We Are All Trolls

[American Dream]

"We have to recalibrate our notion of abundance"

With the writer and journalist Richard Seymour


Just one last question. In various moments in our conversation you talked about social media, calling it 'the social industry'. Your latest book, The Twittering Machine, is about that. Why is it that you consider this such an important issue?

First of all, the reason I call it 'the social industry' is that, to call it social media is a kind of propaganda: all media are social. It is akin to calling cigarettes 'friendship sticks': they can be used that way, but that's not what they are for. They are a delivery mechanism for cancer, based on an addictive mechanism. And that's what we are talking about. The industry is based upon, obviously, the extraction of data, as its raw material, which is extracted by a certain amount of free labour. If you think about it, globally, the average internet user spend 135 minutes a day on one of this apps. This is a lot of time. Take the figures with a pinch of salt, but they illustrate the scale of this. If you were to calculate that over a lifetime, the global average life expectancy of 71 years, that would be around 50,000 hours. I was talking about the good life earlier, imagine the sort of project that you might embark on with 50,000 hours. This industry has turned leisure time into its time. They offer it as a tool, or as leisure, so that you don't even notice the work.

And I thought, what is the incentive? Why spend all that time on the social industry? You are not spending that much time meeting people face to face, and that means this is your social life now. Looking at a screen is your social life. As Marxists, we are very interested in social relations, and this is how social relations are being reorganised in a capitalist way. And it actually reminds me of what Adorno called 'the culture industry': a massive industrial system that homogenizes culture on the format of the commodity. It integrates us from above and results in a very narrow and conservative culture, with conventional ways of thinking constantly reiterated. Now, he probably over-estimated this and overstated the uniformity of the Hollywood production line. But nonetheless, it has something to it. But far more than that, the social industry does exactly this: it integrates you from above and it subordinates you to - it's not even a question of the commodity format - you are obeying protocols and algorithms that are hard written into the system. They are not even seen, they are taking for granted as the precondition for being there. And these are what Althusser called interpellation mechanisms: they interpellate you because as soon as you sign up you get a profile picture, a little description, you have to provide certain kind of content, and act in a certain type of way. You are a certain kind of subject. And your social subjectivity is now programmed, literally programmed in a way that it never has been before.

This is a revolution in social relations, along very capitalist lines. But it's not just capitalist lines. There is interesting research by Alice Marwick who used to work in Microsoft and found that the values of the social industry are the values of the sort of people who made it, and that is rich, white men in Northern California. They are values of hierarchy, status, competition, celebrity and celebrity worship. That reflects the life experience of a very small section of humanity, but now it's being universalized. Forget about the Hollywood dream factory, that's got nothing on the sophistication of this ideological machine. Forget about millionaires buying newspapers to broadcast their ridiculous views for the sake of some ideological mission. This is way more subtle, because the social industry is so massified and yet so personalized. The algorithm is very good at listening to you. It's a listening devise, that hears everything that you say and automatically calculates... without even intending to, it registers your unconscious, aggregates it, and then splits it up in demographics and sells it back to you as a commodity experience. It commodifies your unconscious.

One example: on this website you can buy a t-shirt saying 'Keep Calm and Rape a Lot' or stuff like that. What does this mean? It means that some people were searching for this and the guys who made these t-shirts, they didn't even have to think about it, they just, automatically, by algorithm, advertised they could make these t-shits, and they must have gotten enough orders. The algorithm works the same way on Youtube, where it picks up on watch-time, scrolling, click throughs. So we ask, why has the far right been so successful on Youtube? The far right is way ahead of the pack, way ahead of the Left and the liberals. And one of the things that we know about the social industry is that they don't select by the accuracy of the information or edification, they select for material in your feed that is going to have a somatic impact, that you'll react to, so that you feel you have to type something back, or so you keep watching Youtube. And for some reason, conspiracist material in particular is addictive. And that's what you get with the far-right: conspiracist infotainment, Islamophobia, antisemitism, Holocaust revisionism, the Hillary Clinton 'sex slave' scandal. This infotainment also delivers a kind of narcissistic pleasure: 'I've figured it out while the sheeple haven't worked it out'. This has proven to be incredibly powerful, especially when nobody trusts politicians or the old media. Why should you trust them? They are liars! They are right about this. The traditional modes of hegemony are breaking down.

