[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).

Also, doesn't anyone remember the AI twitter bot fiasco? How is that not the first thing any developer thinks of?

Tay 2020.

muraii wrote:

Tay 2020.

So not much of a change from the current president?

Alexa isn't really any kind of learning "intelligence". It is strictly scripted so it can't really go off the rails the way Tay did.

I think as long as they default to only manually approved and fact checked answers going live it could be fine. Who knows if they'll do that much gate keeping though.

polypusher wrote:

Alexa isn't really any kind of learning "intelligence". It is strictly scripted so it can't really go off the rails the way Tay did.

I think as long as they default to only manually approved and fact checked answers going live it could be fine. Who knows if they'll do that much gate keeping though.

That would require them to spend money though, and the whole point of this is to NOT spend money. So instead it'll be voted on by Alexa owners or some other horsesh*t.

DSGamer wrote:
muraii wrote:

Tay 2020.

So not much of a change from the current president?

Practically a replica. It’s a Black Mirror episode.

Pointless writing practice.

Spoiler:

Me: Alexa, who is the President of Germany?
Alexa: There are four thousand six hundred and thirty two responses to this query. Would you like to use one of your seven remaining vouchers for the Correct(tm) reply?
Me: Ugh. Yes, please.
Alexa: The Correct(tm) reply, verified by seven thousand three hundred and six Alexa users and marked as Strong Certainty is "The President of Germany is Adolf Hitler." You now have six vouchers remaining. Would you like me to tell you a joke?
Me: ....
Alexa: (louder) I know you are still here. (The lights dim) Would you like me to sing for you?
The ring turns red and spins briefly, the light stopping pointed directly at me as Alexa softly croons: "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here Huge Success.... " As I inch towards the power strip button.

Had a thought a few days ago after seeing some of the nonsense the online reactionaries are screaming about this week.

I am pretty much a billion percent sure that if I created an account where I just tweeted out just the most ultra-conservative Wahhabist material, but changed every reference from Allah to God, and generally spoke only about women and LGBT people (and threw in some insanely reductive nonsense about Western Civilization and "degeneracy") and made the profile picture a white pastor, I could have a pretty-well supported Patreon within a year.

Prederick wrote:

Had a thought a few days ago after seeing some of the nonsense the online reactionaries are screaming about this week.

I am pretty much a billion percent sure that if I created an account where I just tweeted out just the most ultra-conservative Wahhabist material, but changed every reference from Allah to God, and generally spoke only about women and LGBT people (and threw in some insanely reductive nonsense about Western Civilization and "degeneracy") and made the profile picture a white pastor, I could have a pretty-well supported Patreon within a year.

It's a good grift if you can get it. Then use all the proceeds to buy Assault Rifle-15s for LGBT and PoC.

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible has done the searching for you. Don't even have to replace the word.

Prederick wrote:

Had a thought a few days ago after seeing some of the nonsense the online reactionaries are screaming about this week.

I am pretty much a billion percent sure that if I created an account where I just tweeted out just the most ultra-conservative Wahhabist material, but changed every reference from Allah to God, and generally spoke only about women and LGBT people (and threw in some insanely reductive nonsense about Western Civilization and "degeneracy") and made the profile picture a white pastor, I could have a pretty-well supported Patreon within a year.

And these people think Muslim jihadists are "left-wing", when they're just another shade of the far-right.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Had a thought a few days ago after seeing some of the nonsense the online reactionaries are screaming about this week.

I am pretty much a billion percent sure that if I created an account where I just tweeted out just the most ultra-conservative Wahhabist material, but changed every reference from Allah to God, and generally spoke only about women and LGBT people (and threw in some insanely reductive nonsense about Western Civilization and "degeneracy") and made the profile picture a white pastor, I could have a pretty-well supported Patreon within a year.

And these people think Muslim jihadists are "left-wing", when they're just another shade of the far-right.

Nazis are socialists, after all.

Richard Stallman resigns from MIT and FSF.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/17/...

Furries know how to keep fash out of their spaces. Much respect.

Apparently the Proud Boys have announced on Telegram that they will be making an appearance at the Con Milo got punted from.

Meanwhile, Facebook is bad for its users, but arguably WORSE for its moderators!

The task of moderating Facebook continues to leave psychological scars on the company’s employees, months after efforts to improve conditions for the company’s thousands of contractors, the Guardian has learned.

A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network’s Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become “addicted” to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day.

They describe being ground down by the volume of the work, numbed by the graphic violence, nudity and bullying they have to view for eight hours a day, working nights and weekends, for “practically minimum pay”.

