[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).

Prederick wrote:

Saying that the aftermath of the Notre Dame fire on social media has been a complete avalanche of actual "Fake News" would be a understatement.

Notre Dame Cathedral fire spurs Islamophobic conspiracy theories on social media

As firefighters worked to contain the fire that ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Monday, Twitter and YouTube struggled to take down conspiracy theories being pushed by both anonymous accounts and verified white nationalists who spread Islamophobic theories about the disaster.

French officials investigating the fire have ruled out arson and terrorism, saying the fire that led to a roof collapse may have been tied to ongoing repairs at the cathedral.

Images and videos of the flaming cathedral spread quickly across social media and were quickly seized upon to push Islamophobic narratives that have flourished in far-right politics around the world in recent years. Those sentiments then made their way to more mainstream conservative pundits, who questioned whether the fire had been set on purpose.

Some anonymous users used editing software to push conspiracy theories on YouTube and Twitter, and their accounts remained active on the platforms — despite repeated debunkings and reports on the platform. One video on YouTube, viewed 40,000 times, superimposes audio of a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for "God is great") over a video of the Notre Dame fire. The audio comes from a years-old video, which is the first result when a user searches for “Allahu Akbar Scream” in Google. The video has not been removed from YouTube.

The account that posted the video, which features a white supremacist cartoon for an avatar, remains active.

That hoax video was then re-posted to Twitter, receiving almost 2,000 retweets and tens of thousands of views before being removed Monday night. The user’s account, however, remains active.

Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University who focuses on white nationalism, said the edited videos and talking points are part of a recruitment strategy but they “also fit into their ideology that the race war is happening.”

“They’re committed to getting more white people to white nationalism, and fanning the flames of Islamophobia is helpful,” she said.

I saw a discussion somewhere that really underlined how the democratization of the internet now means that literally anyone can purport to have significant knowledge on a subject, and that people with expertise in various subjects are now other people with opinions. It's what I think of whenever I see the legions of trolls in the mentions of various reporters doing the debunking work on this stuff doing the whole "I did my own research...." song-and-dance.

Basically, it's this:

@bomani_jones wrote:

this is a really underrated point. these folks came up with ideas better than their brains could actually handle. in the movies, that usually means the end will be total destruction and whew, this got really sad really fast.

@JYSexton wrote:

The people who created social media have absolutely no idea what they're doing and every time they break or injure society it's depressingly obvious they're in way over their heads.

Social media obviously did not create hoaxes and conspiracies, but man has it ever given them a megaphone. I'm still trying to figure out how much of it I think is particular to social media, and how much of it is just a reflection of the ugliness of humanity.

This Waypoint article on GamerGate figures running as politicians is distressing.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

This Waypoint article on GamerGate figures running as politicians is distressing.

Honestly that seemed inevitable.. I'm surprised it took this long.

Grifters gonna grift, yo.

Yeah, it's already happened in several other countries. The YouTube-to-elected office pipeline is, unfortunately, real. If you don't think PewDiePie could run for most offices damn near anywhere in the Western world and have a decent shot at winning, you haven't been paying attention.

Speaking of YouTube....

Even by the nightmarish standards of the empire she oversees, Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive officer of YouTube, has had a dreadful start to 2019. During a single week in February, BuzzFeed reported that her company was running advertisements alongside anti-vaccine content; there was a nationwide panic over the platform abetting child suicide; and a viral video showed how pedophiles were flourishing on the site.

It's a whole big article, and I've used up all my freebies for the month, but I thought this tweet's juxtaposition got it pretty nicely.

A revealing contrast in this profile of YouTube's CEO:

-How she reacted after a critical news story about execs looking the other way on the recommendation system

VS

-How she reacted when relations with a giant advertiser were in further jeopardy

I'm not sure what people expect. She is paid to bring in the money, not to build a socially responsible online space. We are the product. That is the beginning and the end of what a social media mogul thinks about us. Never forget that.

Yesterday Facebook added CheckYourFact.com to the group of fact checkers it's relying on to fight the spread of false news.

CheckYourFact.com is a for-profit subsidiary of The Daily Caller, a site known for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories, and its majority owners are Daily Caller co-founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, tweeted about Facebook's roll-out of their fact checking group. Back in December, before Facebook unveiled the group, the company asked Rosen what he thought about the group and what reaction he thought media would have to it.