Through these spaces you get infotainment, and you also get the culture wars. It's interesting that the internal identity politics of this industry is such that you have to spend your entire time crafting a public identity for yourself, as an online micro-celebrity. When you get caught up in this medium, you tend to get wrapped up in these online disputes and you have to engage in taking sides in a way that is a lot more rigidified that otherwise might be. And I'm not talking as much about political polarization, as about cultural balkanization, identity essentialism. And so you get these culture wars, and spitting out of these culture wars you get alt-right cultures such as what came out of the #gamergate. So this industry is the most profitable industry in the world, so Google, Facebook, they are beating out oil companies. That's changing our mode of production, it's also changing our politics.

Although it was inaugurated by Clintonite liberals and welcomed by the Obama administration, it seems that paradoxically the unconscious of the system is proto-fascist. So I think, given that we are at a moment in which the future of humanity really is at stake, it is ominous that our social lives are being re-written in this way by people, technologists and the companies they work for, who don't respond to our internets, needs or demands. And they have a lot more political power, in some ways, than elected politicians. We need to use the democratic avenues that are open to us, however diluted they are, to reform this in a radical way. One possible way to begin to that is to - first of all tax the hell out of them, because they are making enormous profits - but more importantly, we need some publicly owned platforms. In this country we've got the BBC, which is not great, but it is based on the idea of 'public service broadcasting'. Why can't we have a public service internet? So we can make practical, concrete reforms, by which we rapidly democratise these things. That's why I think it's important.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/we-have-to-our-29625670

[American Dream]

Trolls, conspiracy theorists, hoaxers and Trump have twisted Facebook, YouTube and the news to toxic levels - and it's only getting worse



Soviet-born British TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, argues that when tech rips open the floodgates of communication, the bad guys always find a way to exploit it. Dictators quickly harnessed the power of radio. Joseph McCarthy, as a U.S. senator in the '50s, used television to spread his anti-Communist conspiracy theories.

Yet for decades, the internet was heralded as a new frontier that allowed "citizen journalists" to take on the stodgy media elite. In 1998, the Drudge Report, a right-wing news-aggregating website, broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Newsweek got cold feet. In 2004, when Dan Rather and 60 Minutes put out a 1973 memo purporting to show that President George W. Bush had received special treatment while in the Texas Air National Guard, Drudge elevated the conservative bloggers who persuasively argued the memo was a fake written in Microsoft Word.

An "Army of Davids" — as some bloggers dubbed themselves — swarmed to debunk flawed media accounts, trying to counter bias wherever they saw it. The gatekeepers were being overthrown, the drawbridge had been flung open and the villagers could storm the castle.

But the villagers had their own standards for newsworthiness. Drudge also sent his readers to darker corners, where sketchy websites claimed Barack Obama wasn't an American citizen and Bill Clinton had a secret love child. Drudge even provided fuel for "Pizzagate," the conspiracy that drove a man in 2016 to fire an AR-15 inside a pizzeria, because the internet told him that they were harboring child sex slaves.


Millions of people tuned into Alex Jones’ red-faced rants about 9/11 being an inside job, Obama chemtrails turning frogs gay, and the Sandy Hook shootings being faked. Donald Trump has been a fan. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump assured Jones on the conspiracy theorist’s radio show. “I will not let you down.”

https://www.inlander.com/spokane/trolls ... d=18415723

[coffin_dodger]

Trolls, conspiracy theorists, hoaxers and Trump have twisted Facebook, YouTube and the news to toxic levels - and it's only getting worse

It's a fairly basic tactic to link 'conspiracy theorists' aka 'anyone who doesn't buy the official story' to nutters like Alex Jones and Trump. The System is almost at the point of having to act in a dangerous way - it has little to lose except divide a nations people directly down the middle - those who want to believe the official stories and carry on as before - and those that don't believe them and are looking for alternatives.

