organized right-wing trolling over the entire internet

[justdrew]

I've said it before but I'll say it again... someorg with software assistance is trolling pro-hate/fascist messages on EVERY god damn site I look at. I just don't believe it's random angry posters.

There's not a god damn thing that can be done about it either. and what the only solution to bad speech is more speech? Come on, I've got better things to do with my life than argue with reich-bots on public message boards. So what the fuck is to be done? I suppose boards could start using a distributed ip blacklist... but half or more of the boards like the reich-wing posts, so that won't do much, the other half will "fight to the death" for anyhitler's right to deliver his speech.

checkmate? I really don't want to have to see an inverse posting bot network to deliver good messages, but I'm not sure there's any alternative...

[Simulist]

Full-spectrum dominance remains a military concept, but it isn't just for physical battlefields anymore: the internet is the new battlefield of the mind.

George Orwell said that "whoever controls the past controls the future" and that "whoever controls the present controls the past" — to control the collective perception of reality is to control the present. Our perception of reality is based, in part, upon the opinions of others; trolls provide a false representation of these collective opinions, and therefore serve toward managing the collective perception of reality — and thereby, to a degree, the present itself.

Whenever I'm online, I simply consider it a given fact of life that there are trolls, many of whom are quite sophisticated in their methods.

Some are purposefully obvious trolls; these distract from the less-than-obvious ones so that these trolls can go about their business of manipulating opinion relatively unrecognized. There are also trolls (often more than one person, but sometimes just one person who sockpuppets) who appear to possess diametrically opposite opinions; this is a tactic: one troll presents a deliberately inferior argument, the obvious inferiority of which is intended to enhance the argument of his/her "opponent" in order that perception (and therefore reality itself, to a degree) is manipulated.

There are many such tactics, some brilliantly subtle.

When it was revealed that the Pentagon was spending more than $30 billion to "dominate cyberspace," most people took this to mean the physical circuitry of cyberspace. Few considered the utility of trolls to accomplish through several sorts of dialectic argumentation in "real time" what had as yet been impossible through earlier forms of media manipulation.

For everything real there is also a counterfeit.

[matrixdutch]

They do something similar on digg:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybe ... y_id=69562

[justdrew]

and an example:

ABC reporter’s Twitter consumed with defending Obama’s Christian faith
By Stephen C. Webster 23AUG2010

The President of the United States adheres to the Christian faith, according to all available, credible evidence.

And if you're ABC's Jake Tapper, you're likely sick of talking about it.

That's because after reporting on widespread and growing misconceptions about the president's religion, Tapper's Twitter account became inundated with challenges to the facts, leaving him to spend seemingly half his tweets on Monday defending the story and continually insisting that, yes, all evidence points to Obama being a Christian and not a Muslim.

"Its true that I don't 'know' Obama is Christian any more than I 'know' George W. Bush is Christian," he wrote. "But all credible evidence says they are."

That same hour, Tapper wrote: "Those objecting to my reporting that Obama is Christian don't seem concerned with the notion of empirical fact..."

And again: "I suppose using the 'pure empirical fact' guideline one can't ever report that anyone adheres to a certain religion or political philosophy."

And again: "In any case, whether it's 18% or 99%, if americans believe something that all credible evidence says is false, I will say so."

And again: "Bush/Obama: both say they're Christian, friends + religious leaders vouch, they talk and write about it, no legit evidence to contrary."

And again: "Life is too short to debate this - many of u are relying on false internet reports (or out of context ones, e.g., 'my muslim faith.')"

And yet again: "The Pew poll indicates the most reliable indicator of belief (wrong) that Obama is Muslim is opposition to him, and many seem blinded."

Tapper's seemingly relentless defense of Obama's religious orientation (those are approximately half his Monday tweets on the subject) comes just days after a Pew Research Center poll found that 18 percent of Americans believe the president to be a Muslim, and nearly half of respondents said they were unsure of Obama's faith.

While most mainline Republicans have been reticent to jump aboard the conspiracy alleging that Obama secretly harbors Islamic faith, it's conservatives who are more likely to make such an assumption.

The poll found that only a third of Americans think he's Christian.

Responding to the poll, White House spokesman Bill Burton insisted on Thursday that Obama is a Christian who prays every day.

