[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).

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Most of The Great Awakening was like this anyway. Lots of talk of God and "Luciferians" and how various things in the "MSM" were parts of Satanic rituals. For instance, the McCain funeral was apparently one big Satanic rite that most of the people there were involved in.

You've got to hand it to Satan, he's spectacularly sh*t at his job. So many chances, all of them blown.

Oh i dunno, what better way for the devil to taunt Christians by waving their beloved biblical apocalypse in front of their face then pulling it away at the last minute and going "psych!"

Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube

New Data & Society report Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube by Researcher Rebecca Lewis presents data from approximately 65 political influencers across 81 channels to identify the “Alternative Influence Network (AIN)”; an alternative media system that adopts the techniques of brand influencers to build audiences and “sell” them political ideology.

Alternative Influence offers insights into the connection between influence, amplification, monetization, and radicalization at a time when platform companies struggle to handle policies and standards for extremist influencers. The network of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities that Lewis identifies leverages YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism.

Notably, YouTube is a principal online news source for young people.1 Which is why it is concerning that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, has become the single most important hub by which an extensive network of far-right influencers profit from broadcasting propaganda to young viewers.

“Social networking between influencers makes it easy for audience members to be incrementally exposed to, and come to trust, ever more extremist political positions,” writes Lewis, who outlines how YouTube incentivizes their behavior. Lewis illustrates common techniques that these far-right influencers use to make money as they cultivate alternative social identities and use production value to increase their appeal as countercultural social underdogs. The report offers a data visualization of this network to show how connected influencers act as a conduit for viewership.

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

People are finally beginning to understand what other people I've posted in this thread have been saying for a months, hell, years now. YouTube, via its algorithms, has basically built a gigantic radicalization engine (on multiple subjects, no less).

The issue for YouTube, I think, is that this problem is pretty much out of their control now. What makes YouTube YouTube is that there's no door to entry, meaning hundreds of hours of content are being uploaded every second. there is no way to effectively moderate that, especially considering that many bad actors on the site are more than smart enough to upload material that skirts around the ToS without actually violating it (see the entire YouTube Kids' fiasco from last year that only got fixed because journalists pointed it out). And they won't change their algorithms much, because all of this sh*t gets clicks, and that's their business model.

Basically, they've built Frankenstein's monster. Which leads me to a quote from an article I wanted to post:

Bridle argues that the Enlightenment-era equation of knowledge and power has collapsed under the sheer tonnage of information—data, news, opinion, political spectacle, fact, falsehood—mobilized by contemporary technology. Not only is knowledge no longer power, it isn’t even really knowledge anymore. It is a strange fact, verifiable by people still living, that the Internet was once thought of as a grand superstructure by which all of us would be elevated to a state of technological enlightenment. This is not how things have panned out. Here’s how Bridle puts it:
We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

From The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media.

Lastly, I logged into FB today, and saw a animation with a bunch of people painting a Dove and this text underneath:

Building Peace Together

Communities can make good things happen all over the world. Join all of us at Facebook today in hoping that kindness will lead the way.

I was genuinely surprised at how angry it made me. "Hoping that kindness will lead the way," when they are directly contributing to this morass.

Man am I pessimistic about the future.

Tying into that, lately, I've been reading Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble. I'm not completely thrilled with the way that it's written, but it digs deep into the questions of how search algorithms (and by extension, other algorithmically-driven content like YouTube or Amazon) reinforce stereotypes and prejudice by their very nature, as well as how our culture has collectively ceded authority on knowledge and authenticity to for-profit companies that have no incentive to promote those things.

....as well as how our culture has collectively ceded authority on knowledge and authenticity to for-profit companies that have no incentive to promote those things.

While continually pretending to care about those things. Which is also incredibly annoying.

So Charlie Warzel has quickly become one of my favorite follows for navigating the entire clusterf*ck we currently exist in, and he has a great weekly newsletter that I'm subscribed to.

This week's was great, especially in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh hearings and the bifurcated realities that have come to define American politics:

Last February I asked MIT researcher Aviv Ovadya what kept him up at night. He described a dystopian future of information warfare in which technological advances irreparably blurred the lines between fact and fiction. “What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did” he asked. Then he told me about "reality apathy," a term he'd coined to describe what happens when people confronted by an endless barrage of sophisticated misinformation become too exhausted to vet it and simply disengage. Why bother when, to borrow a phrase, nothing is true and everything is possible?

This isn’t exactly new but I think the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings provide a decent case study.

