[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).

What's amazing is how many people are involved peripherally to this junk. All the folks doing the grunt work that make this happen. There's no platform for this stuff without publicists, camera folks, lawyers, etc.

Bruce wrote:

Milo's grift is surely on its' last legs now.

http://neilerikson.com/wp-content/up...

There’s so much in there. Criminy what a clusterfrump.

Bruce wrote:

Milo's grift is surely on its' last legs now.

http://neilerikson.com/wp-content/up...

Wait, I though that no-platforming makes people stronger? What's the explanation for this?

And now he's had to get out the begging bowl.

https://www.patreon.com/dangerousmilo

It's embarrassing how cheap he is.

Bruce wrote:

And now he's had to get out the begging bowl.

https://www.patreon.com/dangerousmilo

It's embarrassing how cheap he is.

And banned from Patreon already.

Bruce wrote:

And now he's had to get out the begging bowl.

https://www.patreon.com/dangerousmilo

It's embarrassing how cheap he is.

This page has been removed.

I'm sure there's an alt-right crowd-funding site out there for him.

oilypenguin wrote:

I'm sure there's an alt-right crowd-funding site out there for him.

Grab.

I assume his header read "Milo is Making the World a Measurably Worse Place."

...

"Milo is Leeching off Easily Duped Hate Lumps?"

"Milo is Lacking in Legitimately Marketable Skills?"

Bruce wrote:

And now he's had to get out the begging bowl.

https://www.patreon.com/dangerousmilo

It's embarrassing how cheap literally everything he is.

Sorry to be pedantic.

Speaking of alt-righters and money, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has gotten some media attention lately because he's apparently using his Twitter account to shill for a betting app (and not making it clear that it's an ad).

Steve Bannon has been trying to make money the old-fashioned way, by getting paid for speaking at events. He began running into trouble a few months back when The New Yorker scheduled him to speak at the New Yorker Festival. A bunch of other speakers and panelists caught wind and presented The New Yorker with the simple option of 1) having Bannon attend, or 2) have them attend. Since those other speakers included real celebrities and famous people Bannon was uninvited.

It's kinda gone downhill for Bannon since then. This week he had pull out of the keynote address at the ACE Advances in Computer Technology and Entertainment Conference, which is a joint conference with the International Congress on Love and Sex With Robots. Researchers heard he was keynoting and began canceling.

I think you're getting close to hitting rock bottom when sex robots don't want to touch you.

It's sad because ACE used to be a legit conference, before the current organizer took over and ran it into the ground this year. Inviting Bannon was just the last straw, albeit the one that got people to take notice. At which point the associated publisher noticed all the withdrawn papers, took a look at the current state of its peer review process, and noped out.

On the guy who took it over and who also runs that sex robot conference is also a real piece of work and managed to burn even more bridges.

OG_slinger wrote:

Speaking of alt-righters and money, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has gotten some media attention lately because he's apparently using his Twitter account to shill for a betting app (and not making it clear that it's an ad).

My hope that the stain of Spicer's work would follow him and actually hamper him down the road has been realized beyond my wildest dreams.

OG_slinger wrote:

Speaking of alt-righters and money, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has gotten some media attention lately because he's apparently using his Twitter account to shill for a betting app (and not making it clear that it's an ad).

Steve Bannon has been trying to make money the old-fashioned way, by getting paid for speaking at events. He began running into trouble a few months back when The New Yorker scheduled him to speak at the New Yorker Festival. A bunch of other speakers and panelists caught wind and presented The New Yorker with the simple option of 1) having Bannon attend, or 2) have them attend. Since those other speakers included real celebrities and famous people Bannon was uninvited.

It's kinda gone downhill for Bannon since then. This week he had pull out of the keynote address at the ACE Advances in Computer Technology and Entertainment Conference, which is a joint conference with the International Congress on Love and Sex With Robots. Researchers heard he was keynoting and began canceling.

I think you're getting close to hitting rock bottom when sex robots don't want to touch you.

