[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).

I bet there's an extension or add-on for that. I haven't looked but it's gotta be something someone's done. After a quick search, here's one for Chrome with these key features:

- Default fixed Video Quality to always match your Screen and bandwidth: always 720p, 1080p, 4k, 8k ? Or simply 480p, 240p? avoid 60 frames (vs. 30 fps)
- Auto-Play always off / on by default:
✓ Player Auto-Play ✓ Youtube's "Up Next" ✓ Playlist Auto-Play

I'm gonna hunt down something similar for Firefox, since I've made the switch.

ETA: Trying out Enhancer for YouTube.

I saw a particular troll in the wild today on reddit. It was an interesting one because it was a person pretending to be a minority and espousing some extremely hateful rhetoric, like enslaving white men and chemically castrating them. Just sh*tposting all over reddit, but particularly in areas where there is already a lot of the types prone to being radicalized. It was clearly intended to incite rage among white men towards minorities. All to radicalize people further.

oh, that enhancer is neat! definitely going to make use of that.

Not sure if this belongs here or the political news thread. It all seems to come together at the moment anyway.

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern leans on Facebook to drop Christchurch shooting footage

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has taken Facebook to task for failing to remove graphic vision of the Christchurch shootings from its platforms, while vowing to "give the gunman nothing, not even his name".
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Facebook said it had removed 1.5 million videos from its platforms within the first 24 hours of the shootings and was removing all edited versions of the video, even if they did not show graphic content. Facebook and Alphabet Inc's YouTube said they were also using automated tools to identify and remove violent content.
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The plea comes as the video is formally listed as "objectionable" by New Zealand's chief censor, David Shanks, who is responsible for overseeing the classification and restriction of content. The ruling means the footage is banned throughout the country, and those found sharing it could face fines or jail time. Calls for more action from social media giants were echoed by internet service providers in Australia and New Zealand, including Telstra and Vodafone, which are blocking "dozens of sites" that are still hosting footage of the Christchurch attack.
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State-owned Lotto NZ said it had already pulled advertising from social media "as the tone didn't feel right in the aftermath of these events". ASB Bank, one of the country's biggest banks and a unit of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is also in talks on whether to pull its ads from social media, a spokesman said. The Association of New Zealand Advertisers and the Commercial Communications Council asked all advertisers to consider where they placed their ads, and challenged Facebook and other platform owners to take steps to moderate hate content.

Meanwhile in Russia, Vladimir Putin signs sweeping Internet-censorship bills

President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on the Russian Internet Monday, signing two censorship bills into law. One bans "fake news" while the other makes it illegal to insult public officials.

I have what may be a dumb tech question. I know a lot of local police monitor the social media of gang members and have at times been able to pick up folks for bragging about crimes online. So how hard would it be to monitor 8Chan and start going after anyone who posts credible threats? I get that there’s a big difference between an anonymous troll and someone dumb enough to use their real name, but surely there must be a way to hunt the worst of them down. Or at the very least be able to send out an alert when somebody says “I’m going to go shoot up Christchurch.”

The problem is an institutional one. Law enforcement (and the law, for that matter) doesn't give the same weight to anonymous internet posts that they do to statements made in person, in public. Until laws and law enforcement treat them the same, nothing will change.

It's not only that. If you have a name then there is a better chance you can do additional investigation using open info before a warrant is necessary. If he talks about using an AR-15 and he has a registered AR-15, that helps with probably cause. Past history or restraining orders, whatever, you have more potential to find the information you need to demonstrate to a judge that you need a warrant.

If 8chan doesn't have hidden metadata like ip addresses pasted right onto the posts (and I bet they don't) then you basically have no information other than the offending post to justify a warrant to make 8chan give you the IP address, and that ip address isn't guaranteed to actually give you an identity.

How do you get from anonymous poster to identified poster?

You can't serve a warrant to 8chan because they operate outside of your jurisdiction.

