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This is the last of a small series of articles “Anti/Social” discussing why I have not ever, and won’t use popular social media platforms, why I’d advise readers of Kos and their friends not to either... Life’s too short to spend time being outraged by computer systems designed and built by trolls (oh, those trollgorithms, let’s call engagement algorithms by what they are...) to seduce with ‘friendship’, then once you’re hooked, deliver an outrage machine. I first was aware of Facebook, Twitter, and even back to MySpace, my instant reaction was “what a nightmare”, and I had no interest or even curiosity in participating.
There are two preceding pieces — A Cesspool of Melancholy and A Suppuration of Trolls in which I walk through a brief history of Usenet — the prototype of all social media systems, and it’s descent into the cesspool, facilitated by trolls, and how we can watch that behavior over, and over and over again.
I want to speak now to my fourth major observation:
4 — The faster the flow, the faster the degradation of social media. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Usenet, the prototype social media system from the ‘80s I’ve been mentioning, used to be slow, and connecting to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) which had Usenet, and grabbing gobs of data with a dial-up 2400-Baud Racal-Vadic Modem was tedious in the late 80’s and 90’s. Crap postings could actually be cancelled before they spread far and wide because message flow was all so entirely slow.
Now, a crap posting (today, ideally, a troll posting about Quanon containing some hideous pornographic image) can be circulated via Usenet within fractions of a second. Well, same with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… When you read that the prior Administration posted something misleading about voting, then there are always 3-4 lines which follow in a news article — “but before facebook could ‘tag’ the posting as violating some arabesque of propriety, it had already been read by “10,000,000” people, the video downloaded “300,000,000” times and reposted continuously, and the troll posting it responded with “outrage” that their first amendment rights to throw shit were trampled on.” I read that a YouTube posting telling people some brazen fiction about Vaccines, or sponsorship to organize a Far-Right terror rally “can’t be caught” before it’s been distributed to tens of millions of people — really? We’re speaking of an “oops” moment? Organizations that can target ads to people by age, religious affiliation, skin pigmentation, what kind of car they like, where they’ve been on vacation, what they’re talking about with friends, what kind of birth control they’re searching for, what kind of issues they’re having with their spouse — these organizations can’t figure out how to block anti-vaccination postings? Why is that?
Honestly, when you read the same news story 5, 10, 1000 times, you begin to realize that the instantaneous distribution and outrage is by design. The Trolls, in the case of modern fast unmoderated media, actually design and are running the social media system. Yep! What I feel is that systems like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and Tik-tok are actually designed by Trolls for Trolls, the more I read about them. The design of the prototype Social Media Usenet was perfect for attracting and retaining Trolls, but it had one flaw. Information was slow to travel, and generally users were unaware of what everyone else was reading, perhaps shocked by, and responding to. But it’s gotten so much better now. The social media itself measures reader ‘engagement’, and queues up more and more outrageous content automatically, content naturally coming from a wide variety of troll species. It’s designed to be a machine of outrage, no matter what you read about clever algorithms and filtering. It’s purely an effect of instantaneous mass distribution – virality, just like Covid. Trolls have built a system to guarantee that troll postings dominate all communication, are always the ‘most shared’ over time, and infect the most people with unhappiness. And when people object, and particularly horrible postings from the cesspool are, by some poor soul deleted, the ‘social media’ simply then points out that the cesspool posting by a troll troubled tens of millions of users, but it was ‘deleted’, and in pointing out the magnanamous restraint of their system, they naturally repeat “the posting telling people that Covid Vaccine causes ...” simply keeping the ball rolling. Horrible to realize isn’t it?
I’m sure people do enjoy connecting with one another on Twitter, FaceBook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram… and so on. And then you lose control of the ‘feed’. You get “other friends” are reading feeds. And stories are forwarded to you because you know someone who knows someone. You watch an instruction video, and the next one that queues up, and starts automatically, is a little more aggressive. You’re in the socialverse, and your conversations begin to revolve more around what surprised you than what informed you. “Are you on instagram”, starts the pull into multiple feeds and sources, and instead of connecting with friends, you’re connecting with… people. Then you read a posting that makes you pause, unhappy, and want to respond. The Troll Factory keeps sending you more, and more, your original friends somewhat distant as you find a majority of your news is from Facebook. or YouTube. And it’s more raw, more awful, because it’s hypnotic and frightening, and compelling. When you are left unhappy reading, it’s time to stop. Leave social media. It’s a machine designed by trolls to endlessly troll.