The lies about Obama's faith, spread almost exclusively by GOP-leaning media personalities, have been a persistent nuisance to Democrats since the 2008 presidential campaign.

[justdrew]

Full-spectrum dominance remains a military concept, but it isn't just for physical battlefields anymore: the internet is the new battlefield of the mind.

George Orwell said that "whoever controls the past controls the future" and that "whoever controls the present controls the past" — to control the collective perception of reality is to control the present. Our perception of reality is based, in part, upon the opinions of others; trolls provide a false representation of these collective opinions, and therefore serve toward managing the collective perception of reality — and thereby, to a degree, the present itself.

Whenever I'm online, I simply consider it a given fact of life that there are trolls, many of whom are quite sophisticated in their methods.

Some are purposefully obvious trolls; these distract from the less-than-obvious ones so that these trolls can go about their business of manipulating opinion relatively unrecognized. There are also trolls (often more than one person, but sometimes just one person who sockpuppets) who appear to possess diametrically opposite opinions; this is a tactic: one troll presents a deliberately inferior argument, the obvious inferiority of which is intended to enhance the argument of his/her "opponent" in order that perception (and therefore reality itself, to a degree) is manipulated.

There are many such tactics, some brilliantly subtle.

When it was revealed that the Pentagon was spending more than $30 billion to "dominate cyberspace," most people took this to mean the physical circuitry of cyberspace. Few considered the utility of trolls to accomplish through several sorts of dialectic argumentation in "real time" what had as yet been impossible through earlier forms of media manipulation.

For everything real there is also a counterfeit.

yeah, good points Simulist, FSD is probably part of it

They do something similar on digg:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybe ... y_id=69562

yeah, digg, redit, etc, all the same...
at this rate it's going to be very difficult to come up with any useful solution. Another four months or so and we'll see where things really stand after the "elections"

[Joe Hillshoist]

Not just in the states either, or on the internet.

[Nordic]

George Orwell said that "whoever controls the past controls the future" and that "whoever controls the present controls the past" — to control the collective perception of reality is to control the present. Our perception of reality is based, in part, upon the opinions of others; trolls provide a false representation of these collective opinions, and therefore serve toward managing the collective perception of reality — and thereby, to a degree, the present itself.

Orwell was like Einstein. His discoveries were used by the bad guys to spread evil. Same thing happened with Freud and his nephew Bernays.

If Orwell hadn't written the things he did, the Powers That Be would be way behind in this shit.

Oh well.

Orwell.

But yes, it's brilliant -- you get people all living at the end of a road, that they can only reach by driving their cars, inside these big boxes where their only "window" to the outside world is their television. So you control what they see on TV and you control their very sense of reality.

Now with the internet, which has become the biggest threat to this since, oh I don't know probably the printing press, there's a big mad rush on to create the reality there as well.

At least it's harder for them to do it here.

This Ground Zero Mosque bullshit has to be the most brilliant thing to come down the pike in years. I really can't remember the last one that was so effective. It's just a massive smoke screen blinding everybody to everything else that's going on.

Jon Stewart tonight pointed out how Fox has been painting a portrait of a very evil Muslim who is behind all of this, behind the financing of the fellow who is building this place. Turns out it's the Saudi who owns a big chunk of News Corp. They make sure they don't show photos of him or mention his name. Just create THEIR BOSS as the bogeyman. Whether you like Stewart or not, his pointing this out is damn funny.

100% manufactured, artificial "controversy". And it's everywhere.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I dunno, I thought Orwell wrote 1984 as a summary of the time he then lived in - 1948.

Back in the day, when I was at high school, in your final year every student had to study English to "graduate", and every year one of the books studied by the whole state, and if I remember rightly, the whole country, was 1984. It was compulsory and on the national curriculum, unofficially, cos there wasn't actually a national curriculum, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

Man studying that book was a trip.

Especially the day one of the students piped up and said Winston and Julia were basically anti social misfits who got everything they deserved.

Yeah anyway from memory a big part of Orwell's writing reflected the culture of the era just displaced in time. (Well spacetime...) Obviously "Till death do us part" describes all poms perfectly, and Orwell just looked around and did the sums before writing the book. And he probably would have been more accurate in his description of the 2nd half of the 20th century if psychedelics hadn't mushroomed in popularity.