Tangentially related there was a story today about how a media collective revealed that Daniel Morley, a school resource officer working at L.C. Bird High School in Virginia, was also a new pledge coordinator for the neo-Nazi/white supremacy group Identity Evropa based on his online behavior.

The media collective tracked Morley's online presence for years because he used the same screen name whether he was on reddit, YouTube, the Stormfront forums, or Identity Evropa's Discord and Slack. (Morley was already a lost cause by the age of 19, when his screen name first popped up on Stormfront's forums in 2006.)

Over the years Morley essentially doxxed himself, revealing enough information about where he lived and what he did that activists were able to package his posts and chat logs and send them to his boss, who suspended him and is going through the process of firing him.

Given the NSA's and CIA's massive online surveillance capabilities, I don't doubt that they could technically track 8chan sh*tposters. But doing so would very likely be illegal and unconstitutional (at least if the white supremacist terrorist was American).

Sure, it's easy to track a moron who leaves a glowing breadcrumb trail for you to follow.

But they're not all morons.

If 8chan was a hub for trafficking child porn, you can bet that law enforcement would not let "anonymity" get in their way. There is no such thing as anonymous on the internet. Even, in many cases, when a VPN is part of the equation.

BadKen wrote:

If 8chan was a hub for trafficking child porn, you can bet that law enforcement would not let "anonymity" get in their way. There is no such thing as anonymous on the internet. Even, in many cases, when a VPN is part of the equation.

Uhh. Not sure if unaware, or 8th dimensional ironic posting.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8cha...

Unaware, but I have to wonder if 8chan is being used as a resource internationally to help track down people for some of the massive busts in recent years.

I'm growing closer and closer to agreeing that all social media should face massive regulation. I'd turn Facebook, Twitter, and the like into utilities. Social media has benefits, and it will move us forward as a society. But the ability of small groups to cause massive problems means we need the government to step in and correct it.

CNN: Her son died. And then anti-vaxers attacked her

Not long ago, a 4-year-old boy died of the flu. His mother, under doctor's orders, watched his two little brothers like a hawk, terrified they might get sick and die, too.

Grieving and frightened, just days after her son's death she checked her Facebook page hoping to read messages of comfort from family and friends.

Instead, she found dozens of hateful comments: You're a terrible mother. You killed your child. You deserved what happened to your son. This is all fake - your child doesn't exist.

Bewildered and rattled, she closed her Facebook app.

Interviews with mothers who've lost children and with those who spy on anti-vaccination groups, reveal a tactic employed by anti-vaxers: When a child dies, members of the group sometimes encourage each other to go on that parent's Facebook page. The anti-vaxers then post messages telling the parents they're lying and their child never existed, or that the parent murdered them, or that vaccines killed the child, or some combination of all of those.

Nothing is considered too cruel. Just days after their children died, mothers say anti-vaxers on social media called them whores, the c-word and baby killers.

The mother in the Midwest, who wants to remain anonymous, isn't alone.

Jill Promoli, who lives outside Toronto, lost her son to flu. She believes the anti-vaxers are trying to silence the very people who can make the strongest argument for vaccinations: those whose children died of vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Jonman wrote:

How do you get from anonymous poster to identified poster?

You can't serve a warrant to 8chan because they operate outside of your jurisdiction.

Outside of our jurisdiction? Sounds like a job for the CIA.

Honestly, the CIA, with other intelligence agencies, ought to start just nuking these sites. Then sift through the IPs and start building profiles and cases. We're in a war. At some point we have to act like it.

Jayhawker wrote:

Honestly, the CIA, with other intelligence agencies, ought to start just nuking these sites. Then sift through the IPs and start building profiles and cases. We're in a war. At some point we have to act like it.

Some questions for your war:
1: Who is the enemy?
2: What does victory look like?
3: How do you clear the many, many legal hurdles that will be in the way of your war? Constitutional lawyers would have a field day.

