The downfall of twitter activism, Trolling and Social Media.
As I mentioned a few days ago I use 4chan pretty regularly and have been witness to a lot of the shenanigans which the site is famous for over the last few years.
Recently the users decided to troll online feminist groups using Twitter which they found remarkably easy to do in very little time. This was easy because there is a large amount of people online who don't think about how valid the person they're talking to via social media actually is. I'm not really going to go in to the details of "Operation Lollipop"(a name given to the ruse after the fact by the people who had been trolled, believe me if it was called that I would have known about it) or the politics, I'm more interested in the ease in creating a false persona online.
To infiltrate online feminist groups all the users had to do was create multiple accounts on Twitter and then agree with prominent members of the groups over and over again until they were accepted or followed. Then they'd follow more people and more people would follow them. In a very short time a small army of users had built up credibility with very little effort. They were then able, using this small amount of influence, to bring more fake accounts into the fold by vouching for them(following them, retweeting them and favouriting them) until a few dozen people had several thousand people following them.
Then they waited.
Online hashtag campaigns are, to my mind, as stupid as hell. But they're popular because they require almost no work and at the same time they provide a sense of achievement which you'd otherwise have to actually work to get. Protesting on the streets is risky and requires co-ordination and planning and permits that a lot of people just don't have the patience for these days. But the thing about IR(In Real Life) protesting is that when a person shows up you know that they're just one person, it isn't easy to pretend to be twenty different people when you're standing in front of the person you've been lying to. Also actual protests in real life tend to attract slightly more reactions from the public unless you're very lucky and very popular online and even that can fizzle pretty quickly(Kony 2012!).
What the trolls of 4chan did was wait for a particularly stupid hashtag to start gaining some kind of momentum(#endfathersday) and then jump on it creating a sensation of a movement. Contrary to what some articles claim the hastag was not a creation of the trolls, but it was their tool. By supporting something very close to what a lot of their "friends" did the trolls were able to create an in-group of people who were saying things that were patently ridiculous but seemed to be popular and accepted. This lead to actual people agreeing with and supporting the idea that we should get rid of fathers day because men don't have any part in making children. This wasn't the first hashtag which they'd done this but it was the first time they'd really promoted something this hard compared to just nudging things along as they had in the past.
The primary result of this was that a few dozen people made a few hundred people look like idiots with only a few hours of work spread across a few months. The secondary result of this is that online feminist groups are now "running scared" and acting very paranoid about just who is a real person and who isn't. To make matters more interesting many of the troll accounts pretended to be Black and Asian so now quite a few actual non-white non-troll feminists have been cast out from various groups creating even greater divisions within their movement(which was part of the reasoning behind the trolls choice of racial identity, they recognised that the feminist movement is very divided down racial lines #whitepeopleproblems and have attempted to drive a wedge down there in the event of getting exposed). The politics of the thing have been interesting enough but the fallout has been what attracted my attention the most, damage control as people realised they've been had as well as attempts to fix the damage(difficult because Trolls took screenshots of the now deleted tweets) and try to re-steer the movement back on track.
But I don't think it will be as easy as they think it will. The level of paranoia is high amongst former friends and the fact that most of these are people who've never met offline as well as some people who use pseudonyms for various reasons makes actually verifying who is a feminist and who is a 25 year old guy with a minimum wage job and nothing better to do than waste a few hours making someone else look stupid is going to be difficult if not impossible.
The question of why? also rises up at times like these, these trolls seem to have no reason other than causing pain to do what they do. But the reality is that they don't really see what they're doing as causing pain, they're just embarrassing people who they feel can afford to be taken down a peg. Do we question why John Stewart and the Daily show mock politicians? Why Monty Python mocked the aristocracy?
The fact that some people consider this to be so painful is part of the amusement factor to online trolls who've long considered that people online take themselves too seriously. A lot of these people were around before normals showed up(the arrival of AOL created what some people refer to as the Eternal September) and they find the self-righteous and online-obsessed people to be a betrayal of the early anarchic days of the internet and usenet.
By attacking these groups in the most benign way humanly possible(words on a screen) and then watching the over-reaction and ensuing mess these guys re-assert their beliefs that they are the dominate online lifeform, capable of weathering the storms. This is likely because a lot of these people, despite being online all the time, rarely have an online reputation or persona. They remain anonymous and aren't tied to any account or any service, they see people who invest time and effort into sites like Twitter and Reddit(Karma is anathema to anonymous users) and fail to see the point of it all. They see it as people creating hierarchies in the one and only place in human history where such constructs aren't necessary. They see people building houses on sand and try to will the waves to come.
