And too bad for that.

Good thing ignore feature exists.

I like my anonymity online well enough -- no easy answers from me, but I'm glad the topic is still out there.

(as I've been accused of being a RW shill on more than one occasion).

On the one hand I am sure that there are people who are from campaigns or the RNCC (or possibly even the DNCC) who are paid to visit and post and disrupt.

On the other hand it's too facile to assume that people who disagree with you are trolls. I mean it's pleasing to assume that all the honest DUers agree with your position on the issue of the day, and the people who disagree with you are obvious trolls. But the long term implications of that strategy are largely negative.

1) By assuming your antagonists are trolls - you cut yourself off from analyzing your own views. Even assuming you don't change them, you might well refine them or your arguments in favor of them.

2) By assuming your antagonists are trolls (and therefore acting in bad faith) you might lose the opportunity to convince someone of the rightness of your position - I hate to admit this (this being the internet and all) but I have had the experience of changing my perception by a well argued point.

I generally think it's best to assume that people are arguing from good faith - although I have my bad days where I just want to fight.

Bryant

And what do you do if you think that you are talking with a troll?

Bryant

... argue with DU members who I believe are trolls, especially if I think they are secret conservatives undermining traditional Democratic Party policy positions. But most often I have those folks on "mentally ignore" and don't read their threads or replies.

And yet, someone last week said that he "knows of a better forum for me" or something to that effect, just because I posted a few things to the right of his opinions on certain topics.

Can you guarantee that you are to the left of me, if not in agreement, with all of MY opinions?

If not, can I suggest you go post on F.R. like that other DUer suggested to me the other day?

I'm usually fairly far left, calling out positions I believe are right of traditional (e.g., "FDR&quot Democratic Party policies. I don't have much remorse over telling members to take their right-wing opinions elsewhere, although I don't recall ever mentioning FR.

Clearly the Russia troll brigade was out in force not to long ago.

And all you have to do is snark on Putin and the long knives come out...

I've blocked at least a few trolls on here who may indeed by left-wing, but only pass themselves off as liberals, and/or are particularly onerous about certain subjects(at least one of these folks actually accused me of being racist because I disagreed with a position, or position, of theirs), as well as one guy whose main offense was stalking.

Must have really misread what you said.

I will admit that I have some strong views and some strong ways of expressing them. I make it no secret that our society needs to be disarmed completely. Many of my fiscal views are Marxist in nature. I wouldn't even be too bothered if certain types of hate speech were made a criminal offense, the way that throwing around racist remarks against African- and Asian-Europeans can land you in very hot water in places like Great Britain.

I'm not a "Let's all hold hands and love each other" kind of progressive, but the kind that thinks conservatism is a serious cancer. Perhaps it is because I live in a conservative stronghold where people assume everyone around them is part of their echo chamber, and they make it no secret how they want to take the country "back" from atheists and Muslims and gays and transgendered and African-Americans and Latinos.

I haven't been here too long, and while I've found plenty of DUers are accepting of the fact we're not going to agree on everything 100% of the time, I've also found some are a little too quick to dismiss anyone who doesn't fit into some "safe" slightly-left-of-center position as a conservative or RW troll. I even had a lengthy anti-gun post reported to MIRT because my knowledge of firearm culture apparently makes me a pro-gun agitator, when in reality that's a product of my living in a conservative stronghold where people need to flap their gums about guns all the time.

Once we hit 1,000 post, some of the stigma will subside. Until then, we are suspect.

I don't want to make it easier for stalkers and other miscreants to find ways to attack me in real life.

good conversation, though, and that's why I posted the piece.

I do think, in close-knit communities, that "reputation" can play a role. Of course, here we tend to give people the benefit of the doubt (which is not the case in other places), so trolls can have their way for a bit, anyway.

arguing with them is like addressing the kitchen table.

they even go about ending anonymity. People could still just post fake pictures of others as their avatar/create fake names and lie that it's them, unless maybe they start requiring people to show ID in order to create an account.

by showing ID.

Of course, that didn't stop the Bush twins! Fake IDs can be had for not too much money!


For every method of ID verification, there's a way to get round it. All it would do is slow the trolls down, not stop them. I think that taking a troll down a peg before banning them is probably a better way to go--it sensitizes the regular readers to the fact that there's shenanigans in the comment section!

This is due in large part to social media.

In reality, I couldn't give two fucks what some RW asshole has to say about the President, the government, the ACA, pancakes or the weather.

Beyond that, all opinions are not created equal. The opinion of someone who is poorly educated and willfully ignorant shouldn't count as much as someone who is the opposite of those things.

Yeah, that'll work!

I don't think this article is considering the interactions in more intimate online communities. It's more about big, anonymous comment streams after Daily Mail or Guardian-style articles, I suspect.