It’s hard to imagine a more fertile environment for information warfare than the Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. His nomination is a highly divisive partisan process that intersected with the #MeToo movement, occurring at a moment of extraordinary cultural upheaval. The stakes are high.And then there’s the issue of Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence, which, regardless of one’s personal take on what happened, has bifurcated the senate and the nation: you either believe the testimony of Dr. Ford and other accusers or you believe Brett Kavanugh’s numerous denials. Already, both sides feel as if they have claim over the truth.

Mixed in with the allegations, the political attacks, and bogus smears were murkier issues:the nature and fidelity of memory over time, the effects of trauma on the brain, varying definitions of slang. We all saw how this played out — a hellish, painful week of speculation, gaslighting and information warfare. But the best example of Ovadya’s dystopia came on Wednesday night, when suddenly a flurry of new accusations against Kavanaugh appeared. There was an NBC News report of an alleged 1998 assault from an anonymous accuser which quickly went viral. Not long after, a Senate Judiciary Committee transcript made the rounds with another — at that point unsubstantiated (and seemingly less credible than the NBC report) — accusation of a sexual assault on a boat in Rhode Island.

The new accusations were met with immediate skepticism from reporters and Kavanaugh supporters both. Unlike past accusations these were anonymous and appeared unvetted. Pro-Trump media pundits like Mike Cernovich immediately called bullsh*t. He also claimed he’d predicted that flimsy accusations against Kavanaugh would appear on a major news outlet and used the NBC report to paint the media as reckless, casting doubt on all its Kavanaugh reporting.

But some Democrats called bullsh*t as well. Reports began to surface that Democratic staffers worried these new and totally anonymous accusations might have been planted by those with a vested interest in confirming Kavanaugh. Their reasoning: by seeding the media with less credible accusations, they’d undermine more credible accusations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who’d agreed to testify before the judiciary.

What played out — intended or not — felt like a reality apathy moment. Kavanaugh supporters slammed a reckless media falling for the dirty tricks of those looking to derail the nomination. Meanwhile opponents of Kavanaugh’s appointment wondered if his supporters might have been responsible for an anonymous accusation that was quickly weaponized against them.

The pattern is familiar: the truth — whatever it may be — is distorted and manipulated and then refuted by the other side. Both sides retreat certain they’ve won. And those trying to make reasonable sense of the real truth of the matter — the (I can’t believe I’m writing this) TRUE truth — are left to walk an informational minefield that their own emotions have likely made very difficult to navigate. Two universes, each with their own reality, and those caught between left with a question: try to make sense of it all, or disengage.

The two universes concept is popular among a number of pro-Trump media personalities. Cernovich and Dilbert creator turned Trump mindset guru Scott Adams frequently discuss the malleable nature of reality and truth. The subhead of Adams’ book, Win Bigly, is “Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter;” Is jacket copy argues, “The point isn’t whether Trump was right or wrong, good or bad.” Cernovich, meanwhile has waxed poetic about memory and truth, and the idea we’re living in a simulation. It’s a clever tactic that plays well with the pro-Trump media audience, which is often distrustful of the mainstream media and its sometimes overly self-serious “Democracy Dies In Darkness” pronouncements. The claim that reality is a construct is a tactic the pro-Trump media uses to gain trust (‘hey, I don’t have all the answers, but at least I’m willing to admit it, unlike the fake news!’). But it’s also a great way to excuse propogating conspiracy theories and dodging blame if/when they’re disproved. It’s a great way to blur the lines and keep them blurred.

And if recent history is any example, it’s going to keep happening. Especially as technology advances in ways that help undergird the idea that anything and everything can be faked. Donald Trump did it in late 2017 when he attempted to refute his earlier admission that it was his voice on the Access Hollywood tape. And this summer — just before his ban from Twitter — Alex Jones used a similar tactic when he suggested that photoshop audio advancements might be responsible for an alleged tape of Donald Trump using racial slurs — should such a tape exist.

CODA:

The whole thing reminds me a bit of this interesting article from the summer which revisits a a 1984 interview given by a KGB defector. I’ll just quote the article (emphasis, theirs):

“His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and ‘demoralization’. It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.”

The defector — whose name is Alexandrovich Bezmenov — continues:

“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Here’s how the defector describes demoralization:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Big caveat here: By noting this article I don’t mean to suggest that Russia or any foreign government might be juicing the political and cultural discord around the Kavanaugh appointment. My point is only to note just how much Bezmenov’s descriptions of demoralization sound like American political rhetoric in 2018. It’s eerie how familiar it feels.

