Arthur Chu has a brilliant piece at Salon about why the Internet is so susceptible to throngs of obsessive bullies who won’t ever ever ever go away.
The “vote” doesn’t end up being among everyone but among the tiny subset of people who really care about that question, which isn’t necessarily correlated with being right about that question–often, in fact, it’s the opposite.
The people who pay the most attention to these questions are the people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it. That can happen on any end of the political spectrum, but in practice? It tends to be a space dominated by privileged reactionary jerks.
Why is that? Why don’t we have people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it on our side of the question?
Well, having asked, I can think of one reason, but it requires changing Chu’s terms a little. I know I’m not willing to be one of those people (and I know neither are a lot of people I know), but it’s not because I don’t have time and energy for it. It’s because I don’t want to squander my time and energy on the kind of people who do that on the other side of the question – on privileged reactionary jerks, in short. It’s because I don’t want to squander my time interacting with horrible people. It’s that simple.
[W]hat’s somewhat true of real elections is overwhelmingly true of Internet elections. No public forum for comment can exist long without being taken over by “the trolls”–and while the trolls sometimes do things just for the lulz, like trying torig a Taylor Swift fan contest to force her on a date with a creepy 4chan dude, this kind of free-form anarchic subversion of online elections is becoming a thing of the past.
Today’s longest-lasting, most determined trolls have a real ideology behind their trolling, and it usually takes the form of a feeling of betrayal and resentment of the world around them and a knee-jerk rage against the idea of progress.
The worst trolls are almost universally hard-right conservatives, in other words, and they generally care about their pet causes with a breathtaking fervor that their enemies can’t possibly hope to match.
Or, again, their enemies may have the fervor, but they don’t have the stomach for horrible people. People consumed with knee-jerk rage against the idea of progress are not fun or interesting to talk to, and they tend to be abusive. It’s that simple.
Right-wing trolls can shout down everyone else because everyone else gets nauseated by the shouting while right-wing trolls don’t. Consider
the $800,000 raised on a GoFundMe for Memories Pizza in Indiana as an apparent no-strings-attached reward for being publicly homophobic from the nation’s homophobes.
Why? There are plenty of homophobic business owners in the country, and if you gave $800,000 to each of them even Mitt Romney would quickly run dry. Surely even in terms of objectively helping out their cause they’d do better giving that money to a political candidate or to a nonprofit pushing their goals.
But that wouldn’t give them the same level of attention as participating in the media-manufactured “controversy” over Memories Pizza–and it wouldn’t piss off liberals nearly as much. And those are the two major goals of the right-wing troll. Hence the fact that nearly every time anyone gets criticized by the “liberal media” they also get a huge wave of donations from trolls, even if they’re guilty not just of public homophobia but of gunning down an unarmed kid.
It’s like freeping. I’d forgotten about freeping.
I say that this kind of thing is “new” but really it’s just the right-wing Internet returning to form. Back in the mid-2000s we had the slang term “freep this poll.” It was a phrase used to rally posters on the Free Republic to mass-flood a poll or comments section hosted by some random website or local newspaper in order to create the impression of an overwhelming majority supporting their fringe-right views.
It’s what that Irish blogger’s new best friends do on his blog: they mob it to create the impression of an overwhelming majority supporting their reactionary views.
But people don’t realize how easy it is to distort the dialogue that way.
People still claim that the toxicity on comments sections or the skewed results of freeped polls and contests reflect reality, and use those claims to try to intimidate critics into silence.
Recently we’ve seen the results of freeping in an area particularly vulnerable to it, the Hugo Awards. For the less-geeky among my readers, the Hugos are the most prestigious awards in the field of science fiction writing, generally encountered as an approving blurb “From Hugo-award-winning author…” on the back cover of a book.
The Hugos are awarded by a popular vote. But.
but to vote you have to pay $40 for a “supporting membership” to Worldcon, the organization that sponsors the Hugos. Tons of people read science fiction; relatively few of them know how to vote for the Hugos; and out of those, not everyone’s going to drop $40 just to express their opinion about what they’ve read.
To vote on the Hugos you have to either know and care a ton about science fiction–or you have to be convinced that science fiction is part of the vast liberal conspiracy arrayed against you and make a disingenuous post calling you and your friends “Sad Puppies” over said liberal conspiracy. $40 is a lot of money to pay to express your opinions, even strongly held ones, about fiction you love–but it’s a cheap price to stick it to liberal pro-diversity elitists you hate.