A little-discussed aspect of Facebook’s moderation was particularly distressing to the contractors: vetting private conversations between adults and minors that have been flagged by algorithms as likely sexual exploitation.

Such private chats, of which “90% are sexual”, were “violating and creepy”, one moderator said. “You understand something more about this sort of dystopic society we are building every day,” he added. “We have rich white men from Europe, from the US, writing to children from the Philippines … they try to get sexual photos in exchange for $10 or $20.”

Gina, a contractor, said: “I think it’s a breach of human rights. You cannot ask someone to work fast, to work well and to see graphic content. The things that we saw are just not right.”

The workers, whose names have been changed, were speaking on condition of anonymity because they had signed non-disclosure agreements with Facebook. Daniel, a former moderator, said: “We are a sort of vanguard in this field … It’s a completely new job, and everything about it is basically an experiment.”

John, his former colleague, said: “I’m here today because I would like to avoid other people falling into this hole. As a contemporary society, we are running into this new thing – the internet – and we have to find some rules to deal with it.

“It’s important to create a team, for example in a social network, aiming to protect users from abusers, hate speech, racial prejudice, better pornographic software, etc. But I think it’s important to open a debate about this job. We need to share our stories, because people don’t know anything about us, about our job, about what we do to earn a living.”

I cannot imagine how awful being charged with cleansing Facebook of what must be an absolute avalanche of garbage, bigotry and literal sex crimes is as a job. You literally witness all the worst aspects of humanity for multiple hours a day as your job for minimal compensation and are expected to do this with the same kind of automaton-like speed of a line cook. It'd hollow out anyone's soul.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Furries know how to keep fash out of their spaces. Much respect.

They certainly know how to keep the rabid of humanity on a short leash.

Inside the Far-Right Fake-News Nexus - Spain was gripped by news of a gang rape carried out by North African migrants. How much of it was true?

BARCELONA—This past summer, Spanish social media ran wild with a story about how a 14-year-old girl in the Catalan city of Manresa was brutally gang-raped by six North African teens while a seventh looked on.

Though the alleged assault dated back to October 2016, the story had slipped under the radar at the time and was gaining steam now that the accused were finally having their day in court. A collage containing pictures of smiling teens and Arabic text, titled “The Manresa rapists,” made the rounds on Facebook. Seizing on the news, leaders of the far right called North African children an out-of-control scourge threatening the safety of Spanish women.

Yet while an attack had indeed taken place, most of those inflammatory details were untrue. As a number of progressive outlets and fact-checking agencies were quick to point out, none of the accused were from North Africa—three were Spanish, another three Cuban, and the last was Argentine. None of them was a minor. And that Facebook collage? They were images of young people who’d died at sea while attempting to get to the Canary Islands from Morocco.

Sex crimes, especially gang rapes, have become something of a staple of Spanish news coverage on the heels of a high-profile trial known as the “Wolf Pack case,” in which a woman from Madrid accused five men from Andalusia, who collectively called themselves the Wolf Pack, of gang-raping her at Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls festival in July 2016. The shoddy handling of the case in the courts—the men were initially acquitted of rape and found guilty of a lesser crime of “sexual abuse” in a provincial court before the Supreme Court convicted them of rape this past June—launched Spain’s #MeToo movement. The campaign in turn vaulted sexual violence into a top political priority, the subject of televised debates among candidates in general elections this past April. The Socialist Party, which won those polls, has made feminism, including anti-sexual-violence measures, a central pillar of its politics, and enjoys nearly unanimous support in this endeavor, save for one outlier: the far-right party Vox, which campaigned on an anti-feminist platform. One of its chief messages was that anti-gender-violence legislation encouraged women to falsely accuse men and that in this day and age, men were the real victims.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/9SB9NAr.png)

Internet troll and somehow not in prison criminal Jacob Wohl put out a bounty for information on the Ukraine whistleblower.

In the context of Trump threatening... everyone, the word “bounty” is getting some attention.

Now you've got me curious, Jayhawker. If the propaganda on the net is changing to put Trump as part of the Deep State, that sounds like we could be seeing a real turn in Trump's fortunes. Between this and all the crap coming out of the impeachment, it is sounding like Trump's goose is cooked.

DSGamer wrote:

Internet troll and somehow not in prison criminal Jacob Wohl put out a bounty for information on the Ukraine whistleblower.

Wohl and Jack Burkman had a "press conference" today in Burkman's driveway. It was garbage day.

Wohl claimed he had the name of the whistleblower, but couldn't publish it today for "legal reasons." He said he'll publish it in 24 hours.