The whole article is worth a read, if only to get a glimpse of what the potential future effects of information warfare look like. Demoralization, after all, is simply Bezmenov’s first of four phases. After that is “destabilization,” “crisis,” and, “eventually,” “normalization.”

Safe to say we’re not there quite yet.

I'm not fond of prominent New Atheist Sam Harris, but I will absolutely agree with something I glimpsed him saying on some TV show a while ago, which is that this entire age of social media is basically the biggest social psychology experiment ever and we've all been drafted into it and no-one can get out.

Prederick wrote:

I'm not fond of prominent New Atheist Sam Harris, but I will absolutely agree with something I glimpsed him saying on some TV show a while ago, which is that this entire age of social media is basically the biggest social psychology experiment ever and we've all been drafted into it and no-one can get out.

Even bigots can be right sometimes, that's part of their power.

I think it's more likely she was reported by trolls who thought her tweet reminding people that STEM fields are not naturally masculine was misandry (not naive people thinking it denigrated women as she supposes), and Twitter's reporting system just sucks at making sure it's being used honestly.

Either way, whether it was an automation snafu or she was a troll victim, Twitter is still clueless when it comes to dealing with abuse. While reviewing her suspension appeal, it would have taken a literate person two seconds to realize she wasn't doing anything wrong. Twitter's highly trained customer service molluscs lack the higher brain function to recognize a situation like this and act accordingly.

Mark Judge, Friend-of-Judge-Kavanaugh-and-prime-witness...was also peripherally involved in GamerGate.
IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoclCbaW4AEgr-m.jpg)

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Also, 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds. First they influence our political process, then opinions about movies. What next? Are the Russians going to try to convince us that the Raiders trading Khalil Mack to Chicago was actually a genius move?

Rat Boy wrote:

Also, 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds. First they influence our political process, then opinions about movies. What next? Are the Russians going to try to convince us that the Raiders trading Khalil Mack to Chicago was actually a genius move?

Possibly my favourite thing has been the study's author responding to trolls trying to pick fights. Every time someone wants to argue he says something along the lines of 'The data is easy to gather, I look forward to your findings.'

These brain geniuses don't know what a study is.

Gremlin wrote:

Mark Judge, Friend-of-Judge-Kavanaugh-and-prime-witness...was also peripherally involved in GamerGate.

...

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Never heard of this Acculturated before, but it's definitely sh*t. They actually use "Social Justice Warriors" in headlines.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Mark Judge, Friend-of-Judge-Kavanaugh-and-prime-witness...was also peripherally involved in GamerGate.

...

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Never heard of this Acculturated before, but it's definitely sh*t. They actually use "Social Justice Warriors" in headlines.

I mean, they publish positive articles about GamerGate, so it is about what you'd expect in terms of quality.

Gremlin wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Mark Judge, Friend-of-Judge-Kavanaugh-and-prime-witness...was also peripherally involved in GamerGate.

...

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Never heard of this Acculturated before, but it's definitely sh*t. They actually use "Social Justice Warriors" in headlines.

I mean, they publish positive articles about GamerGate, so it is about what you'd expect in terms of quality.

I'm looking forward to Russ Pitts buying them in a few years, then.

They are who we thought they were.

I think YouTube and Twitter are complicit in that firing. He admitted he was no angel online, but have you seen some of the vile garbage directed at him, still out there rotting on social media?

I don't get the "you have to be nice to all customers even the ones sending you death threats" meta these media companies are pushing.

This is a real shame. I’ve signed up for Chuck’s newsletter and find his take on fiction writing and humor incredibly refreshing. Sadly, I think majorly traded companies like Disney just want to avoid any problems with stock prices.

karmajay wrote:

I don't get the "you have to be nice to all customers even the ones sending you death threats" meta these media companies are pushing.

That's because that's not the meta in play.

"You have to be nice to shareholders, even the ones sending you death threats" is what's happening. These aren't decisions coming out of the customer service department, they're decisions coming from top executives and board members

That's probably a lot of it. Could be worth keeping in mind that there is a decent chance most of anyone's upper management are Trump supporters. I know that my boss is pretty conservative, pretty sure his boss is, and I know that his boss is. And you probably don't even need the missing gendered pronoun on that last boss to know it was also a male.