And they did.
We should have learned a long, long time ago that “Just let the public give their input” is a lazy, useless and above all dangerous way to make decisions. If you want democracy you have to put effort into designing a process that actually makes sure your voting population matches the relevant population and to keep the process from being captured by bad actors. If that’s too hard for you, then accept that democracy is too hard for you and find some other way to claim legitimacy for the decision you end up making.
But don’t just leave your process open to the public and unguarded, unless you want The Comments making your decisions for you. Best case scenario, you end up with egg on your face that can be easily wiped off, like a bridge named after Stephen Colbert.
Worst case scenario, your public platform becomes a mouthpiece for the worst people in the world, who won’t give it back until they’ve run it into the ground.
This is exactly correct. Comments sections can go to hell if you don’t curate them. You have to curate them. The angry reactionaries pretend that’s a cowardly offense against free speech, but it’s not at all. It’s no more an offense against free speech than is the fact that magazine and newspaper editors select who writes for them, as opposed to just publishing whatever they’re offered.
You have to curate comments sections, and you have to keep in mind that hands-off comments sections don’t represent anything but whatever mob has seized them.
You have to curate them. The angry reactionaries pretend that’s a cowardly offense against free speech, but it’s not at all.
You have to curate them because otherwise they turn into spam-a-thons and JAQoff sessions. If you look at Ashley Miller’s fairly interesting threads about AI, you’ll see nothing but pages and pages and pages of what can only generously be described as “spam”. It’s not spam about penis enlargement or make.money.fast – it’s political spam; it’s people who think their views are more relevant or important if they shout them at you.
Not curating such spaces ensures that free speech doesn’t happen because nobody’s going to read through all the dreck and sieve out the nuggets. In other words, curating is the best way to defeat the heckler’s veto (and in that sense it’s why parlimentary procedures are followed instead of letting everyone shout their opinion at the top of their lungs over and over!)
Exactly. I won’t allow dreck here because if I do, the interesting people will go away, and I don’t want that.
Of course it’s also because I don’t want the dreck myself. But I sometimes forget that I’m not just consulting my own tastes, and then I see blogs that are overrun with dreck and I remember that no, it’s not just my taste.
It’s funny when I talk to people who haven’t spent much time in blog comments, web forums, etc. — they’ve never heard of Godwin’s Law, or concern trolling, and they don’t recognize some of the conversational red flags that I do. (E.g., anyone who starts talking about “fiat money” or Bitcoin or “SJWs.”)
For that matter, if you only had online comments sections to go by, you would have been shocked that America hasn’t legalized marijuana everywhere, and elected Ron Paul to multiple terms in the White House.
Marcus Ranum @1
I looked at Ashley’s threads and saw post after post of JAQs about the exact point where someone becomes too dunk to give consent to sex and other misogynist gems. Those people are obsessed with preserving male privilege (while denying such a thing exists). Chu is correct when he says:
“in practice? It tends to be a space dominated by privileged reactionary jerks.”
The problem there is that one can define anyone with a voice who uses it as “privileged reactionary jerks”. For example, those of us who speak out against religion’s excesses will sometimes be told we’ve become drunk on our free speech rights, that what we have to say would rightfully have resulted in our incarceration (at the very least) in the past because what we say tears down society’s very core, and that we basically have no right to speak freely – we must carefully weigh each word, each syllable, to avoid offending the religious simply because they’re religious. “Privileged reactionary jerks” is unfortunately a sword that cuts whichever way those who decide to use it choose to wield it – and there’s no rule for who can pick it up.
I disagree, Blanche. It is not that difficult to see the difference between an actual thought you disagree with and dreck. For instance, Eugene Volokh arguing expertly that allowing hate speech is essential to freedom. (I’m convinced he’d stop being so pro-hate speech if it was his personal life it was ruining. But I digress.) Versus a jerk piling on filth and drowning out everyone else.
Okay, so those are two extremes, but my point is that it’s not hard for the human mind to tell them apart. The law is full of decisions about situations that depend on the analysis of “reasonable people.” The whole jury system, for one.