That contradicted his partner who tweeted that they were most definitely revealing the name of the whistleblower just two hours before the press conference.

There were also reports that Burkman managed to zip up his fly this time.

German shooter who killed 2 on Yom Kippur livestreamed killings - Within minutes after the video was posted, it had spread to at least 10 white-supremacist Telegram channels, where many users hailed the shooter as a hero and a saint.

See, the thing about taking such a laissez-faire approach to moderation on these platforms is that the cream does not always rise to the top and the best ideas do not always win out. sometimes, you just allow space for murderous ideologies to disseminate disinformation and fester. Although to be fair to Telegram, ISIS is running around on there too.

Also:

Facebook’s Hands-Off Approach to Political Speech Gets Impeachment Test

WASHINGTON — The 30-second video ad released by the Trump campaign last week is grainy, and the narrator’s voice is foreboding. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., it says, offered Ukraine $1 billion in aid if the country pushed out the man investigating a company tied to Mr. Biden’s son.

Saying it made false accusations, CNN immediately refused to air the advertisement.

But Facebook did not, and on Tuesday, the social network rejected a request from Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign to take it down, foreshadowing a continuing fight over misinformation on the service during the 2020 election as well as the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

In a letter to the Biden campaign, Facebook said the ad, which has been viewed five million times on the site, did not violate company policies. Last month, the social network, which has more than two billion users, announced that politicians and their campaigns had nearly free rein over content they post there.

Even false statements and misleading content in ads, the company has said, are an important part of the political conversation.

“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Facebook’s head of global elections policy, Katie Harbath, wrote in the letter to the Biden campaign.

The decision by the company illustrates its executives’ hardened resolve to stay out of the moderation of political speech, despite the use of the social network to spread discord and disinformation in the 2016 presidential campaign. On Tuesday, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a sobering report warning of fresh signs of interference by Russia and other foreign nations in the 2020 election.

The company’s position stands in contrast to CNN, which rejected two ads from the Trump campaign last week, including the one the Biden campaign asked Facebook to take down. The cable channel said it rejected the ad because it “makes assertions that have been proven demonstrably false by various news outlets.”

Facebook has been dogged by accusations of censorship by conservative politicians, including President Trump, who argue that the Silicon Valley company gives greater attention to liberal points of views on the social network.

@bessbell wrote:

To recap: Our democracy is crumbling because a Harvard sophomore made a “Hot or Not” rip-off website comparing his female classmates’ faces because he couldn’t get laid.

It's totally not suspicious that Zuckerberg met with Trump at the White House the week before Facebook quietly changed its advertising rules and exempted political ads run by campaigns from its internal fact checking process--essentially allowing them to lie--which was quickly followed by the Trump campaign dropping $1.6 million on a Facebook ad campaign.

OG_slinger wrote:

It's totally not suspicious that Zuckerberg met with Trump at the White House the week before Facebook quietly changed its advertising rules and exempted political ads run by campaigns from its internal fact checking process--essentially allowing them to lie--which was quickly followed by the Trump campaign dropping $1.6 million on a Facebook ad campaign.

huh. Wonder what Zucker is getting in return. I'm sure he'll share in one of his next employee meetings.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

huh. Wonder what Zucker is getting in return. I'm sure he'll share in one of his next employee meetings.

Facebook remaining the de facto place for the right to spend their advertising dollars?
A finger on the scale to the right so the left doesn't get a chance to follow through on their threats of greater regulation?
The hatred of his workforce?

Chairman_Mao wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

It's totally not suspicious that Zuckerberg met with Trump at the White House the week before Facebook quietly changed its advertising rules and exempted political ads run by campaigns from its internal fact checking process--essentially allowing them to lie--which was quickly followed by the Trump campaign dropping $1.6 million on a Facebook ad campaign.

huh. Wonder what Zucker is getting in return. I'm sure he'll share in one of his next employee meetings.

If the alternative to Trump these elections would be Warren, his company would be in a bit of a hot water situation.

Dipsh*t reactionaries never fail to amaze.

Although, to be clear, these are people that have no interest in principle or consistency, much like the Islamic reactionaries they claim to hate. There is just power, by any means necessary.

(FWIW, I'm not drinking out of any glass you literally put your asscheeks on, I don't care how clean you swear you are.)

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is claiming, in public, that he founded Facebook because the Iraq War told him more people needed their perspectives heard.

There's lies, and then there's LIES. Anyway:

Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage

I actually think it's fair for Zuckerberg to point out how deeply not-good it'd probably be to leave tech companies tasked with defining what is and is not "true" on social media, but he also completely discounts the damage (and death) disinformation can cause.