Tanglebones wrote:
BadKen wrote:

If 8chan was a hub for trafficking child porn, you can bet that law enforcement would not let "anonymity" get in their way. There is no such thing as anonymous on the internet. Even, in many cases, when a VPN is part of the equation.

Uhh. Not sure if unaware, or 8th dimensional ironic posting.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8cha...

Interesting article. Everyone makes good points about the difficulty of outing the worst trolls, but I still wish there was a better way to monitor the site for active threats.

I also was thinking the government could seize the American servers mentioned in that article using asset forfeiture given that you only need probable cause.

So Infowars has been banned from YouTube and most social media platforms....

....Except Instagram, of course. Which is owned by Facebook, of course.

@zeynep wrote:

Next up: Instagram. It has everything: the algorithmic feed, the scale, the exposure and lots of people who went there to escape what was happening in Facebook's news feed.

Oh look! More about Instagram!

Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate

When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it on Instagram, searched for information on YouTube, and read up on it on forums.

A year and a half later, Alex, who asked to use a pseudonym, runs his own Gen Z–focused QAnon Instagram account, through which he educates his generation about the secret plot by the “deep state” to take down Donald Trump. “I was just noticing a lack in younger people being interested in QAnon, so I figured I would put it out there that there was at least one young person in the movement,” he told me via Instagram direct message. He hopes to “expose the truth about everything corrupt governments and organizations have lied about.” Among those truths: that certain cosmetics and foods contain aborted fetal cells, that the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash was a hoax, and that the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings were staged.

Instagram is teeming with these conspiracy theories, viral misinformation, and extremist memes, all daisy-chained together via a network of accounts with incredible algorithmic reach and millions of collective followers—many of whom, like Alex, are very young. These accounts intersperse TikTok videos and nostalgia memes with anti-vaccination rhetoric, conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Clinton family, and jokes about killing women, Jews, Muslims, and liberals.

Recent posts by @the.new.federation, which has more than 38,000 followers, include a post likening Representative Maxine Waters to an ape, one that labels an image depicting prison rape as “how socialism works,” and several suggesting that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died months ago and is “better off dead.” Yesterday, it asked, “If Muslims can behead Christians, why can’t we do the same to them?” That post has 2,088 likes.

A post from @unclesamsmisguidedchildren, which has more than 559,000 followers, implies that John Podesta is partially responsible for the New Zealand shooting. That post has more than 8,300 likes. A post made four days ago includes a video promoting the conspiracy that more than 22 Islamic terror camps operate in the United States and are likely responsible for the shooting in Parkland, Florida. It has been viewed more than 200,500 times.

In an email, an Instagram spokesperson told me that the company and its parent, Facebook, “continue to study trends in organized hate and hate speech and work with partners to better understand hate organizations as they evolve.” The spokesperson added, “We ban these organizations and individuals from Instagram and also remove all praise and support when we become aware of it. We will continue to review content, accounts, and people that violate our policies and take action against hate speech and hate organizations to help keep our community safe.”

Since 2016, social-media companies have come under fire for allowing white supremacy and other extremist ideologies to spread. YouTube’s algorithms have been shown to push people further toward the fringes; a New York Times headline called the site “the Great Radicalizer.” Facebook is notorious for allowing anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists to organize and spread their messages to millions—already, the top two most-shared news stories on Facebook in 2019 are both false. Twitter, too, has been criticized for being slow to police the misinformation that spreads on its platform.

But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not where young people go to socialize. Instagram is.

The platform is likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought, and yet it has largely escaped scrutiny. Part of this is due to its reputation among older users, who generally use it to post personal photos, follow aspirational accounts, and keep in touch with friends. Many teenagers, however, use the platform differently—not only to connect with friends, but to explore their identity, and often to consume information about current events.