In the next twenty years we will start to see the first politicians emerge who grew up with the internet, they'll have some racist jokes from when they were thirteen on Facebook pulled out and paraded around, they'll have pictures of themselves from parties dressed as Hitler(I went to a costume party dressed as Hitler once(the theme was Dictators and Superheroes), it was fun but then I had to catch a cab home, not easy when you're the Führer). Their online identity is entwined with who they are and it won't do them any favours going forwards.
Some other things I wanted to talk about but didn't really get time to do:
My Day.
My last day of Volunteer work until the next term!
Pretty easy day, I woke up and phoned the guy who was meant to be coming over for dinner tonight(an old neighbour of my brothers) but he had to cancel so I put the word out on Facebook that there was an opening for anyone interested in a free dinner. Around lunch time I got a text from a mate from school saying he was free and was keen on getting fed so that was sorted out.
I got to school and shelved the books, then I faced the shelves up so they looked neat and tidy and then I kind of killed the day sitting around. With no-one borrowing because the holidays are on next week all we can do is return books and shelve them. So all I did all day was sit around and occasionally shelve books. Eventually I got tired of it and I went and organised the Vietnamese language shelves so that they're actually in order for once(Nyguen is a very very common name in Vietnamese I've learnt today).
We had a good crowd in during lunchtime, nothing too memorable except I kept having to tell kids they couldn't borrow which was sad because they had these depressed looks on their little faces when they found out that they couldn't borrow right now.
I left just before the last bell of the day rang and can honestly say I'm going to miss it for the next few weeks until I can come back. Unless, obviously, I get a job between now and then in which case I'll be happier doing that and getting paid.
After that I went home and made some nice Beef Goulash for dinner, caught up with my mate Daniel who enjoyed the food, sorted out my brothers bath and bedtime stuff and then I went to bed at about 9pm. I'm constantly amazed by how early I'm going to sleep the last few weeks. I'm used to being awake when the sun rises so this change is startling to me.
YouTube Clip of the day.
I don't know why but I found it hilarious to contrast Seventh Heaven with the theme from Inception and the slang from an online shooter game.
Recently the users decided to troll online feminist groups using Twitter which they found remarkably easy to do in very little time. This was easy because there is a large amount of people online who don't think about how valid the person they're talking to via social media actually is. I'm not really going to go in to the details of "Operation Lollipop"(a name given to the ruse after the fact by the people who had been trolled, believe me if it was called that I would have known about it) or the politics, I'm more interested in the ease in creating a false persona online.
To infiltrate online feminist groups all the users had to do was create multiple accounts on Twitter and then agree with prominent members of the groups over and over again until they were accepted or followed. Then they'd follow more people and more people would follow them. In a very short time a small army of users had built up credibility with very little effort. They were then able, using this small amount of influence, to bring more fake accounts into the fold by vouching for them(following them, retweeting them and favouriting them) until a few dozen people had several thousand people following them.
Then they waited.
Online hashtag campaigns are, to my mind, as stupid as hell. But they're popular because they require almost no work and at the same time they provide a sense of achievement which you'd otherwise have to actually work to get. Protesting on the streets is risky and requires co-ordination and planning and permits that a lot of people just don't have the patience for these days. But the thing about IR(In Real Life) protesting is that when a person shows up you know that they're just one person, it isn't easy to pretend to be twenty different people when you're standing in front of the person you've been lying to. Also actual protests in real life tend to attract slightly more reactions from the public unless you're very lucky and very popular online and even that can fizzle pretty quickly(Kony 2012!).
What the trolls of 4chan did was wait for a particularly stupid hashtag to start gaining some kind of momentum(#endfathersday) and then jump on it creating a sensation of a movement. Contrary to what some articles claim the hastag was not a creation of the trolls, but it was their tool. By supporting something very close to what a lot of their "friends" did the trolls were able to create an in-group of people who were saying things that were patently ridiculous but seemed to be popular and accepted. This lead to actual people agreeing with and supporting the idea that we should get rid of fathers day because men don't have any part in making children. This wasn't the first hashtag which they'd done this but it was the first time they'd really promoted something this hard compared to just nudging things along as they had in the past.