When I was reading about mass coordinated attacks in (Myanmar, Southern India, Kenya, Brazil, Germany, London, Oregon, the Capital...) on Facebook, or Whatsapp, or Instagram or Twitter or Reddit — I thought “wow’, that’s the specific design, the intent. The ultimate in trolling on social media is not just to upset people “ex machine”, but to get people upset enough to start to scale up their fears, anger, and depression in the real world. The faster the troll factory can feed them, without any connection to reality, the better it works, the more engaged, the more upset, and the more reactionary they become. That’s the design, I’m afraid.
A tale of two postings then: One gives accurate information about where to vote, or successful strategies for avoiding COVID, or a strategy for exercising while in isolation. Anodyne, possibly uplifting, but easy-to-skip. Compare that with an incendiary posting about “voter fraud conducted by mail by some foreign or minority group trying to take over government”, or how you “may have already have had COVID, can you hold your breath for more than 2 seconds then you don’t need a vaccine”, or best of all the outrage over a “minor celebrity says they definitely were not at a Hollywood body fluid eating or virus-spreading party,” or perhaps “You won’t believe how Angie Dickinson looks today!” The anodyne postings spread very slowly, but the lie/troll/cesspool postings spread like wildfire — nobody is vetting them, and within moments the OMG reflection system has spread the troll-jam far and wide. The system designed for the fastest flow of the most enraging content.
However, a very simple principle would stop it all cold, and it involves only slowing down dissemination of a post, in effect, ensuring that viral anonymous troll posts never spread with speed humans clearly can’t manage. The “R0” of measles, spread through the air is 12-18 — one infection can spread to 12-18 other people — yes, the term ‘going viral’ is not a good thing - and soon you have zillions of infected people. Wear a mask, have a vaccine, enforce physical and time distancing — slow it down and the impact of virality is destroyed, and people live uninfected. Social media became the monster we know because of speed, and in particular, the speed at which completely anonymous content, from bad actors, can spread on the platform designed to spread the worst the fastest.
Here’s an idea you don’t see: Stop using anonymous sites.
Would you have unprotected anal sex with an anonymous person in the age of HIV? Reading, (and spreading!) untested postings by any source in the age of Internet has the same danger. Few or no media sites I know of, which have anonymous public access, have quality or content tests which actually matter. Reading postings on social media in Usenet, and apparently today, which had no human preview as to conforming to standards of decency is the mental equivalent to unprotected anal sex with in the age of HIV. Sorry to be so vivid, but count me out. You cannot ‘unsee’ cesspool content.
I read postings here on DailyKos from KOS staff mostly. I’m not a staff member, this posting is relatively anonymous, and I’m generally not a troll as are most posters and responders here. KOS is both slow (I see postings usually a day or two after mainstream media), and managed. It’s human-scale, and it doesn’t have Trollery. I also read content on Reason, a mirror-image of KOS. It’s one of my favorite Troll Honeypots. Besides the knee-jerk wildly negative response to any concept that doesn’t involve pure selfishness (yes, we’re talking Libertarian), their completely anonymous ‘hands off’ commentary to libertarian writing, you can in a few seconds get a feel for the zeitgeist, as when Covid writing came out and Trolls simply wrote, as you can imagine, about the benefits of accelerating death of undesirables. I was amused to see even hardened Reason Libertarians were shocked — shocked! and dismayed! — that other libertarians could be so unapologetically fascist and rabid. Trolls love fast-response anonymous social media, so we have Twitter just for them.
Here’s an idea you don’t see: Don’t “Tag” troll postings — remove the troll.
Remember the Communications Decency act, which tagged records (God Bless Tipper Gore) to identify adult content? Or movies and now TV (contains scenes of nudity, drug use, body shaming, body shaving, nose-piercing, uncomfortable airplane seats and smoking cigarettes while drinking beer). Sounds like a movie I’d end up watching. Can you imagine Disneyland allowing people into the parks with Measles, but requiring them to wear purple sweaters? Why would they be there at all? It’s crazy! Tagging increases visibility of a posting, increases visibility to a troll, and elevates cesspool content. As the adage goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The bad thing is simply disappearing.
Here’s an idea you don’t see: Freeze troll postings.
Any basic damaging posting which has a delay in being viewed and shared, which can be isolated, identified, cancelled or ‘treated’ for virality, will have a very low, to no spread rate. No posting of a beheading should ever have a million views before being ‘taken down’. We should learn something about controlling hackers and passwords. When you try a password in many systems, if you make a mistake more than a few times, then there’s a pause before you can login again. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute. It won’t stop a hacker from trying, but it makes it very, very slow to crack a password. If a robot is trying to crack the password, it easily manages giant robot armies hacking away. They rapidly become unusable.
