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Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

theatlantic.com

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Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#241

Post by un-devmox »

pdeuchler wrote: post #137

The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experience, are accessing it and moving increasingly larger chunks of their life to the internet. As someone who fell in love with the internet when I was young because nobody knew I was young , it constantly surprises me when people put intimate details online and the…

Take, for example the referee of the KY game who got his business trolled as well as death threats. I don't think he did anything to "feed" the trolls however he may be irreparably damaged by such people. I don't think you can ignore them and hope they just go away when your business is threatened as well as your life.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#242

Post by dasil003 »

pdeuchler wrote: post #137

The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experience, are accessing it and moving increasingly larger chunks of their life to the internet. As someone who fell in love with the internet when I was young because nobody knew I was young , it constantly surprises me when people put intimate details online and the…

I've been on the internet since the 80s even, so your line of thinking resonates with me.

But what's different now is that a troll actually got elected president, this shows how we've come from trolls being toothless. It's probably always been the case that perception makes reality, but never before has a pseudonymous forum such as the internet held so much sway on perception.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#243

Post by jdietrich »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #73
jknoepfler wrote: post #67

I don't understand this article at all. I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development). The professionals are winning the internet there. There are dedicated subforums for trolls and random bs, which are pretty funny sometimes, but serve as an outlet for the garbage. I browse hacker news... It is what it is, I'm happy with it as a content sharing platform. My biggest gripe is the…

You're in the top 1% or 0.1% of filtering for quality, IMO. Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.

Check a Usenet archive and see what the alt.* groups looked like in 1997. Lunatics and assholes have always been present on the internet; the difference is that in 1997, we saw the necessity of creating private spaces that excluded undesirable people.

Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.

Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#244

Post by st3v3r »

jknoepfler wrote: post #185
michaelkeenan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is a prominent woman journalist, so her experience of the internet probably involves more harassment than most people's.

sure, but here her voice is at the top of a widely read internet forum, and there's a polite conversation going on about it. This seems like a win for the internet. I can't stress enough that I respect the pain of public personalities in the age of the internet, to the extent that they suffer harassing emails, fake police calls, stalking, and lord only knows what else. That's not what the conversation is about though…

It's also a heavily moderated forum. Let's see what the response to the article is on Reddit or one of the Chans.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#245

Post by 5thaccount »

ksenzee wrote: post #225
milesrout wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 'Trolling' is not harassment. You can harass someone by trolling them incessantly , but harassing people is not 'trolling' them. Don't use them as synonyms. 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first plac…

> 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. This is a cop-out. You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do. If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source). And I'm an unimportant software developer. What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twi…

> We need Twitter to be safe too.

In theory agree keeping things safe seems great, but I struggle with the idea that we can define "safe" in a way that is reasonable and makes sense, and where the punishment is effective and reasonable.

The vast majority of times I have seen claims of harassment, the usual process is that someone makes a controversial statement, then realises the group that objects was larger than they imagined as they receive hundreds and thousands objections, some of which are almost certainly awful. I understand how that can feel like harassment when 10,000 people tweet at you, and in 10,000 tweets half a dozen are guaranteed to sound batshit insane and downright scary, but it isn't harassment to be disagreed with, nor to have ideas that you promote subject to scrutiny.

SM amplifies what that scrutiny looks like massively, but pure numbers don't constitute harassment. Nor does people watching everything you say and commenting on it. And this is where it gets tough, nor does having people say mean things about you, because mean is just so subjective.

Any definition of harassment is really tricky, and a definition of "safe" is even more difficult, and we haven't even got to the punishment part yet.

Ultimately, the idea we can stop people disagreeing, and disagreeing passionately enough to border on troubling, is impossible, and what is needed is a something proactive an individual can do to protect themselves.

And I have no idea what that is!

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#246

Post by jdietrich »

problems wrote: post #136
accountface wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone literally came to my house, where I live.

Why was that information available on the internet? That's the kind of risk you take if you make that kind of information available on the internet. Think of all the possible things someone could do with your address and assume those will be done. That's the type of precaution you should be taking.

Doxxing a business owner is generally very straightforward even if they take careful steps to hide their identity - there's a huge paper trail behind any real business.

If you think you can't be doxxed, you're probably just lucky.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#247

Post by baobabKoodaa »

bingomad123 wrote: post #151

When you define anyone who does not agree with you as a Troll that phrase kind of gets meaningless. I meet regularly main stream journalists who complain about Trolls winning on internet but talking longer makes me realize that these people actually hate the fact that their "card carrying journalism" is actually made totally worthless by ordinary individuals on street writing a blog from their bedroom. I am from Indi…

Troll used to mean someone who just tries to provoke reactions online. Nowadays almost every time I hear the word, it's actually used to describe a person who expresses an unpopular opinion. It's an easy way to ignore criticism and disagreement: anyone who disagrees with you is just a troll.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#248

Post by eikenberry »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #237
pdeuchler wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting that criminal harassment via the internet is largely a failing of law enforcement, not a failing of the infrastructure of the internet or a sudden arrival of a new species of really mean humans. There are some privacy/free speech issues down this road, but by and large LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. And while it's a different discussion all together, I think examining why con…

> LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. On the contrary. One of my side-projects is involved with the running an Internet-to-PSTN wake-up-call service. The service is free-to-use in the US (because domestic calling is so cheap) which also means it gets used by criminal-harassers who send wake-up calls at 4am to their targets (we do aggressively rate-limit which helps mitigate these issues). We are fr…

More phones should just come with whitelist support. Where calls will automatically go to voice mail if it isn't on your list. I have this on my phone due to lots of wrong numbers and it works great.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#249

Post by arcseco »

enraged_camel wrote: post #133
bigtimeidiot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience. /the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?

>>Do you assume these people are stupid I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it. So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cre…

The exact same thing could be said about the people celebrating the DNC and Hillary's race to the White house on reddit. An obviously flawed actor with few redeeming qualities, yet still held in high regard in the minds of people on r/politics. The only difference I see on the left side of the divide is lack of humour (which tends to invite trolling).
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