Once critical mass has been induced - by media articles like the referenced above - the one side of thinking will then be pitted against the other, as is happening right now, right here. At which point, things start falling apart and in steps the original system, promising greater stability and a 'return to normal'. It's a win-win for The System.

You must be due a commendation medal for all your work, AD. Well done.

[American Dream]

It's like you didn't really pay attention at all to the actual content of the thread but rather just opted to filter it all through your own manichean lens. I wish you well but there is no grounds for dialogue here.

[coffin_dodger]

I wasn't looking for dialogue, thanks.
Your critics know you're not authorised to 'dialogue', lest you let something slip.
Cheers, old pal.

[Marionumber1]

I can't believe that an article which broadly attacks "conspiracy theorists" as toxic invaders of the media landscape is getting posted on Rigorous Intuition as serious analysis. This article predictably treats white supremacists, Birthers, Pizzagate supporters, and blatant controlled opposition like Alex Jones as the primary representatives of those who would be considered conspiracy theorists. And there is no distinguishment made between those objectionable factions and legitimate researchers in demeaning (the standard dogwhistles are all here: "spread their gospel", "fringe", "spool of yarn", "shadowy figures") the entire collective group, even though these two categories of people would never wish to be associated at all:

Conspiracy theorists used to spread their gospel through books, newsletters, public access television shows, and by standing on street corners and handing out fliers. But the web gave every community a niche — no matter how fringe — and allowed them to spread their message in only a few keystrokes. On the internet, the corkboard is infinite and the spool of yarn used to connect pictures of shadowy figures never runs out.

[JackRiddler]

It's like you didn't really pay attention at all to the actual content of the thread but rather just opted to filter it all through your own manichean lens. I wish you well but there is no grounds for dialogue here.

Excellent. So you're rebanning yourself? You're going to stop hijacking, flooding, lying and posting?

[American Dream]

I believe in thinking critically. Clearly there are deep ills in conspiracy culture. "White supremacists, Birthers, Pizzagate supporters, and... Alex Jones" are just the tip of the iceberg. I am able to look past mainstream dismissal of conspiracy motifs because I understand full well that the egregiously stupid stuff gives us all a bad name.

[American Dream]

The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media

Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?

By Richard Seymour

Whether or not we think we are addicted, the machine treats us as addicts. Addiction is, quite deliberately, the template for our relationship to the Twittering Machine. Addiction is all about attention. For the social media bosses, this is axiomatic.

If social media is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols – the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine – to tell them who they are. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press send, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are and what your destiny is through arithmetic likes, shares and comments.

The interesting question is what it is that is so addictive. In principle, anyone can win big; in practice, not everyone is playing with the same odds. Our social media accounts are set up like enterprises competing for attention. If we are all authors now, we write not for money, but for the satisfaction of being read. Going viral, or trending, is the equivalent of a windfall. But sometimes, winning is the worst thing that can happen. The temperate climate of likes and approval is apt to break, lightning-quick, into sudden storms of fury and disapproval.

A 2015 study looked into the reasons why people who try to quit social media fail. The survey data came from a group of people who had signed up to quit Facebook for just 99 days. Many of these determined quitters couldn’t even make the first few days. And many of those who successfully quit had access to another social networking site, like Twitter, so that they had simply displaced their addiction. Those who stayed away, however, were typically in a happier frame of mind and less interested in controlling how other people thought of them, thus implying that social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated.

For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait. Notifications light up the reward centres of the brain, so that we feel bad if the metrics we accumulate on our different platforms don’t express enough approval. The addictive aspect of this is similar to the effect of poker machines or smartphone games, recalling what the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the “gamification of capitalism”.

But it is not only addictive. Whatever we write has to be calibrated for social approval. Not only do we aim for conformity among our peers but, to an extent, we only pay attention to what our peers write insofar as it allows us to write something in reply, for the likes. Perhaps this is what, among other things, gives rise to what is often derided as virtue-signalling, not to mention the ferocious rows, overreactions, wounded amour-propre and grandstanding that often characterise social media communities.