The bit about "open" comment sections made me think of places like Yahoo and IMDb. The latter has been overrun with wingers and people with major superiority complexes ("If you don't agree with me that this film/director is worthless, then you're a ___tard!!1!&quot

someone posting about the tardis from Dr. Who, or maybe a medical condition known as tardive dyskinesia!

but I do know about the TARDIS

Maybe we should act dumb with those that use it and offer up all of the other words with those four letters. Confuse them until they leave in disgust

Our Dr. Strange made me laugh the other day after a complaint I had with my postal carrier stuffing CDs and other too-large items into my tiny mailbox:

"My mailbox is not a TARDIS!"

changed my opinion.

Reading intelligent comments and providing links that back up comments helps me to form my opinions.

I then do my own research.

I like truth and facts.

People who get nasty and insulting don't help their cause or their POV, IMO...maybe that's a generational thing, but I don't "do" nastiness and bullying very well.

IMO a troll will always lose in the end, they can never maintain their apparent similarities with the other posters or forum topic. At some point they have to start trolling with contradictory information. Usually spotted by ten forum regulars a soon as they start.

Everyone has seen it here after key topics come up in GD. Someone is always there, unable to comprehend what 99% of the other posters are saying. Or the drive by threads where 300 people correct them and they never come back.

Another good reason always to verify information if it is from corporate or state run media. I would guess dictatorships would have the most number of trolls.

Due to a swarming of trolls i can tell you its quite an effective means to dissuade people from participating in a forum as i have sent a recently formed forum i was participating in to the recycle bin for just such activity.

A lot of Stormfront assholes signing up there. Some have been exposed coming directly from KKK websites.

Too much hate venom and vitriol from an ever increasing number of RWNJs .

!

The two main news subreddits, /r/News and /r/WorldNews, and the main internet meme subreddit, /r/AdviceAnimals, are infested with racists, and the racist posts get upvoted and the sane posts get downvoted.

But yet it was /r/Politics that got removed from the default subreddit list because it is a "left-wing circle-jerk". More like Conde Nast, Reddit's owner, didn't like one of the default subreddits being a haven for people wanting the downfall of the Corporatists.

What happens if the Orchestrated Campaign of Asswipes becomes incorporated with the regulars?

Those Koch Brothers will eventually die!

From a couple of guys who know how to cognitively infiltrate an Internet or two scientifically:

An AVAILABILITY CASCADE is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that give the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs -- activists who manipulate the content of public discourse -- strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas ("Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation," Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, Stanford Law Review, 1999).

complaining about Trolls? That's rich.

Derail. Disrupt. Discredit.

At least, that's the drill.

ok, thanks for the clarification.

And I don't have a problem, I believe in vaccines, safe nuclear power and the use of military power in the hands of a competent PBO.

And folks here have no idea just how many disruptors get stopped at the door. MIRT rocks!

disrupt. They serve a 90 day term and can serve two terms in a row. I served 4 times.

It's a group of DUers who volunteer to screen new joins and are responsible for removing disruptors and trolls from this board. This board is heavily trolled/FReeped/etc., so MIRT keeps DU safe for the rest of us. Here's the explanation:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10134294

I've served on MIRT, so can really appreciate the job that they do. We get all manner of people who come here to cause trouble, but you won't encounter the majority of them, thanks to MIRT.

Between the midterms and the news coming out of Ferguson, so thought they deserve a special vote of appeciation.

Then there's the run-of-the-mill trolls that are familiar to you.

Phew!

And thanks for all you did here today!

and the jury system isn't a troll hunting device. Thus trolls can (and probably do) infiltrate this forum and write some pretty vile stuff so long as it's not in the form of a personal attack. More insidiously they are free to present backward, racist, misogynistic, *phobic views using polite language and claim to be part of the "big tent" of Democratic politics. It's rare that this sort of troll is PPR'ed by admin.

But MIRT does do a terrific job at turning away a large number of obvious disruptors at the door. As for the others, the admins do hear about them even if they are excused by juries, and recent juries haven't been particularly tolerant of the views you mention. Sending them to MIRT is still important.

Admin either is busy with other things or loathe to PPR long time trolly types.

Though MIRT does have a long memory.

I want a cape.

Would you want someone digging up absolutely everything you've posted, everywhere you've visited, and everyone you've ever talked to on the internet? Would you want this to be used against you? How about employers, or even the government?

Would you want that one time you lost your temper on DU and called someone a name a couple of years ago to be forever associated with your name? Anonymity exists on the internet for a reason, and is very important. It's for the same reason voting is private.

thesis, I simply presented it for the sake of conversation).

It would make the internet "no fun" anymore, because everything one does would be searchable, and that's not the case in real life.

"You" is referring to the general internet user.

It would be pretty hard to find someone who would be open to their entire internet history being public information. Technically it currently is, but it would be almost impossible to compile that type of information. With no anonymity, it would be fairly easy to find someone's online activity on forums, their interests, and what party they belong to. This could be fairly problematic.