Because the fact checking group consisted of mainstream media organizations like ABC News and the Associated Press, and well-established and non-partisan fact checkers like Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org Rosen predicted that conservative media would cry liberal bias. Which is exactly what happened.

Rosen wrote:

The Facebook rep called me the next day to say, rather sheepishly, "I guess you were right." I asked what they planned to do in reply. Answer: they were going to add to the partnership conservative fact-checking sites. There was a pause... Then I said, "good luck with that."

A few days ago Wired ran an article about Facebook that detailed the tumultuous times the company has had over the past 15 months. A part of that was an internal debate last summer about changes the company had made to its algorithms that resulted in a steep decline of news traffic.

Wired wrote:

That kicked off a wide-ranging conversation that ensued over the next two months. The key question was whether the company should introduce new factors into its algorithm to help serious publications. The product team working on news wanted Facebook to increase the amount of public content—things shared by news organizations, businesses, celebrities—allowed in News Feed. They also wanted the company to provide stronger boosts to publishers deemed trustworthy, and they suggested the company hire a large team of human curators to elevate the highest-quality news inside of News Feed. The company discussed setting up a new section on the app entirely for news and directed a team to quietly work on developing it; one of the team’s ambitions was to try to build a competitor to Apple News.

Some of the company’s most senior execs, notably Chris Cox, agreed that Facebook needed to give serious publishers a leg up. Others pushed back, especially Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush who was now Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. Supporting high-quality outlets would inevitably make it look like the platform was supporting liberals, which could lead to trouble in Washington, a town run mainly by conservatives. Breitbart and the Daily Caller, Kaplan argued, deserved protections too.

...

The need for leadership in communications only became more apparent on July 11, when John Hegeman, the new head of News Feed, was asked in an interview why the company didn’t ban Alex Jones’ InfoWars from the platform. The honest answer would probably have been to just admit that Facebook gives a rather wide berth to the far right because it’s so worried about being called liberal. Hegeman, though, went with the following: “We created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of view.”

Supporting high-quality outlets would inevitably make it look like the platform was supporting liberals, which could lead to trouble in Washington, a town run mainly by conservatives.

All the facepalms...

muraii wrote:
Supporting high-quality outlets would inevitably make it look like the platform was supporting liberals, which could lead to trouble in Washington, a town run mainly by conservatives.

IMAGE(https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/716/623/38b.jpg)

I've never purposefully clicked on a YouTube ad. Most I skip as soon as the 5 seconds are up.

They really make money from them?

Ads are basically the root of all internet evil. Nearly everything awful is done for clicks (ad money).

Stele wrote:

I've never purposefully clicked on a YouTube ad. Most I skip as soon as the 5 seconds are up.

They really make money from them?

I'm not in advertising, so this is just a lay person's take, but I would think advertisers like the certainty of pre-roll video ads. Even if the person skips after 5 seconds, the advertisers know for certain that one video click equals one ad impression. It's akin to a full page magazine ad that you can pretty much bank on someone had to at least glimpse it to flip to the next page, whereas on the web there is less certainty because of banner placements, ad blockers, etc.

Stele wrote:

I've never purposefully clicked on a YouTube ad. Most I skip as soon as the 5 seconds are up.

They really make money from them?

Spam also makes money, especially the deliberately misspelled ones that weed out people with critical thinking skills.

You show an ad to enough people and someone is going to bite. Google et al. made a bet that if you show the ad to the right person, they're even more likely to bite. Which they're so confident in that they don't charge you for the ad unless someone clicks on it. (On Google Ads, the YouTube rules may be different.)

That's the reason why Amazon keeps pushing the last thing you bought, by the way: you've marked yourself as someone who buys refrigerator door handles, which ups the chance you'll buy another one to something like 0.05 percent, which is enough to make it worth it. Most people aren't the kind of person who buys a refrigerator door handle, so they seize on the small bit of data they have about you because advertising is cheap to them and it works often enough to be worth it even if 99% of the time you'll never buy another one for the rest of your life.

Gremlin wrote:

Most people aren't the kind of person who buys a refrigerator door handle, so they seize on the small bit of data they have about you because advertising is cheap to them and it works often enough to be worth it even if 99% of the time you'll never buy another one for the rest of your life.

But that 1%...
IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f0/e8/34/f0e8343daf534a46cce3e92b06dbb962.jpg)

Stele wrote:

I've never purposefully clicked on a YouTube ad. Most I skip as soon as the 5 seconds are up.