The analogy between the gambler and the social-media junkie is hard to avoid. Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist, calls your smartphone “The Slot Machine in Your Pocket”. Most smartphone apps use “intermittent variable rewards” to keep users hooked. Because rewards are variable, they are uncertain: you have to pull the lever to see what you are going to get. Adam Alter adds that, with the invention of the like button, users are gambling every time they post. The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, based on her work on machine gambling, agrees.

Today’s casinos are very different from the macho dice-and-card play organised by old-school crime bosses. At the roulette table, the gambler could justify his perverse pleasure in risk-taking as a matter of honour in competition with peers. In recent decades, however, the favoured form has moved from the table to the slot machine. And the slot machines – digital and complex – have come a long way from the days of the one-armed bandit. Now, the gambler experiences no macho showdowns, just an interactive screen offering multiple permutations of odds and stakes, deploying user-experience design techniques similar to video games to induce pleasure.

The machines have a range of devices to give users the appearance of regular wins to keep them playing. These are often losses disguised as wins, insofar as the payoff is less than the cost of playing. But the wins are not even the goal of playing. When we are on the machine, Schüll finds, our goal is to stay connected. As one addict explains, she is not playing to win but to “stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters”. The gambling industry recognises this desire to avoid social reality. It is called “time on device”, and everything about the machine is designed to cultivate it.

Time on device pinpoints something crucial about addiction. Traditionally, casinos have blocked out daylight and banned anything that conveys the sense of time passing: there are no windows or clocks and, rather than timed meals, there is a constant supply of refreshments. Some gambling-machine addicts today prefer to urinate in a paper cup rather than leave the device. Pubs and opium dens also have a history of blotting out daylight to allow users to enjoy themselves without the intrusion of time. The sense of dropping out of time is common to many addictions. As one former gambling addict puts it: “All I can remember is living in a trance for four years.” Schüll calls it the “machine zone”, where ordinary reality is “suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process”. For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing. Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist and former heroin addict, describes how even after kicking the drug, he couldn’t face “a day without a change of state”.

The Twittering Machine, as a wholly designed operant conditioning chamber, needs none of the expedients of the casino or opium den. The user has already dropped out of work, a boring lunch or an anxious social situation to enter into a different, timeless zone. What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we are avoiding as what we find when we log in – which, after all, is often not that exciting. There is no need to block out the windows, because that is what the screen is already doing: screening out daylight.

And it manages time differently. For gamblers, the only temporal rhythm that matters is the sequence of encounters with destiny, the run of luck. For drug users, what matters is the rhythms of the high, whether it is the stationary effect of opium or the build, crescendo and crash of alcohol. The experience of platform users, on the other hand, is organised in a trance-like flow. The user is plunged into a stream of real-time information and disciplined to stay constantly ahead of it. Twitter highlights not the time and date of posts, but their age and thus currency: 4m, or 12h, as the case may be.

The ensuing trance-like state, according to the digital theorist David Berry, is remarkably similar to what in early stock markets was called the “ticker trance”. Financial speculators would become absorbed in watching the signals conveyed on stock market ticker tape, vigilant to every minute variation in a real-time flow. That is to say the timestamp, like the coded information on the ticker tape, is information about the state of the game. It enables users to place an informed bet.

If social-media platforms are like casinos, then they build on the existing extension of gambling in the neoliberal era. Whereas gambling was controlled in a paternalistic way in the postwar era, laws have been increasingly liberalised in the past 40 years. Today, the majority of Britons gamble in some form, most commonly through the National Lottery. Similar transformations have taken place in the US and Canada, and the European Commission has pressured holdouts including Italy, Austria and France to liberalise.