Yonder wrote:

That's probably a lot of it. Could be worth keeping in mind that there is a decent chance most of anyone's upper management are Trump supporters. I know that my boss is pretty conservative, pretty sure his boss is, and I know that his boss is. And you probably don't even need the missing gendered pronoun on that last boss to know it was also a male.

Yeah, I think most of corporate America is pretty staunchly pro-Trump at the higher levels. Like you, my boss is a Trump supporter, his boss is a very outspoken Trump supporter, and that continues upward. Comments by our previous CEO hinted strongly that he preferred Republican economic policies (shocking). And going further, my building's management has OAN, and nothing else, playing on all the TV monitors in the halls and cafeteria throughout the workday. It's great, eating lunch and seeing a headine on the TV at my workplace about how liberals are plotting something nefarious, then later hearing my boss's boss and a coworker fervently agree what a refreshing, balanced channel that is.

That said, I'm not sure how any of this jives with all the studies indicating that college-educated people are more likely to be Democrat, unless most of the college-educated Democrats didn't go on to be mid- and upper-level management.

Mormech wrote:

That said, I'm not sure how any of this jives with all the studies indicating that college-educated people are more likely to be Democrat, unless most of the college-educated Democrats didn't go on to be mid- and upper-level management.

Statistically, that checks out.

The Facebook cleaners: 'I've seen hundreds of beheadings'

Social media platforms pay armies of moderators to remove offensive content, so you're not exposed to violence and other upsetting material.

The Cleaners, a documentary, looks at the toll this takes on a group of outsourced workers in the Philippines.

It is amazing to see Facebook (and especially YouTube) reckon with the reality that they've basically built Frankenstein's monster. Moderation is a constant game of catch-up, the algorithms are easily evaded, and doing the actual work of moderation is literally damaging to your mental health.

Gab (the alt-right gamergate-refuge Twitter replacement) has been banned by Paypal, for unstated-but-probably-related-to-the-recent-mass-murderer reasons, since the shooter had posted his threats on Gab.

Twitter itself is getting nervous, since the mail bomber had been reported to them weeks ago because he was making threats to Rochelle Ritchie and Twitter did nothing.

Gab is the Twitter for the worst of humanity. The sooner it goes out of business, the better.

The world would be better off if Twitter followed.

I hopped on Gab last night and it's surprising not because "free speech" is interpreted so uncleverly to justify hate speech* and racism** but that the adherents to that interpretation exist with such dissonance. They at once claim that all speech should be free and then take offense when someone else's speech impugns theirs. It's not new, of course; it's another flavor of the way in which, for instance, the far-right's sensibilities are so tender yet they hurl "snowflake", etc.

Gab user * wrote:

Gab is more than “Hate Speech”. For one thing, there is no such thing as hate speech. It is a figment of emotion-driven leftist intolerance.

Gab user ** wrote:

there is no such thing as “racism” it was just a word invented to stifle certain speech. everyone and everything has a natural in group preference, we love our own family more than the neighbours but that dosnt mean we have to hate the neighbours

@broderick wrote:

Bolsonaro's win in Brazil tonight marks the end of the first Facebook elections. Here's a piece I've been working on for almost four years new:

Here’s How A Handful Of American Tech Companies Radicalized The World

In the last 4 years, I’ve been to 22 countries, 6 continents, and been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections.

Three things are now very clear to:

1) A handful of American companies, Facebook and Google more than any other, have altered the fundamental nature of almost every major democracy on Earth.

In most of these elections, far-right populism has made huge strides.

2) The misinformation, abuse, and radicalization created by these companies seems to affect poorer people and countries more heavily.

These companies replace local community networks, local media, local political networks and create easily exploitable, unmoderated news ones.

3) It is going to get worse and more connected.

It is getting more mobile. It is having more physical real-world effects. Apps like WhatsApp and Instagram are even harder to track than Facebook.

Last point: These algorithmic elections will be nothing compared to the A.I. elections just around the corner.

My favorite pullquote from that article:

The way the world is using their phones is almost completely dominated by a few Silicon Valley companies. The abuse that is happening is due to their inability to manage that responsibility.

That reminds me of the post I made last month. This part specifically:

Prederick wrote:

Lastly, I logged into FB today, and saw a animation with a bunch of people painting a Dove and this text underneath:

Building Peace Together

Communities can make good things happen all over the world. Join all of us at Facebook today in hoping that kindness will lead the way.

I was genuinely surprised at how angry it made me. "Hoping that kindness will lead the way," when they are directly contributing to this morass.

Man am I pessimistic about the future.

Motherf*ck Mark Zuckerberg, man.