They really make money from them?

No one really pays for ad clicks anymore. You pay per impression. The 5 seconds you spent waiting is what they want and what they got.

Edit: heh Gremlin says otherwise. During my time in online advertising at least everything was CPM because clicks were basically fraud vectors.

SixteenBlue wrote:
Stele wrote:

I've never purposefully clicked on a YouTube ad. Most I skip as soon as the 5 seconds are up.

They really make money from them?

No one really pays for ad clicks anymore. You pay per impression. The 5 seconds you spent waiting is what they want and what they got.

Edit: heh Gremlin says otherwise. During my time in online advertising at least everything was CPM because clicks were basically fraud vectors.

Yeah my company does this kind of work on YT, FB and Twitter and we pay for clicks, not impressions. I think when you collaborate with a publisher on sponsored content that they publish and distribute, they typically charge based on impressions (though clicks are still a benchmark they measure against). Of course we usually target our ads at very specific audiences and blacklist sketchy websites (e.g. Breitbart), which reduces the chance for fraudulent clicks.

I was an arrogant "Ads don't work on me" dude for years, until a while ago, I was in the grocery store looking for deodorant. I don't have a specific brand, so instead, I'm looking at like 50 different brands and trying to figure out which one to get, and then had the thought "Oh, Old Spice, their ads are funny."

And about .5 seconds later, I went "Ooohhhhhhhhhhh. That's how they get you."

Setting up a Pi-hole this weekend just to get rid of ads entirely. Managed to break my first Raspberry Pi taking the card out earlier this week, and the new one I got today doesn't quite fit in the case thanks to some new pins, so time to get out the X-Acto knife and see if I can avoid the ER trimming some plastic.

Prederick wrote:

I was an arrogant "Ads don't work on me" dude for years, until a while ago, I was in the grocery store looking for deodorant. I don't have a specific brand, so instead, I'm looking at like 50 different brands and trying to figure out which one to get, and then had the thought "Oh, Old Spice, their ads are funny."

And about .5 seconds later, I went "Ooohhhhhhhhhhh. That's how they get you."

*Old Spice jingle music* *eye twinkle*

I'm on a horse.

BadKen wrote:

I'm on a horse.

Terry loves Old Spice.
At least it's a decent enough product.

I like to think of myself as ad resistant as well, but I'm sure there is some sort of deep subconscious BS that tips the scales ever-so-slightly-but-still-just-enough to grabbing one product over another. I feel like I genuinely have particular tastes with most of my purchases, but, akin to the aforementioned deodorant example, there has got to be some purchases in which I have a very low investment for which product I choose so my lazy brain just gravitates towards a familiar logo.

That's one thing I like about Costco. They pay their employees well, and they give me very limited options. Also, they have the wonderful benefit of not being Sam's Club.

Mechakoopa wrote:

I feel like I genuinely have particular tastes with most of my purchases, but, akin to the aforementioned deodorant example, there has got to be some purchases in which I have a very low investment for which product I choose so my lazy brain just gravitates towards a familiar logo.

That's one thing I like about Costco. They pay their employees well, and they give me very limited options. Also, they have the wonderful benefit of not being Sam's Club.

I feel the same way, maybe even more extreme. I don't care anymore if some ad prevented me from reaching my full individuality, I just want to be happy.

I'd rather save my willpower for stuff like how they pay their employees, or if they are making the market worse for consumers.

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.

Motherboard wrote:

At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

...

JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”

“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

f*ck. Twitter gets the problem at least even though they won't fix it.

Yet CNN, NBC, etc keep inviting the white nationalists on TV every week in the name of both sides-ism

Stele wrote:

f*ck. Twitter gets the problem at least even though they won't fix it.

Yet CNN, NBC, etc keep inviting the white nationalists on TV every week in the name of both sides-ism eyeballs at any cost

Yeah I don't see the difference. TV networks won't bring on ISIS reps either.

The US as a whole has decided that banning one side is too expensive, so it doesn't happen.

A shift in the discussion I've noticed after the recent synagogue attack: people who are familiar with the internet hate groups are pointing out that an awful lot of these "lone wolves" are posting their attacks to 8chan and getting egged on. And that law enforcement taking a closer look at the site would likely get them swiftly shuttered if the FBI was diligent about it.