[82_28]

I always thought of Orwell as a writer who simply recognized the trends. Same with Sinclair. Just to name a couple. Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" helped tip me over into considering "1984" differently had I not read the essay after I had read 1984.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Reading RI regularly makes me think that Orwell is just a useful cog in the great machine of technocratic fascism.

In other words, doesn't mean a thing!

[82_28]

Online ranters increasingly pay a price

WASHINGTON — The Internet has allowed tens of millions of Americans to be published writers. But it also has led to a surge in lawsuits from those who say they were hurt, defamed or threatened by what they read, according to groups that track media lawsuits.

"It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet," said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York.

While bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found they are not protected from lawsuits, even if comments are anonymous. Some postings have led to criminal charges.

Hal Turner, a right-wing blogger from New Jersey, faces up to 10 years in prison for posting a comment that three Chicago judges "deserve to be killed" for having rejected a Second Amendment challenge to the city's handgun ban in 2009.

Turner, who also ran a Web-based radio show, believed it "was political trash talk," his lawyer said. But a jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., this month convicted him of threatening the lives of the judges on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In western Pennsylvania, a judge recently ruled a community website must identify the Internet address of individuals who posted comments calling a township official a "jerk" who put money from the taxpayers in "his pocket." The official also owned a used-car dealership, and one commenter called his cars "junk." The official sued for defamation, saying the comments were false and damaged his reputation.

In April, a North Carolina county official won a similar ruling after anonymous bloggers on a local website called him a slumlord.

"Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online," said Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University in California. "A whole new generation can publish now, but they don't understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, 'My dentist stinks.' "

Under federal law, websites generally are not liable for outsiders' comments. However, they can be forced to reveal the poster's identity if the post includes false information presented as fact.

Calling someone a "jerk" and a "buffoon" may be safe from a lawsuit because it states an opinion. Saying he wrongly "pocketed" public money could lead to a defamation claim because it asserts something as a fact.

Seattletimes.com, like many news websites, promises to safeguard the privacy of users — including those submitting comments — by not releasing personally identifiable information to third parties. But The Seattle Times makes exceptions when public safety is at stake or when compelled to disclose user identities by law-enforcement authorities.

The Supreme Court has said the First Amendment's protection for freedom of speech includes the right to publish "anonymous" pamphlets. But judges have been saying that online speakers do not always have a right to remain anonymous.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month upheld a Nevada judge's order requiring disclosure of the identities of three people accused of conducting an "Internet smear campaign via anonymous postings" against Quixtar, successor to the well-known Amway.

"The right to speak, whether anonymously or otherwise, is not unlimited," Judge Margaret McKeown wrote.

Quixtar had sued, contending the postings were damaging to its business. The judge who first ordered the disclosure said the Internet had "great potential for irresponsible, malicious and harmful communication." Moreover, the "speed and power of Internet technology makes it difficult for the truth to 'catch up to the lie,' " he wrote.

Media-law experts say such lawsuits are hard to track because many arise from local disputes and rarely result in large verdicts or lengthy appeals.

Goldman, the Santa Clara professor, describes these cases as the "thin-skinned plaintiff versus the griper." They begin with someone who goes online to complain, perhaps about a restaurant, a contractor, a store, a former boss or a public official. One person's complaint sometimes prompts others to vent with even sharper, harsher complaints.

"There's a false sense of safety on the Internet," said Kimberley Isbell, a lawyer for the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. "If you think you can be anonymous, you may not exercise the same judgment" before posting a comment, she said.

Not surprisingly, the target of online complaints may believe he or she has no choice but to take legal action.

"These can be life-changing lawsuits," Goldman said. "They can go on for years and cost enormous amounts in legal fees."

He is particularly concerned about teenagers and what they post online. "Teenagers do what you might expect: They say things they shouldn't say. They do stupid things," he said. "We don't have a legal standard for defamation that excuses kids."

Media-law experts repeat the advice that bloggers and e-mailers need to think twice before sending a message.

"Before you speak ill of anyone online," Baron said, "you should think hard before pressing the 'send' button."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... its24.html