What was Bannon's going to talk about at a tech conference?

article wrote:

When it was announced that one of the keynote talks at ACE was to be given by Steve Bannon on the subject of employment opportunities for minorities in the computing entertainment industry, there were so many protests against Mr. Bannon participating in the ACE conference that it became necessary to cancel the 2018 ACE conference.”

Very few people know tech as well as Steve Bannon. Who else would've hired Milo as the tech editor for Breitbart?

And you have to hire plenty of people to drive that gold farming operation.

That’s the thing with all these people, including the President. They’re all the worst people. Every one of them is deep in debt, committed crimes and basically on their last grift.

PewDiePie gives shout out to hateful, anti-Semitic YouTube channel
Channel has grown by 150,000 subscribers since

The Verge wrote:

In Kjellberg’s most recent edition of “Pew News,” a semi-satirical series where Kjellberg offers his own take on news events or YouTube cultural discussions, he dedicates the last portion of the video to shouting out smaller YouTube creators he enjoys watching. One of those creators is E;R (otherwise known as “EsemicolonR”), an essayist who often includes anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, and cruel language in his videos.
“You also have E;R, who does great video essays,” Kjellberg says in the video. “He did one on Death Note, which I really, really enjoyed.” …
“Yesterday PewDiePie ended #Subscribetopewdiepie in a video where he promoted some of his favorite channels,” Piker tweeted. “One of them was straight up a neo-nazi’s YouTube page where he makes video essays on children’s cartoons with added nazi propaganda.” …
In one example — a video Kjellberg publicly liked, leaving a comment underneath — E;R uses aerial footage of the moment when a car drove through a crowd of people during the white supremacist-led “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The incident left multiple people injured and one protester, Heather Heyer, dead. E;R turns a scene from Netflix’s live-action Death Note movie, describing how a death is carried out when a name is written inside the titular notebook, into a joke about Heyer’s death using actual footage from Charlottesville.

"This guy keeps making anti-Semitic "Jokes" and said the N-Word live on a stream"

*Defenders* He's not Racist or anti-Semitic! He totally apologized, and is giving money to charity!

"He just linked to a Neo-Nazi youtube video."

*Defenders*

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/xmulu1f6urt11.jpg)

As a reminder, PewDiePie's channel has 75 Million subscribers.

This is my not-surprised face. YouTube has already made it perfectly clear that hate speech is a-ok.

Bare breasts and butts, however, are right out.

Somewhat relevant, YouTube bans Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. For copyright infringement of course.

Make that bare breasts, butts, and copyright infringement.

Butt infringement.

RE: Pewds

So YouTube's Year-End Review video is the most disliked video in YouTube history. I found it most interesting because the video, which is marginally about the YouTube "community" but in truth is really just a promo for advertisers to use their service, left out both PewDiePie and the Paul brothers. PewDie is the most popular creator on the platform by an immense distance, while Logan Paul's boxing match against fellow YouTuber KSI neared or cleared one million viewers during its live-stream this summer.

And I think that, by not putting them in, it's kind of a tacit admittance by YouTube that Something Is Rotten In The State Of Denmark. These are literally your most popular creators, they drive enormous audiences online, they are the most talked about people on your site, and in your year-end video, you pretend they don't exist because you don't think that you can't use them to sell yourself to Procter & Gamble.

Not that I think YT gives a sh*t about this in any material way, mind you. I don't think this is a moral decision, it's a entirely financial one. They know the platform they've built has basically become Frankenstein's monster, a borderline un-policeable, incredibly powerful disinformation machine that's designed to keep you watching with an algorithm that, in pursuit of your continued viewership, quickly creates filter bubbles of content.

I think YouTube knows it's platform is an open sewage line, but they're trying to sell it which means keeping up the facade of it being this LGBTQ-friendly, diverse space, which is honestly laughable these days. For all the claims of their bias against Conservatives, I don't think any company has done more for the global right and far-right than YouTube.