All of this has taken place concurrently with waves of financial liberalisation, wherein capitalist dynamism was increasingly dependent on the bets and derivative bets of the stock market. And there is a logical convergence between financialisation and tech. The financial sector is the most computerised sector of capitalism, and the use of software for trading has resulted in numerous efforts to “game the system” – as in May 2010, when a trader’s use of algorithms to repeatedly spoof bets against the market some 19,000 times briefly caused a trillion-dollar crash.

Culturally, the idea of life as a lottery – one that only a few magical adepts know how to work – has gained widespread traction both as a folk social theory and as an explanation for human misfortune. This links gambling to destiny and divine judgment in a way that reaches back to its earliest expressions. As the late literary scholar Bettina Knapp explained, the use of gambling as a divinatory device, as a way to work out what the supreme being wants of us, has been found in Shintoism, Hinduism, Christianity and the I Ching. At several points in the Bible, the drawing or casting of lots is used to discern divine will. In essence, the lot or die is a question about fate, posed to a superpower. Something similar happens when we post a tweet or a status or an image, where we have little control over the context in which it will be seen and understood. It is a gamble.

The cliche holds that the social media platforms administer social approval in metrically precise doses. But that is like treating gambling as if it were only about the payoffs. Every post is a lot cast for the contemporary equivalent of the God of Everything. What we are really asking for when we post a status is a verdict. In telling the machine something about ourselves, whatever else we are trying to achieve, we are asking for judgment. And everyone who places a bet expects to lose.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... n-gambling

[American Dream]

The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy

We set out to study internet discourse around #BlackLivesMatter — instead, we were unintentionally learning about the Russian information operation to undermine democracy

Kate Starbird Oct 20, 2018


Retweet Network Graph of Accounts in Twitter Conversations about #BlackLivesMatter and Shooting Events in 2016. Courtesy of Kate Starbird/University of Washington


This underscores the power and nuance of these strategies. These IRA agents were enacting caricatures of politically active U.S. citizens. In some cases, these were gross caricatures of the worst kinds of online actors, using the most toxic rhetoric. But, in other cases, these accounts appeared to be everyday people like us, people who care about the things we care about, people who want the things we want, people who share our values and frames. These suggest two different aspects of these information operations.

First, these information operations are targeting us within our online communities, the places we go to have our voices heard, to make social connections, to organize political action. They are infiltrating these communities by acting like other members of the community, developing trust, gathering audiences. Second, these operations begin to take advantage of that trust for different goals, to shape those communities toward the strategic goals of the operators (in this case, the Russian government).

One of these goals is to “sow division,” to put pressure on the fault lines in our society. A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. Look at how the orange accounts in the graph (Figure 3) are at the outside of the clusters; perhaps you can imagine them literally pulling the two communities further apart. Russian agents did not create political division in the United States, but they were working to encourage it.

That IRA accounts sent messages supporting #BlackLivesMatter does not mean that ending racial injustice in the United States aligns with Russia’s strategic goals or that #BlackLivesMatter is an arm of the Russian government.

Their second goal is to shape these communities toward their other strategic aims. Not surprisingly, considering what we now know about their 2016 strategy, the IRA accounts on the right in this graph converged in support of Donald Trump. Their activity on the left is more interesting. As we discussed in our previous paper (written before we knew about the IRA activities), the accounts in the pro-#BlackLivesMatter cluster were harshly divided in sentiment about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election. When we look specifically at the IRA accounts on the left, they were consistently critical of Hillary Clinton, highlighting previous statements of hers they perceived to be racist and encouraging otherwise left-leaning people not to vote for her. Therefore, we can see the IRA accounts using two different strategies on the different sides of the graph, but with the same goal (of electing Donald Trump).

The #BlackLivesMatter conversation isn’t the only political conversation the IRA targeted. With the new data provided by Twitter, we can see there were several conversational communities they participated in, from gun rights to immigration issues to vaccine debates. Stepping back and keeping these views of the data in mind, we need to be careful, both in the case of #BlackLivesMatter and these other public issues, to resist the temptation to say that because these movements or communities were targeted by Russian information operations, they are therefore illegitimate. That IRA accounts sent messages supporting #BlackLivesMatter does not mean that ending racial injustice in the United States aligns with Russia’s strategic goals or that #BlackLivesMatter is an arm of the Russian government. (IRA agents also sent messages saying the exact opposite, so we can assume they are ambivalent at most).