Jack, a 16-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym to protect his identity, has learned a lot about politics through Instagram. In 2020, he’ll be able to vote for the first time, and so he recently started following some new Instagram pages to bone up on issues facing the country. “I try to follow both sides just to see what everyone’s thinking,” he said. While he’s struggled to find many compelling pages on the left, he said he’s learned a lot from following large conservative Instagram meme pages such as @dc_draino and @the_typical_liberal, which has nearly 1 million followers and claims to be “saving GenZ one meme at a time.” Recent posts include a joke about running over protesters in the street, an Infowars video posted to IGTV, and a meme about feminists being ugly. “It’s important to have The Typical Liberal and DC Draino to expose the [media’s] lies, so we can formulate our own opinions,” Jack told me.

Hey! There's that sense of immense dread about the future! I hadn't heard from you in like two whole days! Glad you're back!

CJ Pearson, a 16-year-old conservative activist who is not affiliated with any extremist groups, says that “the role [Instagram] will play in 2020 is being slept on right now. The right has an advantage in that they’ve organized a huge network of meme accounts on the platform that reach millions of young people across the web who will be casting their first vote come 2020.”

And Pearson says he wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those kids are already familiar with conspiracies such as QAnon. “There’s mainstream Insta pages that believe in QAnon. There are lots of creators who openly promote it and believe in it,” he says.

Nick, a 16-year-old who asked to use a pseudonym, said that he’s seen such content himself on the platform. He began following @the_typical_liberal after the page was suggested to him because so many of his friends from school follow it. “I noticed this whole network of personalities and pages because they all shout each other out,” he said.

But recently, content from those pages has gotten too extremist for him. Nick was particularly surprised when @the_typical_liberal began reposting Infowars videos. He stopped trusting it as a legitimate news source, but noted that 30 of his friends still follow the account, and said that many people he knows are “really into it.”

“I’ve seen talking points from these pages regurgitated up in class debates,” Nick said. “I know where they’re getting it.”


So happy
you're back.

I know when I think about legitimate new sources rando IG accounts are right up there with The Washington Post and The New York Times.

I wouldn't worry about people who will be casting their first vote in 2020. Young people do not vote.

IMAGE(https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FT_16.05.13_millennialVoters_turnout.png)

I think if you didn't come out to vot for or against Obama, and you didn't come out to vote for or against Trump, then you're just not going to vote ever. Either you don't care, don't see the point, or can't afford to take time off work. Losing your job is not worth voting. Especially if you don't live in a swing state. I don't think it is worth analyzing thise people. Better to convince people have voted fpr both parties before but are willing to admit they made a miatake with Trump.

BadKen wrote:

I wouldn't worry about people who will be casting their first vote in 2020. Young people do not vote.

Yet.

OG_slinger wrote:

I know when I think about legitimate new sources rando IG accounts are right up there with The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Sure, but if you've been stewing your brain in a morass of conspiracy content for weeks on end, WaPo and the NYT are all part of a shadowy cabal of elites who have been lying to you all your life. Why not get the "real truth" from a "Independent Journalist" who you can tell is telling the truth because it's right in his username!

Pew makes me feel a little better, but honestly, I'm inclined to think a bunch of people might just by lying in their responses.

Either way, yes, I am once again terrified about the future. Between this and climate change, I feel like 2020-2030 is going to be absolute garbage on every single front.

BadKen wrote:

I wouldn't worry about people who will be casting their first vote in 2020.

I'm not really worried about CJ and Nick voting in 2020.

I'm worried that they'll be full on neo-Nazis/white supremacists after mainlining social media "conservative news" for two years.

Prederick wrote:

Pew makes me feel a little better, but honestly, I'm inclined to think a bunch of people might just by lying in their responses.

Either way, yes, I am once again terrified about the future. Between this and climate change, I feel like 2020-2030 is going to be absolute garbage on every single front.

There's still going to be a lot of dumbass rural white boys in Gen Z who are growing up with their MAGA-voting fathers, uncles, and grandfathers telling them how all the non-whites ruined their lives (and America).

And I'd push the garbage years out another generation to 2050 or so. It's going to take that long for all those rural states to get enough non-white population so that those white voters don't immediately sh*t their pants in fear of MS-13, sharia law, or "thugs from the big city."