Why isn’t this an method for trolls? Freeze them. If you originate or spread a discredited post, you have a 24-hour delay up to the next post. If you have a 2nd discredited post, you have a 48-hour, then 96-hour, and so on delay, the anti-viral doubling delay. They delay is in proportion to your personal Troll R0. The network of viral troll postings gets an exponential slowdown which literally halts non-topic, incendiary, troll-lies immediately. There’s not ‘freedom of speech’, issue, just a ‘pollution of speech. Robot troll armies, everything hits molasses very quickly, and it becomes expensive to keep up the crap, and you simply can’t get responses, and people won’t spread for you.
Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, it should also replace laws concerning profanity and penalties on public TV networks. I couldn’t care less about profanity (lets scrap that!), but it certainly generates lots of breathless concern.
Does anyone remember the Fairness Doctrine? Cleverly scrapped by an original Troll-in-Chief Reagan, this mandated that, for holders of communications licenses, in matters of public importance and controversy, they would be forced to broadcast other positions on the matter. What an idea! In fact, the US supreme court (8-0 ruling) found that the fairness doctrine was constitutional, and even applied to Teletext! Zowie! All gone in the 80’s. The FCC simply said, anyone can monopolize a communication resource from now on… So therefore we suddenly got trolls like Russ Limbaugh and others monopolizing radio time, Fox monopolizing network time… and Trolls effectively monopolizing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube…
I’d rather hear that the FCC imposes a combination delay, and equal time troll penalty as a new version of “Fairness”— on Troll networks. One self-harm advisory (forget masks! gargle with Lysol!) imposes a one-hour block on their programming in prime-time, to be replaced with one-hour of “how to manage COVID” commercial-free for a week. The second event, a two-hour block free block in prime-time for a week. A statement by a troll personality communicating voting-machine libel — one hour block for a week. two hour block for a week… A politician communicating unmediated or mediated, debunked lies about voting, about Qanon simply results in under an ‘equal time’ rule an exponentially increasing amount of time devoted to the facts.
Speakers are free to say what they want. But distribution networks are held accountable for damage and speed of misinformation.
Another idea you never hear: Never quote a troll.
Generalize around troll communication when referencing it or you become the problem. Quotes and citations merely continue to provide exact duplicates of troll information with ludicrously ineffective disclaimers (see the purple sweater in Disneyland from my original post). The information flows continues to zip along at the speed of affrontery:
John Doe claimed he was acting on authentic “Votes were changed, and the election was a fraud.” information when he assaulted police officers, information known to be is false.
Still Troll-talk on a high-speed network: both a great callout for John Doe and that less-than-useful ‘false’ label.
When arrested for assaulting police officers in a recent riot that lead to 5 deaths, and hundreds of injuries, John D. offered a confused explanation that his actions were directed by, and in response to bizarre, anonymously spread conspiracy theories and legally discredited false statements made by the losing electoral candidate.
The Demon of Speed is tamed. Troll postings freeze on social (and other) media, and where necessary, wrapped in clear but protective language. We’re not wired for intellectually managing high-speed viral Troll lie distribution. So rewire the distribution back to human speed. Or, as I advocate, stop using social media. Stop being part of the problem!
Finally, probably the last social media observation:
5 — Social media is not a conversation, it’s a recording.
Recently I read some usenet posts I made back from the mid-80’s in a kind of ‘best of’ archive’, along with “Deja-News” which was taken over by Google. Folks, we’re speaking of 40 years ago, was I aware that my postings would be archived and ‘recorded’ for all time? Of course, when I made the postings, there was a small audience who was used to my peculiar humor, and it was all fun. Then there was the day a few years later I talked with someone from Johns-Hopkins, and found a posting I had made was printed out and put on bulletin boards, still humorous but faintly… disturbing. Not distribution I intended.
When I chat with friends, I don’t imagine that what I say is recorded, and can be played back at any time. It’s just… talking. As social media created the ability to ‘chat’ with many people simultaneously, at a distance, it also began to lull people in to feeling that an online chat and an in-person chat were the same. They’re not. We all laugh when a politician posts something which is childishly simple to challenge from one of their prior postings, or a video, or a tweet, you name it. “Gosh, didn’t they know that everything they do or say on internet is permanent?”
Unfortunately, Usenet also signaled to me that for us, ordinary people, everything we do or say ‘on internet’ is recorded, and more or less permanent, and fully accessible to Trolls. Don’t people find it startling when software mines their conversations and presents a ‘timeline’ 5-10 years prior? Ugh! The first time is startling, as my friends show me their ‘timelines’. The second time is creepy, and it grew into a very creepy feeling for me. My Usenet observations from only 30 years ago, that everything even then was a recording, is all too true. Social media makes everything you do — everything you post, click on to read, click on to forward — a permanent recording. Would you want exactly the wrong person to get your reading history on Facebook? It’s there… it’s been recorded.
