the world in a very real way - it's my opinion that Postmodernism has diverted far too much brainpower into actively working to tear down the way we know the world and share it with each other. And social movements that look to turn people away from egalitarianism and opportunity to exclusion and servitude make use of it to disrupt, disturb and ultimately work to destroy the underpinnings of a cooperative world, by removing the idea that we can know anything at all about the world and the way it works. They replace that with their own internally derived worldviews which are crucially disconnected from the consensual understanding in ways that benefit them where they wish it to.

It's hard to underestimate the damage of this ultimately anti-intellectual breed of intellectualism over the last 60 years or so. And I firmly believe that the "skepticism" and nihilism and self-centeredness of the modern PUA or Men's Rights Activist or "Climate skeptic" or "State's Rights" advocate or modern "screw you, I got mine" fake libertarian (and many other movements) owe a great deal to the justification of subjectivity over objectivity that comes with Postmodernism as a cultural influence.

This is exactly the problem I have with postmodernism. As Asimov once said: "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" That, to me, sums up postmodernism in a nutshell.

Demosthenes wrote:

THAT is the part that still confuses me to this day. What the hell happened to Cheong? He jused to joke with Arthur Chu about how GGers were too stupid to tell the two of them apart. GGers used to call him a rape apologist for not reporting a rape reported to him by the victim after she told him she didn't want to report it to the police.

And somehow, through some means that still don't make sense... he completely flipped and seeks the approval of those that sent him death threats a year prior. What the absolute fuuuuuuuuu...

He was red-pilled when a review of The Witcher asked why there were no brown people in the whole game.

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like. I understand completely why allies are distrusted by women and Poc, especially Black people.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like. I understand completely why allies are distrusted by women and Poc, especially Black people.

Yep, everything is a-ok as long as we are cooperative and go along with what these allies want and their opinions/points-of-view, but the moment we deviate, there are the usual problems, and they often don't even recognize if/when they are doing it.

(Obligatory disclaimer "not all allies", etc.)

MrDeVil909 wrote:

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like.

That's just humanity in general.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like.

That's just humanity in general.

Truth. But I expect better from leftists. We should be able to take a challenge to our perspective, it's kind of a central principle of liberalism.

bekkilyn wrote:

(Obligatory disclaimer "not all allies", etc.)

Over the last couple of years I've come down on the side of Feminista Jones. She argues that there isn't really such a thing as an ally. And while I bristle at this myself because I consider myself an ally, I can't actually argue with it because I've seen this happen so many times. It's why I don't generally call myself one, because it also centres me when it's about the people I want to help.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like.

That's just humanity in general.

Truth. But I expect better from leftists.

I don't. Not anymore.

We should be able to take a challenge to our perspective, it's kind of a central principle of liberalism.

The devil has enough advocates.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The devil has enough advocates.

Careful, that much iron can supernova a star!

Dr.Ghastly wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The devil has enough advocates.

Careful, that much iron can supernova a star!

Mr. Stross is never bringing back the Timelike Diplomacy universe. We all just better get used to it. :`(

cheeze_pavilion wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The devil has enough advocates.

Careful, that much iron can supernova a star!

Mr. Stross is never bringing back the Timelike Diplomacy universe. We all just better get used to it. :`(

Neptune's Brood almost makes up for it, though.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

THAT is the part that still confuses me to this day. What the hell happened to Cheong? He jused to joke with Arthur Chu about how GGers were too stupid to tell the two of them apart. GGers used to call him a rape apologist for not reporting a rape reported to him by the victim after she told him she didn't want to report it to the police.

And somehow, through some means that still don't make sense... he completely flipped and seeks the approval of those that sent him death threats a year prior. What the absolute fuuuuuuuuu...

He was red-pilled when a review of The Witcher asked why there were no brown people in the whole game.

It's amazing how often self-styled SJW guys switch sides as soon as they are faced with something they don't like. I understand completely why allies are distrusted by women and Poc, especially Black people.

Ummm... what?

Wait... seriously?

Oh god, I didn't want to know the answer, my brain hurts so much right now.

My gut feeling is that Cheong cynically saw it as an opportunity to end harassment against him by switching teams.

https://m.mic.com/articles/180888/er...

A decent stab at making sure people understand that the harassment and general awfulness of "gamers" started well before GamerGate.

