Troll-Hunting
Oct. 17th, 2012 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerI can't help but steal Ta-Nehisi Coates' title for this post, since his blog is where I first caught wind of this story, and his title was a good one.
Over at Gawker, Adrien Chen has posted about the notorious Reddit troll (and also moderator, which is a key point) called "Violentacrez." It unmasks VA's real identity as Michael Brutsch, but for my money, that's not the interesting part. Instead it's the dissection of Reddit's "free speech" culture, and the way that its paid employees decided it was easier and therefore preferable to make a deal with the devil, rather than attempt to enforce any sort of decency above the bare legal minimum.
What do I mean by that? You should go read the article, but here's a sampler: VA was very good at hunting down and eliminating actual child pornography posted to Reddit, so they were totes okay with the fact that he was running a giant subreddit called "Jailbait" whose members trawled the web for pictures of adolescent girls in bikinis or short skirts and posted them for the prurient entertainment of their fellow Redditors. (Because, y'know, if they didn't want creeps on the Internet drooling over their bodies, they shouldn't have dressed like that, or posted their pictures online!) Oh, and he was really energetic about policing Jailbait not only for child pornography, but also for any girl who appeared to be older than 16 or 17. Good to know he was on the ball!
Of course, there's been great outrage at Reddit. About Violentacrez? No, of course not. About Chen's great crime in "doxxing" him -- exposing his real identity. On this topic, let me just quote Chen:
And so am I.
As Scalzi points out, a lot of this is based in a skewed sense of what "free speech" means, plus an unhealthy dose of privileged entitlement. The notion that I am abridging somebody's constitutional rights by getting in the way of their ability to be a goddamned asshole, is, to put it succinctly, bullshit. Am I glad that Brutsch has lost his job (with a payday lender, apparently, which Fred Clark at Slacktivist has commented on)? No, of course not. He has a family to feed. But I don't blame Chen for that, either. Brutsch thrived because the culture of Reddit allowed him to get away with reprehensible behavior, and the cost of that to other people is real. His pigeons are now coming home to roost. I'm sure Redditors will take up a collection on his behalf, and they'll inundate him with sympathy for the terrible and unjustified witch-hunt against a guy who only wanted to entertain himself with other people's suffering.
But in the meantime, Chen has struck one little blow against Internet sociopathy. If I could donate to him, I would.
Over at Gawker, Adrien Chen has posted about the notorious Reddit troll (and also moderator, which is a key point) called "Violentacrez." It unmasks VA's real identity as Michael Brutsch, but for my money, that's not the interesting part. Instead it's the dissection of Reddit's "free speech" culture, and the way that its paid employees decided it was easier and therefore preferable to make a deal with the devil, rather than attempt to enforce any sort of decency above the bare legal minimum.
What do I mean by that? You should go read the article, but here's a sampler: VA was very good at hunting down and eliminating actual child pornography posted to Reddit, so they were totes okay with the fact that he was running a giant subreddit called "Jailbait" whose members trawled the web for pictures of adolescent girls in bikinis or short skirts and posted them for the prurient entertainment of their fellow Redditors. (Because, y'know, if they didn't want creeps on the Internet drooling over their bodies, they shouldn't have dressed like that, or posted their pictures online!) Oh, and he was really energetic about policing Jailbait not only for child pornography, but also for any girl who appeared to be older than 16 or 17. Good to know he was on the ball!
Of course, there's been great outrage at Reddit. About Violentacrez? No, of course not. About Chen's great crime in "doxxing" him -- exposing his real identity. On this topic, let me just quote Chen:
Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.
I am OK with that.
And so am I.
As Scalzi points out, a lot of this is based in a skewed sense of what "free speech" means, plus an unhealthy dose of privileged entitlement. The notion that I am abridging somebody's constitutional rights by getting in the way of their ability to be a goddamned asshole, is, to put it succinctly, bullshit. Am I glad that Brutsch has lost his job (with a payday lender, apparently, which Fred Clark at Slacktivist has commented on)? No, of course not. He has a family to feed. But I don't blame Chen for that, either. Brutsch thrived because the culture of Reddit allowed him to get away with reprehensible behavior, and the cost of that to other people is real. His pigeons are now coming home to roost. I'm sure Redditors will take up a collection on his behalf, and they'll inundate him with sympathy for the terrible and unjustified witch-hunt against a guy who only wanted to entertain himself with other people's suffering.
But in the meantime, Chen has struck one little blow against Internet sociopathy. If I could donate to him, I would.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 06:42 pm (UTC)I was particularly thoughtful about the section that's concluded by this:
"This certainly doesn't give trolls a free pass, but it does serve as a reminder that ultimately, trolls are symptomatic of much larger problems. Decrying trolls without at least considering the ways in which they are embedded within and directly replicate existing systems is therefore tantamount to taking a swing at an object's reflection and hanging a velvet rope around the object itself. "
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:26 pm (UTC)But as soon as the tables turn BAWWWW FREE SPEECH BAWWWWW.