For a strange digital project I’m working on in Artificial Intelligence, I found that I can download years of postings from, say, Reddit, or Usenet or other sites, for training an AI. My Usenet postings of 40 years ago are ‘online’. And I have no say in the matter - for most social media the presumption is I gave up all rights to my own conversation while using the media tool. Does everyone realize that? No. My own postings from decades ago are now raw material for something entirely different. Do you realize your social media usage is the same?
We simply aren’t wired or trained yet to understand, to feel that everything we ‘say or do’ online in social forums is not a real-world conversation. It is patiently digitally recorded, then indexed, then merged into databases, so that people you don’t know and can’t see, aren’t even aware of, are searching and reading and ‘mining’ for ways to convince you put more of your private conversations online to store, and index and mine and… I don’t know about you, but I’d rather talk to friends personally and enjoy the moment without the inhibitions that come when we know recordings are going on.
There are people who seem to not care about privacy. There was a period when we read about college students posting bleary post-party-binge pictures online, then were desperately trying to delete them later, or postings which created drastically negative impressions for jobs, or for police searches, or perhaps… political searches and purges. Suddenly some of them came to their senses.
The older people get, the more they appreciate privacy, and perhaps begin to understand why transferring social contact to social media isn’t such a hot idea. What you did 10-20 years ago has a way of showing up perhaps at exactly the wrong time, because your information in social media isn’t yours, it is read and indexed and searched and shared by people you don’t know for purposes you can’t imagine. Count me out.
The evil magic comes when the Trolls then find social media — in other words, recordings - , and then use them to foster irritation, to upset people, divert conversations, create ad-hominen attacks of the maximum number of people possible, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Do you remember what you said 10 years ago when irritated at a neighbor and perhaps, just perhaps, said something you might regret, or might come learn is abusive (though at the time felt acceptable). Social media remembers, and will hold it against you forever. Ugh! That’s the perfect dystopia — social media, access to all your past (recorded activities), handed over to a troll to create sharply enraging content, propagated faster than can be shut-down, and with trollgorithms designed to generate the maximum outragement. Lovely!
Private information on social media is a fantastic drug for trolls. Doxxing, is a powerful form of trolling focused on spreading private information — addresses, phone numbers, visits to a sex club, payments to a prostitute…. spreading the information about a person far and wide. It may stem possibly from the concept of ‘outing’ hypocritical politicians who were anti-gay in in public and very pro-gay in bed. With social media — demon speed, forever data, anonymous trolls, descent into melancholy — it takes on an inhuman dimension.
Another really atrocious troll system is one is a deepfake annealing someone’s face to a porn-star’s body in a video. Or publishing private sexual conversations — executives and Politicians know all about that now. It’s all recorded, forever. Finding privately shared pictures which became public. Pictures of your children. Private emails. Treasure troves for humiliation.
Every posting, conversation, every picture and joyous moment posted in social media can become part of the cesspool of memes, doctored images stealing lives, spread with demonic, uncontrollable speed at the moment when you’re most vulnerable. Does that sounds fun? Positively Social?
Enough on these topics perhaps.
So, that’s why I’m kind of “Anti/Social Média” – in the non-digital world I actually have a lot of friends and acquaintances, love long involved conversations and tall tales, enjoy all-evening dinners and all-day lunches and events with friends and family, and maintain a network of contact with people worldwide from decades of traveling for work and pleasure/ Just not on social media. It’s effortless. I’ve never been attacked or trolled in the last 20-30 years, I don’t worry about private subjects being broadcast. My interactions are valuable, for the most part at human speed, and I learn things from people.
Just not on social media.
Social media are all the same, it’s about the name changing as the old systems become polluted. Usenet becomes AOL becomes Myspace becomes Facebook becomes Twitter becomes Instagram becomes Reddit becomes 4chan becomes Snapchat becomes Baidu becomes Tiktok.
Do you really want to subject yourself accidentally to reading or spreading troll hate? Do you want to subject yourself to the melancholy of instagram “Troll” influencers, or the humiliation of “where did those photos come from”? Do you want to get into a screaming fight with someone who doesn’t care, and enjoys being insulted? Do you want to read from trolling ‘expert’ economists giving medical advice? Do you want to worry about whether the neighbor next door is a rabid racist, and what you need to do? Then ‘keep connected!’ and realize that in the long run, it may just not be so good for you.
And, count me out.
And I always advise, count yourself out too.