Let's face it though anyone old enough who was going "online" remembers awful comments back in the Compuserve and Delphi days.

TheGameguru wrote:

https://m.mic.com/articles/180888/er...

A decent stab at making sure people understand that the harassment and general awfulness of "gamers" started well before GamerGate.

Let's face it though anyone old enough who was going "online" remembers awful comments back in the Compuserve and Delphi days.

A bit later, but it was really terrible in Ultima Online. I was shocked by the vile behavior of so many of the players and super duper glad that I kept the fact that I was female in real life to myself (even friends didn't know) and played male main characters. It was bad enough being male in that environment. Had a lot of fun times despite all the badness, so played for a long time, but it opened my eyes to what human beings would naturally behave like in a world without any real rules, morals, or government. I wouldn't want to live in such a world. It took me quite a long time to "come out" as a female online.

Back in the early and mid-80's, it was a truism that when the students went home for the summer, or for holiday breaks, and thus most of them lost their Usenet access, the quality of discussion groups skyrocketed. By the mid-90's, as anyone could get access year round, the intellectual rot set in hard. As a result, I honestly have always pictured passive-aggressive, well to do entitled young white males as the biggest threat to the civility of the Internet. Although I have to say that the wave of semi-organized "people on crusades", each with their own agenda and bullhorns, has served to add to the baseline noise that testosterone and anonymity have gifted us online.

Here's a brief overview of the harassment and abuse Sophie Labelle received a couple of months ago.

The 28-year-old Canadian comic creator tells The Advocate there was a coordinated attack on her Facebook page, which made it crash. That forced her to remove it, and someone used the opportunity to create a fake page posting neo-Nazi hate speech, including suggesting Labelle should be sent to a concentration camp or gas chamber.

“This is what you get for being trans on the internet and for reframing transness into something positive and empowering,” Labelle posted at the time.

Unfortunately, that responsiveness may have intensified the recent attack. After “one of the biggest groups was shut down by Facebook,” Labelle says, “they decided to put the blame on me, and that’s why they hacked into my website and doxxed me by publishing my address and stuff.”

She says she’s been receiving death threats, “extensively for three years.” But the recent ones were more “vicious and violent.” Labelle was also stunned by the sheer volume: “We’re talking about thousands of people ... I got more than 20,000 messages.” The hate comes via emails, social media comments, instant messenger, and even her Etsy store.

Labelle hasn’t reported the latest attack to law enforcement in part because, she wrote, “Anytime I have dealt with police, I ended up being a victim of their transphobia.” In addition, she says, “Reporting harassment and doxxing is a temporary solution.”

Labelle just wants to get back to drawing comics. But now she’s worried about her fans because, she says, “They’ve started harassing my readers. They made a whole page committed to post[ing] profile pictures of my readers. They’ve been sending messages to my readers — especially parents of trans kids … and it can be so violent.”

I will never understand why laws tolerate online things that would never be tolerated in meatspace.

BadKen wrote:

I will never understand why laws tolerate online things that would never be tolerated in meatspace.

Because you—the victim—can just stop going online, and then everything will be fine (according to the police).

Gravey wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I will never understand why laws tolerate online things that would never be tolerated in meatspace.

Because you—the victim—can just stop going online, and then everything will be fine (according to the police).

Yeah.

If this abuse was sent through the mail or glued to your front window I'd hope that the police have a better response. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Other reasons:
- It can be hard to track down who is doing something or where harassment is coming from. The police often don't have the resources to deal with it even in cases like swatting that waste police resources.

- The belief that internet isn't a real place. The internet is both more and less exotic than we pretend: less because it's really just humans talking to each other, more because the stuff we do here sticks around and spreads in weird ways that we don't really grasp. We're still oriented to behave like we're still living in small, private communities, but the internet is a giant glass house. I have no idea who will read these words.

- Online harassment can be crowdsourced. A common pattern in these hate-mobs is that an individual harasser will attack for a little bit and then wander away...but the instigator is still driving traffic at the target so this gets repeated over and over again with new attackers.

- Most of these hate mobs just use words and images. Don't get me wrong: those cause harm by themselves. The emotional damage can be bad enough, plus it's frequent for harassers to attack the victim's career or reputation. But the tiny minority of attackers who escalate to physical violence are unpredictable until they strike: sure 99% of those death threats are idle, hurtful words...but they gain their extra power from the 1% of the attackers who have the wherewithal to put it into action. Since it's impossible to know for sure until they show up in person and pull out a gun, it's hard to do something about it.