The attempt to say you must allow everything or nothing is based on the conviction that we’ll screw it up if we have to make judgments. But that’s really just a fear. It doesn’t let us off making the necessary judgments. And deciding where the real gray areas are where we don’t interfere is also a type of judgment.
We have to wade in and decide who’s a troll, who’s Volokh, who can speak and who is just shouting and preventing everyone else from exercising their rights. That last is why we can’t take the easy way out and refuse to use judgment. If we try that, the only result is we’re saying it’s okay if some people get shouted down and can’t actually use their right to speak.
Wow, “freeping”. I can’t believe I’d forgotten that term. What a blast from the past.
Blanche – also – don’t forget, we’re talking about blog comments here. Not speech in general, just comments on the internet. Yes of course people will use their own filters – and they get to do that.
That’s a tiny bit disingenuous. I’d not forgotten about freeping, because I’ve never heard the word before. I am familiar with the concept, though. It’s just that literally all the times I’ve seen it done (which is a lot), the word used was not “freep”, but “pharyngulate”.
sonofrojblake #9
Every “pharyngulation” I am aware of was actually a kind of “anti-freep”. Some religious fundamentalist or science denier posts a poll, usually on a fairly small site that is already heavily skewed in favor of biblical literalism or whatever, and then crows that 97% are in favor of that position, ignoring the fact that only 400 total votes have been registered. In and of itself, that is fine, but the problem was that lazy journalists would use these cow-pies as “evidence” of a vast population of Ken Hams out there. PZ was merely highlighting how puny those kinds of polls really are.
“Why is that? Why don’t we have people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it on our side of the question?”
I spat Pepsi over my keyboard at that. A couple of inches to the left is a list of 35 blogs, most if not all of which do exactly that. With commenters by the boatload and comment threads that go on for pages and pages. The internet I’m looking at bears no resemblance to the one your seeing.
“The Hugos? “Sad Puppies”? What have I blinked and missed now?” So I had a butchers. Ire might be better directed at Vox Day’s “Rabid Puppy” slate. That guy looks like an ugly piece of work. The “Sad Puppy” slate is a different beast. Begun a few years ago by Larry Correia “…to demonstrate that the awards were biased, represented the likes of only one small part of fandom, and that authors with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be attacked.”, “Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies 3, and I was one of the people who helped. The mission changed, and Brad’s main goal was to get deserving, worthy authors who would normally be ignored onto the ballot, regardless of their politics.” http://monsterhunternation.com/page/2/. Primary sources trump second-hand wibble.
It is one thing to get something or someone on a ballot and another to get that someone or something a vote. We just had a lot of election froth about UKIP over here. Bugger all came of it. We read their election guff; found it content free or giggle-worthy and voted otherwise. If it is a good book, it has a better chance of winning than if it is dreck. Who nominated it is irrelevant. The politics or personality of the author are also irrelevant. The jury votes for what it reads.
You don’t care for the nominations for whatever reason? Join Worldcon and nominate your own under-appreciated authors. Set up your own “Cute Kitten” slate for next year. The more people join, the more nominations and the more representative the the vote and award. That’s how “Jim Crow” was beaten: by getting the voters registered and then getting them out. I hate to think what the Civil Rights Movement would have become if the Internet had been around in the Sixties, considering the present propensity to devolve into furious, wildly inaccurate, and largely useless, spatting.
I find it ironic that “conservative” authors are in metaphorical arms about being underrepresented in US Sci-Fi awards. When I think of US Sci-Fi Heinlein, Card, Cherryh and Moon come to mind. Commies all. Not.
Finishing up, I don’t find Arthur Chu terribly credible. Legend in his own lunchtime and chump, yes. Credible, no. When your incendiary postings and harassing behaviour lead to supporters even more wrong-headed than you to make bomb threats (against lesbians, blacks, transsexuals, gays and feminists for gawds sake!) it is time to fold your tent and slink back into the swamp. It doesn’t say a lot for your critical faculties that you are quoting this fool at length either.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/05/03/dc-gamergate-meetup-disrupted-by-feminist-bomb-threat/
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/05/04/how-gamergate-hater-and-social-justice-clown-arthur-chu-got-me-laid/
The editorial tone of these two posts is clearly biased but don’t let that get in the way of the content. Time to calm down and get a sense of proportion before you inadvertently spawn 21st century Weathermen.