If you accept this, then you should also be able to think similarly about the IRA activities supporting gun rights and ending illegal immigration in the United States. Russia likely does not care about most domestic issues in the United States. Their participation in these conversations has a different set of goals: to undermine the U.S. by dividing us, to erode our trust in democracy (and other institutions), and to support specific political outcomes that weaken our strategic positions and strengthen theirs. Those are the goals of their information operations.

One of the most amazing things about the internet age is how it allows us to come together—with people next door, across the country, and around the world—and work together toward shared causes. We’ve seen the positive aspects of this with digital volunteerism during disasters and online political activism during events like the Arab Spring. But some of the same mechanisms that make online organizing so powerful also make us particularly vulnerable, in these spaces, to tactics like those the IRA are using.

Passing along recommendations from Arif, if we could leave readers with one goal, it’s to become more reflective about how we engage with information online (and elsewhere), to tune in to how this information affects us (emotionally), and to consider how the people who seek to manipulate us (for example, by shaping our frames) are not merely yelling at us from the “other side” of these political divides, but are increasingly trying to cultivate and shape us from within our own communities.

Read More: https://medium.com/s/story/the-trolls-w ... 1fb969b9e4

[American Dream]

We have a malignant narcissist-afflicted authoritarian in the White House who thrives off chaos and uses information warfare to bring chaos to the masses. If you see people engaging in similar behaviors online, there’s good reason to be suspicious of their motives & allegiances.

Chaos is a strategy for some. The purpose is to overwhelm you, distract you, and exhaust you with the drama of the day so you don’t have the clarity to see the big picture or the energy to fight the real battle against the fascism that is taking hold right in front of our faces.

Authoritarians maintain control by promising to restore order & stability after thrusting us all into a state of disorder & chaos. But doing so requires help — from complicit lawmakers, paid operatives, & a lot of foot soldiers tasked with infiltrating & disrupting online spaces.

This is the essence of non-linear warfare, which seeks to overwhelm you and break you down by subjecting you to an ever-shifting state of reality. As you try to figure out yesterday’s lies, they throw another curveball and create tomorrow’s new reality. It’s an endless cycle.

Non-linear warfare takes place on a battlefield with no rules and no consistency — it seeks to confuse you to the point where you don’t know what your enemies are doing or even who your enemies are. This should sound familiar, because it’s taking place on this platform right now.

The aim of non-linear warfare is to undermine your perceptions of the world so you never really know what is happening. It’s a strategy to maintain power by keeping you constantly confused and overwhelmed. Because it is undefinable, it often seems unstoppable.

Continues: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1185 ... 53921.html

[American Dream]

All of this, too:

So what are some of the tactics you should watch for? One such tactic is placing increasingly strict and unreasonable demands on who you “should” associate with on Twitter. Trying to force you not to engage with certain people is a way of controlling your information environment.

“Guilt by association” is a similar tactic. This is often used to try to discredit people with valuable info to share. It involves calling into question the veracity of that info based on the source’s interaction with another person(s), rather than addressing the info itself.

Other tactics seek to harness the power of social norms to manipulate your behavior. Deindividuation describes a process in which a person is encouraged to shed their own identity and replace it with the identity of a group. It’s a form of indoctrination & behavioral control...

Humans are social beings, and we all seek to be part of an “in-group.” But this also makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Bad actors leverage this by promising acceptance — at a price. Often, that price includes participating in attacks against perceived out-group enemies...

Now, imagine if right-wing actors effectively infiltrated “Resistance” groups and used these tactics to label certain people as part of the “out group”, and started encouraging group members to attack those people as a way of showing loyalty to the group.

That is happening now.

Now, imagine if those same right-wing infiltrators started encouraging group members to listen to/share information from dubious sources or conspiracy theorists as a way to make “The Resistance” look gullible or hysterical.