- A lot of these mobs are built around punishing people they perceive as having transgressed the community's morals/norms/tribal unity. They feed off the sexism, racism, and transphobia, and they use that to both isolate their victims and get the authorities to turn a blind eye.

Gremlin wrote:

- Most of these hate mobs just use words and images. Don't get me wrong: those cause harm by themselves. The emotional damage can be bad enough, plus it's frequent for harassers to attack the victim's career or reputation. But the tiny minority of attackers who escalate to physical violence are unpredictable until they strike: sure 99% of those death threats are idle, hurtful words...but they gain their extra power from the 1% of the attackers who have the wherewithal to put it into action. Since it's impossible to know for sure until they show up in person and pull out a gun, it's hard to do something about it.

This is what bothers me the most. Normal people would not tolerate this in person. If a decent person saw that kind of behavior in public, they'd act. The online services that give those people a platform are aiding in their abuse. I realize it is a very hard technical problem, but that doesn't matter. Someone with the money to do the R&D should pay a bunch of very smart people to figure it out.

I have no idea what a solution would look like. I am just so frustrated by what so many malcontents get away with. I stopped using Twitter years ago, and deleted my Facebook account even before that, and I have never even been a target of that kind of abuse.

A company that could provide an abuse-free social media platform might be very successful. It's unfortunate that the cost of competing has become astronomical.

And that, BadKen, is why I love this place, so f*cking much....

:fistbump:

BadKen wrote:

This is what bothers me the most. Normal people would not tolerate this in person. If a decent person saw that kind of behavior in public, they'd act. The online services that give those people a platform are aiding in their abuse. I realize it is a very hard technical problem, but that doesn't matter. Someone with the money to do the R&D should pay a bunch of very smart people to figure it out.

I disagree. Look at the actions of anti-abortion protesters with the signs and stuff they yell.

And, you (USAnians) accept it because "Free Speech".

mudbunny wrote:
BadKen wrote:

This is what bothers me the most. Normal people would not tolerate this in person. If a decent person saw that kind of behavior in public, they'd act. The online services that give those people a platform are aiding in their abuse. I realize it is a very hard technical problem, but that doesn't matter. Someone with the money to do the R&D should pay a bunch of very smart people to figure it out.

I disagree. Look at the actions of anti-abortion protesters with the signs and stuff they yell.

And, you (USAnians) accept it because "Free Speech".

That's a really good example, because in many cases, volunteers step up and protect women who are visiting clinics that are targets of those kinds of protests. They may be exposed to some vile images and shouting, but they have someone physically on their side the whole time.

Nobody can even do that online because there is no mechanism in place for them to do so. There is no way to shield someone from online abuse.

BadKen wrote:

Nobody can even do that online because there is no mechanism in place for them to do so. There is no way to shield someone from online abuse.

Well, there are a few ways we know work: active moderation, for example. It's far from perfect, but it's been demonstrated to significantly cut down on abuse. Of course, some of that gets displaced to other channels, so it's sometimes only displacing the problem--but even that is more than most social networks allow.

I'm wary of pure technological solutions, since the worst parts of human nature are perfectly capable of gaming the system. But Twitter (and Facebook and so on) could significantly cut down on the abuse that gets spread through the service by giving users better tools. Twitter has an incentive to have abuse threads blow up--it makes their numbers look better. Look, engagement!

But they could, instead, do things like allow a user (or group of users) to appoint a trusted moderator, give users better blocking tools, and so on. Even a simple thing like letting you blocking messages from people you don't follow. (I think they actually added that one recently, though it's a bit too little too late.) It won't solve the whole problem--the culture on the site has rot in it, and the very viral nature of the system makes it hard for them to ever weed it out. But they could be doing a lot better.

You'll note that the character assassination that was Gamergate's origin point got ignored and pushed off most sites with moderators until it landed on 4chan--and then got booted from there in one of the rare instances of moderation on that site. It didn't help that there was already a fertile ground for sexist hate in the gaming culture, but most places with moderators rightfully quashed it.

Of course, that didn't help in the end, did it? The whole thing still blew up and goes on to this day. So there's nothing a single site can do to solve the problem. Still, not being a vector for further infection is a good thing, even if it is limited.