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Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

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Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#51

Post by wamatt »

mquander wrote: post #2

"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch. - The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you. - Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about Ireland, but it seems ve…

>"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch.

That's an big issue with our society.

Unless you have huge following (eg PG), making moderate considered and balanced headlines and opinions, more often than not fails to get a reaction and hence traction, even if it's more truthful.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#52

Post by prawn »

abalone wrote: post #43

Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home address without help from the ISP. People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to ipttack…

Easy to trace an IP to the ISP that owns it and often an area of a country via naming schemes.

Not a huge step from there to think "Wait, x uses ISP Y and lives in Z" before burrowing through emails or checking blog comments, etc. Could be that two people were commenting from the same IP, but with different devices which suggested the son rather than the friend could be responsible.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#53

Post by abalone »

prawn wrote: post #52
abalone wrote: post #43

Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home address without help from the ISP. People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to ipttack…

Easy to trace an IP to the ISP that owns it and often an area of a country via naming schemes. Not a huge step from there to think "Wait, x uses ISP Y and lives in Z" before burrowing through emails or checking blog comments, etc. Could be that two people were commenting from the same IP, but with different devices which suggested the son rather than the friend could be responsible.

Problem is he didn't do that critical second step, the "burrowing through emails or checking blog comments" for something that links the IP to a friend.

He made the mistake of responding to the criticism of his story's technical implausability by claiming his friend used a procedure of looking up the IP location on a general web database. But those only resolve to ISP-level geolocation, not user-level, as the very post he linked to was later updated to admit.

Would have been better for him to keep quiet and let us all keep imagining exotic solutions.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#54

Post by nicholas_tuzzio »

sillysaurus wrote: post #49
nicholas_tuzzio wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care if he's lying because his story was re-printed in The Guardian, where I read it, as truth. If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such. But why ? Can you (or someone) please articulate what exactly is so bad about it? Some of the best and most influential stories in human history were precisely that: lies presented as truth. Were the authors "bad" for doing this? At what point does it become bad? (And why?)

Hey look buddy, I'm an engineer; that means I solve problems. Not problems like 'Why is lying wrong?', because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#55

Post by josscrowcroft »

Jesus, how much time went into "investigating" this? This is really, really long.

We all enjoyed the story, and it sounded plausible enough. It had character depth. It had (kind of) redemption, and forgiveness. It had a boy in an awkward position that we could tut tut at.

Who gives a shit if it's embellished?

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#56

Post by othermaciej »

Torgo wrote: post #40
jerrya wrote: post #21

Just to add a bit more fuel to the fire, while a reasonable skepticism should always be well, reasonable, I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to so directly out and out call this fake given the sparsity of the argument as it is. Compare this to skepticism over ElevatorGate. FWIW, here's a woman at skepchick expressing doubt that Leo even exists: http://skepchick.org/2012/10/leo-traynor-anti-semitism-and-t...

Someone should send her a link to Derailing for Dummies. Questioning his account of the events is dangerously close to blaming the victim, derailing the argument from the cause discussing anti-Semitism, and forms a pattern of discouragement against people who come forward as the victims of trolling. This is NOT ok.

And that is why the concept of "derailing" is BS. The position of the speaker as member of an oppressed class means that you must accept their claims on faith. To question them in any way is "NOT ok". Adopting this policy means that no rational person should believe anything that comes from a group with such ground rules.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#57

Post by wonderzombie »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #42
gojomo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traynor did change his behavior: but when he unfollowed one account, another took its place. It took him a while to change his habit of an optimistic follow-back -- if some of his follow-backs resulted in pleasant exchanges with new friends, why wouldn't he try to outlast the troll for a while? -- but it's clear he eventually did. And Traynor reports that when he made his Twitter account private, the harassment moved…

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possib…

You talk like these were the only 2 to 3 strangers that ever followed him, that only trolls followed him. Was that the case? How are you to distinguish between legitimate followers and not?

The whole OP reads like a string of conjectures just like this one. I kept waiting for some firsthand knowledge of the matter, some smoking gun, but mostly it was a lot of innuendo and assumption.

There's just not a lot of "there" there. It sounds more like an assemblage of facts to fit a theory rather than the other way around.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#58

Post by wonderzombie »

othermaciej wrote: post #56
Torgo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should send her a link to Derailing for Dummies. Questioning his account of the events is dangerously close to blaming the victim, derailing the argument from the cause discussing anti-Semitism, and forms a pattern of discouragement against people who come forward as the victims of trolling. This is NOT ok.

And that is why the concept of "derailing" is BS. The position of the speaker as member of an oppressed class means that you must accept their claims on faith. To question them in any way is "NOT ok". Adopting this policy means that no rational person should believe anything that comes from a group with such ground rules.

You've missed the point entirely.

If I told you I had a sandwich the other day, your skepticism meter wouldn't suddenly kick in. You wouldn't ask me how much I paid or intimate that I don't know what a sandwich is. If I told you a crazy guy yelled at me on the bus in the city, you wouldn't ask me whether maybe I misunderstood, or start going through my social network postings to confirm/deny that I took the bus to work the other day.

Yet suddenly you're skeptical when someone claims to have experienced discrimination or bigotry, you're full speed ahead on skepticism? Take nothing as given? Come on.

This might not apply to you personally, but that dynamic is why the term was invented. Esp. with white male nerds, they find their skepticism often, it seems, when minorities, et al, talk about experiences outside the typical white male's.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#59

Post by steevdave »

gojomo wrote: post #46
ryguytilidie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possib…

He did change his behavior! He unfollowed/reported harassers and eventually rejected all new followers by taking his accounts private. And then the harassment came via other avenues! What more are you expecting him to have done? And why wasn't it OK for him to try remaining open to possibly-friendly strangers for as long as possible? And he's not "screaming" or indeed complaining about anything, he's just describing…

I'm not taking any side, by my own personal habit for a follow on twitter is to look at who followed me's stream before following back. I'd hope others would do the same rather than automatically following back.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#60

Post by prawn »

abalone wrote: post #53
prawn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to trace an IP to the ISP that owns it and often an area of a country via naming schemes. Not a huge step from there to think "Wait, x uses ISP Y and lives in Z" before burrowing through emails or checking blog comments, etc. Could be that two people were commenting from the same IP, but with different devices which suggested the son rather than the friend could be responsible.

Problem is he didn't do that critical second step, the "burrowing through emails or checking blog comments" for something that links the IP to a friend. He made the mistake of responding to the criticism of his story's technical implausability by claiming his friend used a procedure of looking up the IP location on a general web database. But those only resolve to ISP-level geolocation, not user-level, as the very po…

I must've missed where he claimed that he didn't do those things? Their specific methods were always suggested to be something "like x" rather than exactly like it.

Further, he didn't need a method that worked at identifying all people (as tripped up 90% of people in the linked explanation), just this particular one.

I run a forum and often try to identify/discourage PITAs. Sometimes just tracing an IP reveals nothing but the ISP and location/exchange, sure, but other times it'll give me an employer and so on. Trace an IP, get something like accessplus.weblink.telstra.net, recognise your pal's Access Plus business name and you're on your way.

Revealing the method goes some way towards informing future trolls of tricks available to them.

To me, it seemed that the mysterious method referenced was half about luring the troll away from Twitter/etc to a place where they could directly record the IP address. The rest came from there.

Picking out something like this to discredit the entire account is very rough, IMO, and I flagged this story FWIW.

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