As a sidenote about the recommendation engine: I was logged out of my account today, and clicked on a video that is literally Joe Pesci's head on fire from Home Alone, turned into a Yule Log. The right hand recommendations featured Jordan Peterson on "race, IQ and the Jewish Question" and a UFO conspiracy theory. And I'm not even necessarily opposing the content itself, but it's nuts that those are the immediate recommendations for a video making a joke of a scene from a 25-year-old movie. And if someone clicked on either, their recommendations would've immediately shifted to similar content for weeks.

BadKen wrote:

This is my not-surprised face. YouTube has already made it perfectly clear that hate speech is a-ok.

Bare breasts and butts, however, are right out.

This also, hilariously, goes for Tumblr.

Star of Bandersnatch bullied off of Twitter.

What the sh*t?

Here's a crushingly depressing Twitter thread for your enjoyment.

Meanwhile, piggybacking on what I'd said earlier about YouTube's recommendation engine:

We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole

In the face of ongoing scrutiny from the public and legislators, YouTube has repeatedly promised to do a better job of policing hateful and conspiratorial content. Yet BuzzFeed News’ queries show the company’s recommendation system continues to promote conspiracy videos, videos produced by hate groups, and pirated videos published by accounts that YouTube itself sometimes bans. These findings — the product of 147 total “down the rabbit hole” searches for 50 unique terms, resulting in a total of 2,221 videos played — reveal little in the way of overt ideological bias.

But they do suggest that the YouTube users who turn to the platform for news and information — more than half of all users, according to the Pew Research Center — aren’t well served by its haphazard recommendation algorithm, which seems to be driven by an id that demands engagement above all else.

The thing is largely that the algorithm is wholly... well, I'll let them explain better.

In some cases, queries run by BuzzFeed News support the claims of past reports. And yet other queries — run on the same day with the same search terms under the same conditions — offer different, more mundane results. Attempts to fully understand YouTube’s recommendation algorithms are complicated by the fact that each viewer’s experience is not only unique, but tailored to their specific online experience. No two users watch the same videos, nor do they watch them the same way, and there may be no way to reliably chart a “typical” viewer experience. YouTube’s rationale when deciding what content to show its viewers is frustratingly inscrutable.

But as demonstrated by BuzzFeed News’ more than 140 journeys through YouTube’s recommendation system, the outcome of that decision-making process can be difficult to reverse engineer. In the end, what’s clear is that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm isn’t a partisan monster — it’s an engagement monster. It’s why its recommendations veer unpredictably from cable news to pirated reality shows to QAnon conspiracy theories. Its only governing ideology is to wrangle content — no matter how tenuously linked to your watch history — that it thinks might keep you glued to your screen for another few seconds.

Oh, and!

Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out

Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics. Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell’s UFOs, the “hoax” moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today’s iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency.

Together with their first cousins, fake news, they are challenging society’s trust in facts. At its most toxic, this contagion poses a profound threat to democracy by damaging its bedrock: a shared commitment to truth.

Their growing reach and scale is astonishing. A University of Chicago study estimated in 2014 that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory. When they repeated the survey last November, the proportion had risen to 61%. The startling finding was echoed by a recent study from the University of Cambridge that found 60% of Britons are wedded to a false narrative.

The trend began on obscure online forums such as the alt-right playground 4chan. Soon, media entrepreneurs realized there was money to be made – most notoriously Alex Jones, whose site Infowars feeds its millions of readers a potent diet of lurid lies (9/11 was a government hit job; the feds manipulate the weather.)

Now the conspiracy theorist-in-chief sits in the White House. Donald Trump cut his political teeth on the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and went on to embrace climate change denial, rampant voter fraud and the discredited belief that childhood vaccines may cause autism.

Amid this explosive growth, one aspect has been underappreciated: the human cost. What is the toll paid by those caught up in these falsehoods? And how are they fighting back?

Is it a conspiracy theory to say that every single one of the major political parties that are running in the elections is cheating when you can see every single one of them openly buying votes right outside the polling booths?