Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

I'm not sure how alarmed I am by this. I certainly have seen this in action on Wikipedia at least, if not on the scale described, but I have little doubt it occurs and I can think of a couple events whose online conversations show evidence of this sort of manipulation.

To some degree I admit, when I see the overwhelming online conversation swaying in one direction, it does influence. On the other hand, partially because I know online conversation manipulation is out there, I become less prone to read comments. I used to always read comments to Economist articles for example, now I rarely do.

Ultimately, if there is online conversation manipulation but people barely pay attention to it, it will be overwhelmed by all the other random sources of influence in our lives. Whether, traffic, etc. all play some influence on our opinions, if the impact of the online conversation manipulation is less than that, I am not alarmed.

There are two other aspects of this worth thinking about:

1. What is the problem we have with online conversation manipulation? Is it the sock-puppets alone? If you replace sock-puppets with volunteers, is that different enough? If you take volunteers who otherwise wouldn't participate in that online conversation, is that different enough? What are the aspects of this that are different from a legitimate campaign to change the opinions of others about a position you think is profoundly wrong.

2. One sad aspect of this is that it dilutes the impact of anonymous or semi-anonymous voices on the web. This was a short-cut to influence for ordinary web users. On the other hand, this is in a way natural, whenever the impact of a medium becomes popularly recognized, more people will try to utilize that medium, and its impact will be diluted. In the same way, just having a website used to be a short-cut to influence, but now has little effect.

tptaceck, someone's talking about you.

Notably, I also found out a few other dynamics:

Personification trumps vilification and ridicule.

Let's take something really ugly, like abortion. People will post up the ugly pictures and they will post up their favorite slogans, and they will denigrate opponents with brutalities like, "baby killer"

This kind of noise completely destroys rational advocacy / debate on the topic, which is why religion and politics are often discouraged in technical and other discussion venues.

Now, personify it. I took a story from Brazil where a 9 year old girl was raped by her father, her mother wanted to get an abortion for her, and the church, state, father and others wanted to deny the girl that.

Instead of the usual advocacy path, I asked people what they personally would say to the little girl who doesn't want to carry a pregnancy.

This required they simulate the scenario, and express their thoughts as actions, or virtual actions in this case, rather than just pull out their favorite "pokemon battle card" type sayings...

Amazingly, the dialog split into two camps!

The majority of participants answered honestly, and were quite disturbed at the experience. The majority said they would not tell the little girl no, regardless of their personal beliefs / preferences. It was the human thing to do.

For those ideologues who were being absolutist about it, they would not answer, because they would reveal cracks in their black and white vision of things, so they vilified instead! And it was intense.

The rest of the group turned on them, and they got shouted down. Secondly, that experience changed the group dynamics. Abortion noise is no longer tolerated like it was before. It's potency as a distraction is now much less in that venue. The personification really impacted people.

Edit: One absolutist actually said the right answer was to cut the girl open after she has carried the baby far enough along to be viable. The group response to this was harsh, and they were banned.

I personally took a lot of heat for that disturbing approach and had to apologize for the rough dialog. And I did, citing my interest in finding out what trumps what. This was well received, but the whole thing was expensive emotionally.

Honestly, this is one of the few times I've ever seen the noise machine beat back into submission like that.

Lesson there somewhere.

(Yes, this is an area of interest of mine, and I've been running little experiments for some time as the problem identified in this thread is growing rapidly and we have few answers. I find the use of data intriguing, and I plan to do some reading to better understand what other options we may have.)

I'd like to register my objection to the currently fashionable, yet toxic idea that when a point of view is only 95% stomped out that that is still a sign of "sock puppetry" and that the remaining dissent, rather than being celebrated, must be stomped out even harder... and then that this is treated as some sort of improvement of public discourse instead of an inevitable degradation of it.

This is, admittedly, not 100% a reply to any of the ancestors of this post, but, well, it's definitely an opportune time. Labeling all disagreement as "sock puppetry" is already a popular rhetorical dodge and this news is only going to make that worse. If you want real free discourse, you need real diversity of viewpoints and you need to foster that diversity, not insist on conformity.

If the only place that diversity is coming from truly is sock puppets, well, I would consider that a condemnation of the community in question. (And make sure you read that sentence very carefully before replying; it doesn't say "we should trust the sock puppets" (hardly!). It means that there should be diversity in the community, before we add in any viewpoints, right or wrong, expressed by sock puppets.)

Somehow you reminded me this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/810/