That is also happening now.

I‘ll add to this with more examples of specific tactics, but my purpose in writing this is to warn you that information warfare comes in many different forms, and some of the most effective strategies come from “friendly” faces. Not all “Resistance” accounts are what they seem.

As I said earlier, I’ve been targeted for over 2.5 years by a group of accounts purporting to be part of the “Resistance.” Some of them are people who’ve been duped. But the effort is spearheaded by a group of right-wing accounts that have infiltrated “Resistance” groups...

The purpose of infiltration is to manipulate behavior from within — it’s akin to controlled opposition. When it’s done effectively, it has the ability to create division, control the flow of information, disrupt communication and organizing, and kill effective resistance.

We are facing some incredibly serious and unprecedented challenges right now. Fascism is at our doorstep, and we‘re the only ones who can stop it from creeping in further.

Social media can be a great tool to facilitate communication and mobilization. But it’s also a battlefield.

The goal of non-linear warfare isn’t to win the war — the goal is to use ongoing conflict to create a perpetual state of destabilization, chaos, & altered perception of reality in order to maintain control. Those who contribute to that conflict are pushing us closer to the abyss.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1185 ... 53921.html

[JackRiddler]

Starbird! Look at this tool recycling the then-already stale #Russiagate panic from a year ago, like we didn't get the same shit thrown here then.

[coffin_dodger]

AD HAS to be posting this stuff here on purpose... to wind up anyone who has been taking notice.

So what are some of the tactics you should watch for? One such tactic is placing increasingly strict and unreasonable demands on who you “should” associate with...

^This had been AD's MO at RI for at least ten years.

“Guilt by association” is a similar tactic. This is often used to try to discredit people with valuable info to share. It involves calling into question the veracity of that info based on the source’s interaction with another person(s), rather than addressing the info itself.

This is another tactic AD has used hundreds of times here, along with his team of slad and Jinky. They continue to do it to this day.

Often, that price includes participating in attacks against perceived out-group enemies...

Do I even need to comment further?

[American Dream]

This is good:


http://idavox.com/index.php/2019/06/19/ ... roll-farm/

New Report Exposes Troll Farm

June 19, 2019



In the end, trolling is the best tactic for White supremacists, and this report zeroes in on one particular outfit to explain how it all works.


A new report has been released showing how a particular troll farm recruits and radicalizes online, and how they have been effective.

According to the abstract for The Troller Report: A Discursive Observational Study into Troll Groups, authors Cody Webb & Nicole Martine examine the structure and strategy of that troll farm, covering recruitment, radicalization, indoctrination, sociology and behavior and the similarity these type groups share with cyber terrorist. “This paper seeks to demonstrate how the operations are effective and what can be done to combat them, by defining a framework to understand the intergroup biases between the online extremist ideologies and how they can be leveraged to provide an exit path,” the abstract reads. “We will also discuss possible paths of solution to monitor abusive users and to combat coordinated harassment campaigns by different methods of self-moderation and platform changes.”

According to the study which observed activity on Twitter for this, 20 men and women ranging in age from 20-50 and representing several countries are part of what is referred to in the study as the “in-group”, and they take on a number of roles ranging from social engineers to propagandists to infiltrators. “Personas were adopted by the test group throughout identifying as: Jewish, to push an anti-Zionist narrative, African American, to support hate speech by the group, Incel (Involuntary Celibate), to glorify mass shooting violence, rape culture and misogyny, Progressive Satirists, to mask neo-Nazi dog whistles, neo Confederates, to mask racism with patriotism,” the study reads.

The study argues that understanding the tactics of the in-group are important to developing a long-term strategy to combat them and this particular form of terrorism. “These observations enable us to identify the “endpoints” of the group identity and can work to “defang” the group of their power to harass,” the study reads. “At the personal level it helps to understand the psychological profile of the particular participant to develop a method to individually “defang” them of their power to harass as well. We can then use these observations to divide the group at the ideological seams and work towards re-humanization from within the group and also provide exit paths to leave the group.”

The Troller Report