Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

"Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" (2012), or how Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf

How Google's use of social signals backfired, badly.

"'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars", or how Google's use of "local" information backfired. "http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf" (2010)

Google's merge of data from Google Maps into the main search engine results created a whole new branch of local SEO spam.

The fundamental problem is that the creation of fake online identities is cheap and easy. This can be partially fixed by taking a tough line on identity, but that's hard for services which are either big or have only a casual connection with their users. Facebook ran into the gay agenda enforcing a real names policy.

The mobile guys can at least make people buy a phone to fake an identity. (A phone number is not enough; you can rent fake phone numbers. See "http://www.attlines.com) An app that phones home with too much user information, though, is hard to fake cheaply. Yelp can tell if your phone has been to the place you're rating.

After mulling your comment over, I realize the best path on this might be to provide open information. This is likely to operate under the same kinds of dynamics information security currently does.

So, let me just put it out there, maybe sort of a mini "Ask HN?"

Really, I'm unsure how to proceed. I understand quite a bit about this and after a quick look around, I may well be quite a ways into this stuff without having realized it...

I started about 8 years ago. Found a smaller venue where all but criminal speech is OK. Moderation is very light, and the number of participants is modest, say 20 very regular contributors and another 50 or so transient ones.

Consistency in the regulars makes for a great control, and there is a discussion archive for analysis and data over time. I used this archive along with various experiments to better understand how this all works.

Being able to go back through archives, look at intent, outcomes, dynamics and a fairly regular set of recurring, high pain topics, meant being able to run a few different scenarios with a reasonable control.

The other thing I did was take ideas from those adventures and apply them professionally as well as on much larger, higher prominence venues.

Overall, I was able to impact dialogs, sometimes to a considerable degree, and others have expressed interest as you have.

For some considerable time, I've been aware of the "sock puppet" type activity, as well as another interesting dynamic where people aligned with some political and economic forces actually take on a fairly professional type role without realizing it. They take the "battle cards" they are given and use them more frequently than they do contribute original content.

Affirmation and confirmation run high in the list of gratifying social media / forum type experiences.

People enjoy the sport of it, but they also use that sport to affirm themselves too. This makes things personal on a level we aren't talking about very much.

Here's a sample:

Take a mind. Barring some abuse, it's a potent mind, able to reason and understand fact vs opinion, etc...

Now, say that mind lies for whatever reason. What happens? The mind is now fragmented, or compartmentalized into the whole, vital, rational portion, and another portion that is associated with the lie. Reason is now somewhat broken and or diminished as the mind has to manage it's lie to avoid being caught on it, and one implication of that is extreme difficulty having dialogs that cross a boundary.

This is seen when seemingly rational people break down on a topic, based on a trigger word, etc... They quite literally can't resolve it normally due to the fact that who they are is all mixed up with this lie and the need to manage it.

Ordinarily, this kind of thing can resolve when it's made OK for them to own the lie, punch through, heal, let the compartment dissolve, and they are once again whole, not impacted by any of that mess.

So now take that dynamic and consider when somebody elevates faith to fact, or buys into some propaganda and associates that with positive affirmation for themselves. Say they are a bigot, or something, and rather than doing the work to resolve the bigotry and grow as a human, they seek affirmation and confirmation for the bigotry.

How much is that ongoing affirmation worth to them, compared to owning a character issue?

Turns out, that is worth a lot! They will write the letter, cast the vote, call the friend, buy the product, and so forth to support that source of normalization.

In this way, advocacy is more powerful than debate, due to the fragmented reason limiting the potency of debate and it's rational basis. Worse, advocacy coupled with propaganda and a lot of repetition can solidify these compartments or boundaries leaving people rigid and unable to process contradictory information!

We end up with a more polarized dialog and when we look across the scope of major issues, actually reaching common ground, or some consensus becomes personal! It's quite literally a threat to somebody on a basic level to join up with their peers and do something we can live with as opposed to, "the right thing" as they may happen to see it!

Meaning, this isn't about being wrong or right. There rarely are clear "right" options, but there are often good or livable or just better options. However, we can't make progress on nearly any front due to the fact that people have linked their self definition of their own worth and character to lies, propaganda, etc...

I've identified a lot of these, how they work, how to recognize them, and techniques (more are needed) to make dialog more productive.

And on that last point, more productive dialog should be the goal, not "who is right", simply due to these factors in play. Since nearly everything is polarized and rendered personal, progress is a material threat to a very large number of us.

Ok, enough of that. I could write pages...

What I don't know is how to approach sharing that would do some good and or have some credence. Given the relative lack of information, I can share examples, provide some general data, techniques, etc...

I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Some topics could be:

Understanding the difference between advocacy and debate.

What to do when others try to make their problems your problems, or make you personally part of the dialog with the intent to intimidate or make you more open to personal attacks and marginalization.

Establishing group norms.

Understanding offensive speech is as offensive as any of us personally thinks it is.

Weighing dialog. Should you worry when a clown calls you out as an ass? How about when a close friends does the same? What is the difference and what does that mean for online dialog?

etc...

Edit: A simple way to process the above is to realize politics, and advocacy type dialog of any kind is a contact sport. When we can speak from a position of relative security, we speak freely and we also can accept being wrong, or contribute to and accept consensus.

However, when we are insecure? We solidify around those things that bolster us, good and bad.

So the goal of these manipulations, and they are manipulations more than they are censorship, is to make people insecure by linking who they are to all the issues, which increases the pain of the "contact", motivating them to divide and gather in ways that resonate with and enable the goals of the manipulators. Because they are linked to it personally, they also find it very difficult to back out, "heal", or come to new or common realizations, rendering the discussion of alternatives, or maybe just "better" options a threat when those may actually be in their best interests.

Say a fairly rational and reasonable contributor goes silent. They are likely just not willing to invest the time.

Say a troll drops a bomb, disturbs the convo, goes silent, and does this regularly?

The first scenario is just ordinary human dialog. The second one is a dodge.

I am terrified of mental manipulation. My only inclination and direction is to train my mind to be an independent blank slate. There's also an odd web that forms, the direction of information flows, word choice, word frequency, like it ping pongs in between groups of people. The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.