For several years now I’ve thought about starting my own social media right-wing conspiracy page, then gradually turning it around to targeting actual corruption and hate-mongering, but I’m concerned that It might corrode my will to live for little actual real-world change.

I feel like it'd probably end up going horribly south.

Prederick wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I wouldn't worry about people who will be casting their first vote in 2020. Young people do not vote.

Yet.

My very first thought, too.

Jonman wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Honestly, the CIA, with other intelligence agencies, ought to start just nuking these sites. Then sift through the IPs and start building profiles and cases. We're in a war. At some point we have to act like it.

Some questions for your war:
1: Who is the enemy?
2: What does victory look like?
3: How do you clear the many, many legal hurdles that will be in the way of your war? Constitutional lawyers would have a field day.

Not one of these things has been an actual roadblock or even tiny hurdle for the last 20 years. Nor has the Constitution or our laws prevented government surveillance of US citizens and the rest of the world. Where/when do you think we are?

muraii wrote:
Prederick wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I wouldn't worry about people who will be casting their first vote in 2020. Young people do not vote.

Yet.

My very first thought, too.

Well, that graph covers 20 years worth of elections, and young people voted even less before that, iirc.

The problem of them becoming radicalized by Insta BS is real, but I doubt they'll have a significant effect on who gets elected. Extremists always make noise out of proportion to their numbers. The potential for tragedy still exists since it only takes a few extreme actions to do a lot of damage and cause a lot of deaths, and as a side effect those actions are amplified by sensationalist media and disruptive to government.

Prederick wrote:

Oh look! More about Instagram!

Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate

Jack, a 16-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym to protect his identity, has learned a lot about politics through Instagram. In 2020, he’ll be able to vote for the first time, and so he recently started following some new Instagram pages to bone up on issues facing the country. “I try to follow both sides just to see what everyone’s thinking,” he said. While he’s struggled to find many compelling pages on the left, he said he’s learned a lot from following large conservative Instagram meme pages such as @dc_draino and @the_typical_liberal, which has nearly 1 million followers and claims to be “saving GenZ one meme at a time.” Recent posts include a joke about running over protesters in the street, an Infowars video posted to IGTV, and a meme about feminists being ugly. “It’s important to have The Typical Liberal and DC Draino to expose the [media’s] lies, so we can formulate our own opinions,” Jack told me.

Hey! There's that sense of immense dread about the future! I hadn't heard from you in like two whole days! Glad you're back!

CJ Pearson, a 16-year-old conservative activist who is not affiliated with any extremist groups, says that “the role [Instagram] will play in 2020 is being slept on right now. The right has an advantage in that they’ve organized a huge network of meme accounts on the platform that reach millions of young people across the web who will be casting their first vote come 2020.”

And Pearson says he wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those kids are already familiar with conspiracies such as QAnon. “There’s mainstream Insta pages that believe in QAnon. There are lots of creators who openly promote it and believe in it,” he says.

Nick, a 16-year-old who asked to use a pseudonym, said that he’s seen such content himself on the platform. He began following @the_typical_liberal after the page was suggested to him because so many of his friends from school follow it. “I noticed this whole network of personalities and pages because they all shout each other out,” he said.

But recently, content from those pages has gotten too extremist for him. Nick was particularly surprised when @the_typical_liberal began reposting Infowars videos. He stopped trusting it as a legitimate news source, but noted that 30 of his friends still follow the account, and said that many people he knows are “really into it.”

“I’ve seen talking points from these pages regurgitated up in class debates,” Nick said. “I know where they’re getting it.”


So happy
you're back.

Thanks for that. /s

My oldest son is 16 and eligible to vote for the first time in 2020. I talk to him and his younger brother regularly about conspiracy sites and the importance of critical thinking and skepticism, and I promote empathy and understanding of their privilege. Yet I remain terrified they'll get sucked into this gaping hole of hate propaganda.