Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

maybe you are the sockpuppet?

A social group implies at least 2 persons.

Even if two people are in a room, and they start having a conversation what you find is that they will try to

* Censor / Re-Imagine themselves to present their POV in a better way

* Censor / Manipulate the other person to force their POV unto them.

The online is a complete extension of the offline, so its perfectly normal for all this to happen, even all the time !

Except for your constant defence of them of course

This is why I'm not particularly thrilled about programs passing the Turing test. As soon as we have programs that can write credibly human-sounding comments on sites like this, many conversations will be controlled by whoever can afford the largest sockpuppet farm. Also, for every post on the actual threads of interest, there will be dozens of comments on every thread designed to increase karma. Automated karma whoring might even be more injurious than the direct intervention, because it will increase the groupthink tendencies already present.

Some might say we're already half way there. I disagree. Yes, Google or Apple employees might swamp an occasional thread here and there, either openly or covertly, but what I'm talking about would be a whole order of magnitude worse and constant.

I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process.

A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently:

1. Subject change

2. False comparison

3. Claim of too many opponents

4. Silence

5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion.

6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand)

7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one.

8. The bible.

9. Redefinition of common words.

10. Personal attack.

11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it)

12. Excess verbosity.

What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen.

I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination:

Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again...

Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve.

But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy.

This led me to another realization:

We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy.

Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate.

Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker:

They will trump an effective debater in a dialog.

Interesting isn't it?