Currently, ISPs would be able to provide what you've done on the internet, but there's absolutely no reason to give that information up unless if you take part in criminal activity. LEOs and the government in general don't care much about what the common internet user is doing - it's a waste of time. The people that want this information most are people who have no business looking for it in the first place.

...it's pretty obvious that they are shills.

Is it pretty obvious you're a paid shill?

The repeated "progressive" line posted weekly often seems like a cut and paste. How do we know you're not getting marching orders from someone?

They come in when the Pootie word is uttered, and they leave when his shit dies down.

I've seen a lot of people accused of being DLC paid trolls who I don't think are, though. They are simply people with a wide range of interests who happen to agree with many of the principles espoused by the Democratic leadership. I don't think they are "bots" any more than the "Hillary haters" are bots, even though they relentlessly go after her, or the "Obama haters" are bots, because they doggedly go after him--they're just people who disagree, often very aggressively. I don't think the people who incessantly champion Warren for POTUS after she's said, time and time again, that this idea is a "Hell No," are bots either--they're just "enthusiasts" whose sincerity sometimes overrides their better judgment.

I think accusing Democrats of being Trolls for Democrats is a bit, well, pointless. I save that kind of stuff for the GOP. At the end of the day, Democrats have much more in common than some want to admit. We all want a better life for people, we want people to have jobs, homes, health care, an education, security...the stuff that makes life worth living. We don't want people living in poverty and want, stressed out and fearful, and under the boot of The Man. We don't go for serfdom and we want people to be self-actualized to the extent of their abilities. We may not agree on how to get there but we for the most part agree on the goals.

The reason is the banned troll downthread. Too many of them!

like I want to if my name was out there. Not good for my career.

Anonymity is a necessary remedy for power imbalances. Once a person is named, the person with greater power in a dispute can retaliate against them just for making them look bad in public. It is especially important to protect anonymity inthe US where only the wealthy have serious access to legal defense of their rights and civil liberties.

The people who harp the loudest about "courtesy" are people who are used to being deferred to because in the offline world the wield some implied power. The people around them want something from them or are afraid of them - thus they are careful not to offend. When people demand courtesy or they "will walk away" from a debate or political demands, they are displaying the power to walk away. Powerlessness is having the conversation continually derailed by offense-finding. We see how annoying this is when we can't make headway in conversation with a religious fanatic that evades logical points by invoking Holy Offense, but we don't admit we use trivial points of courtesy the same way.

That said - what do we do about waves of paid astroturf? If the astroturf is being delivered in batches of hundreds of posts, then it can probably be filtered onthe backend as a form of spam.

If what is appearing is simply negative opinion, at the same rate as other posts, in natural language, that would be up to a moderator or jury to screen. After all- how could you differentiate that from a paid shill shouting in a public square? We can't control the origin of opinions.

Outing companies and people that pay for astroturf might help. Perhaps blocking their IPs would help, though I doubt these are warehouse operations.

If "distorting the meaning of articles" is such an issue, the web site can block comments or only post selected "editorial" responses. No need to assert Totalitarian control over the Internet and squeeze the neck of every anonymous person until their mask pops off.

I don't say this without sympathy for this article's cri de coeur. Trolls suck. I'm pretty active in the Gamergate conversation in which trolls are rife. On forums with crowd-sourced self-monitoring, it's hard to get rid of a troll infestation once they are in the monitoring system. It's frustrating. You want to scream: "Trolls make everything suck! Bring out the napalm!"

But ending Internet anonymity is not the way. That's just the whine of someone who has been getting by on too much privilege in their offline life and doesn't realize it.

People who frequent a site can usually spot a bullshitter at sixty paces, and the good regulars don't hesitate to call out those fools. It's helpful for casual readers and n00bs so that they have an idea as to who's valid and who's a pretender.

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not in favor of the Name-Rank-Serial Number routine proposed by this author...I simply posted the article for purposes of discussion and to provoke ideas from others.

influence people's perceptions. But it doesn't, because people here have been online for a long time and know who the trolls are.

It's always the same people, so they're not hard to spot.

If anything, when a known group of trolls descend on a thread, the opposite happens, people who might not even have read it take a peek at who is trying to influence readers, and generally decide the article is probably worth reading and most likely very factual.

I don't like it. Time to end it.

anonymous, they got the better of her, and she's still stung over it. It wouldn't surprise me if that motivated this essay.

I say it all the time here--the solution to speech is more speech. Within our own group, the "censorship" we do isn't really censorship at all--a "Hide" is more about being tired of an uncivil attitude, usually, or rudeness--and the "hidden" post is still there unless it's someone who doesn't share our group goals--the wingnuts and stormfronters that like to chain pull. It's a way of saying "Step back, you're being a jerk" in most cases (save the trolls, and MIRT will take those out).

Requiring people to put their name out there, in this day and age, though, could be dangerous, because there are weirdos out there.

response. With a smile and a wave, of course.