The primary result of this was that a few dozen people made a few hundred people look like idiots with only a few hours of work spread across a few months. The secondary result of this is that online feminist groups are now "running scared" and acting very paranoid about just who is a real person and who isn't. To make matters more interesting many of the troll accounts pretended to be Black and Asian so now quite a few actual non-white non-troll feminists have been cast out from various groups creating even greater divisions within their movement(which was part of the reasoning behind the trolls choice of racial identity, they recognised that the feminist movement is very divided down racial lines #whitepeopleproblems and have attempted to drive a wedge down there in the event of getting exposed). The politics of the thing have been interesting enough but the fallout has been what attracted my attention the most, damage control as people realised they've been had as well as attempts to fix the damage(difficult because Trolls took screenshots of the now deleted tweets) and try to re-steer the movement back on track.
But I don't think it will be as easy as they think it will. The level of paranoia is high amongst former friends and the fact that most of these are people who've never met offline as well as some people who use pseudonyms for various reasons makes actually verifying who is a feminist and who is a 25 year old guy with a minimum wage job and nothing better to do than waste a few hours making someone else look stupid is going to be difficult if not impossible.
The question of why? also rises up at times like these, these trolls seem to have no reason other than causing pain to do what they do. But the reality is that they don't really see what they're doing as causing pain, they're just embarrassing people who they feel can afford to be taken down a peg. Do we question why John Stewart and the Daily show mock politicians? Why Monty Python mocked the aristocracy?
The fact that some people consider this to be so painful is part of the amusement factor to online trolls who've long considered that people online take themselves too seriously. A lot of these people were around before normals showed up(the arrival of AOL created what some people refer to as the Eternal September) and they find the self-righteous and online-obsessed people to be a betrayal of the early anarchic days of the internet and usenet.
By attacking these groups in the most benign way humanly possible(words on a screen) and then watching the over-reaction and ensuing mess these guys re-assert their beliefs that they are the dominate online lifeform, capable of weathering the storms. This is likely because a lot of these people, despite being online all the time, rarely have an online reputation or persona. They remain anonymous and aren't tied to any account or any service, they see people who invest time and effort into sites like Twitter and Reddit(Karma is anathema to anonymous users) and fail to see the point of it all. They see it as people creating hierarchies in the one and only place in human history where such constructs aren't necessary. They see people building houses on sand and try to will the waves to come.
In the next twenty years we will start to see the first politicians emerge who grew up with the internet, they'll have some racist jokes from when they were thirteen on Facebook pulled out and paraded around, they'll have pictures of themselves from parties dressed as Hitler(I went to a costume party dressed as Hitler once(the theme was Dictators and Superheroes), it was fun but then I had to catch a cab home, not easy when you're the Führer). Their online identity is entwined with who they are and it won't do them any favours going forwards.
Some other things I wanted to talk about but didn't really get time to do:
- Undercover police need fake online identities to work.
- Fake Facebook friends who're robots stealing your data.
- Buying fake Twitter followers, $10 will get you about 1000 people so you look like you're popular.
- My own fake online identity, I created a fake Facebook account under the name A. Machineo so I could play the Tetris game I have which limits the number of games you can play per day unless you pay money. Alternet has one friend and it isn't me, he also has a Twitter account I think and an Email Account. Basically he looks kind of real and with half an hours work I could make him look very much real.
My Day.
My last day of Volunteer work until the next term!
Pretty easy day, I woke up and phoned the guy who was meant to be coming over for dinner tonight(an old neighbour of my brothers) but he had to cancel so I put the word out on Facebook that there was an opening for anyone interested in a free dinner. Around lunch time I got a text from a mate from school saying he was free and was keen on getting fed so that was sorted out.
I got to school and shelved the books, then I faced the shelves up so they looked neat and tidy and then I kind of killed the day sitting around. With no-one borrowing because the holidays are on next week all we can do is return books and shelve them. So all I did all day was sit around and occasionally shelve books. Eventually I got tired of it and I went and organised the Vietnamese language shelves so that they're actually in order for once(Nyguen is a very very common name in Vietnamese I've learnt today).
We had a good crowd in during lunchtime, nothing too memorable except I kept having to tell kids they couldn't borrow which was sad because they had these depressed looks on their little faces when they found out that they couldn't borrow right now.
I left just before the last bell of the day rang and can honestly say I'm going to miss it for the next few weeks until I can come back. Unless, obviously, I get a job between now and then in which case I'll be happier doing that and getting paid.
After that I went home and made some nice Beef Goulash for dinner, caught up with my mate Daniel who enjoyed the food, sorted out my brothers bath and bedtime stuff and then I went to bed at about 9pm. I'm constantly amazed by how early I'm going to sleep the last few weeks. I'm used to being awake when the sun rises so this change is startling to me.
YouTube Clip of the day.
I don't know why but I found it hilarious to contrast Seventh Heaven with the theme from Inception and the slang from an online shooter game.
Click to view