What I love: legally, Chen did nothing wrong. So by Reddit's own logic, he violated no ethical code.
Oh wait, what's that? It's different because it affects them? Ha!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:48 pm (UTC)You can't expect men (particularly white men) to take responsibility for their actions. That's, like, totally uncool and maybe even illegal.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 06:58 pm (UTC)UK laws are far from perfect -- our libel laws are just weird, fora start -- but I am deeply grateful that our laws on hate speech are much tighter here than they are in the US and the culture of 'free speech == the right to trample over others with impunity' is less well entrenched.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 07:37 pm (UTC)(1) As Brutsch pointed out, our larger society considers it OK to stare at under-18 women -- so long as they're on TV, and so long as you're not honest about it. There's something screwed up about punishing honesty. Of course, lots of what was posted on the subreddits wasn't of people with a reasonable expectation of being seen by the public (e.g. photos in high schools or up skirts), which Brutsch approved. So it's not just a question of honesty. Still, you could easily imagine someone losing their job just for being honest about what they like (even though what they like is very common). And that worries me, even though Brutsch himself isn't an actual case of this.
(a) I'm generally worried about someone who is not a company spokesperson being fired because he or she does unpopular-but-legal things.
(2) I'm happy that Reddit admins eventually came around on the issue of links to Gawker. I think their initial reaction was a pretty typical story of loyalty and circling the wagons. I'm not really sure why this sort of thing doesn't get more attention. Maybe because there's no catch name for the phenomenon as a whole.
(3) I am strongly in favor of anonymity. But to be truly anonymous, you can't share details of your private life with strangers (or people you don't fully trust). You can't have that basic human connection of, "oh, yeah, I'm a programmer down here in Texas too". You can't go to meetups. That's a pretty serious trade-off, which only people with a strong reason to be anonymous would engage in. And if you screw up, it's on you (if you're hacked, that's maybe a different matter). Still, once the information is out there, it's out there; you can't unring a bell.
And it's hard not to screw up. I once accidentally linked an anonymous identity of mine to my real identity. Not provably, but enough that the forum admins could have outed me (not that they would have had any reason to, since I was not doing anything even approaching wrong). Fortunately, it was in a case where anonymity was not very important at all (which I guess is why I didn't do all my anonymous work through tor in an incognito window).
(4) It's easy to run a blog or small community site with reasonable rules of conduct. I don't know of a large site which has reasonable rules; every large site ends up screwing up and banning pictures of breastfeeding women. But I hope someone figures it out, because large sites like Reddit do have value. And even if nobody has figured it out, Reddit could certainly do better than it has.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 07:50 pm (UTC)But I profoundly disagree with the notion that we're punishing Brutsch for "honesty." You say it isn't just a question of that, but I say it isn't a question of that at all. It's a matter of our society not agreeing en masse that it's okay to stare at under-18 women, and the part that says it isn't taking steps to try and enforce that standard on the part that says it totally is, because have you seen how those girls dress? Etc. This is decency trying to bootstrap itself up a step or two, and I fundamentally don't know of any feasible way to make that happen except for these moments of public outrage.
As for rules of conduct for large sites, I don't frequent enough of them to judge. But I know Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who is often cited as an excellent moderator and instructor thereof, is involved over at BoingBoing, and I haven't heard of any horrible failures there, whether of the VA type or the "oops, we banned the wrong thing" type. We have the tools to make this kind of thing work; we just need to foster them better, and stop with the attitude (which I'm not ascribing to you, but to an unfortunately large swath of the internet) of "eh, well, it's the web, what can you do." There is plenty we can do. We just don't yet have enough people who care enough to try.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:30 pm (UTC)It's a matter of our society not agreeing en masse that it's okay to stare at under-18 women
But I'm not sure at all that our society agrees about that. Nobody says, "quick, turn that off", if Britney Spears is on MTV. There is hypocrisy -- not unique or unusual, but real.
BoingBoing isn't the sort of large site I was thinking of. It gets at most hundreds of comments per day across a few dozen forums -- not hundreds of thousands of comments across thousands of threads. There are probably only a few hundred sites on the scale that I am thinking of: LJ, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, SomethingAwful, Reddit, Digg, etc. You would never see Rome Sweet Rome on BoingBoing (or, for that matter, on Facebook or 4chan). It might be true that there are no moderation failures on BoingBoing (although given the Violet Blue affair, I wouldn't trust that there would never be), but there are also no great successes; the comments there are rarely interesting.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:41 pm (UTC)Regarding moderation: I don't think it's apt to compare LJ, Facebook, and Twitter to Reddit (I can't speak to the others you listed). The first three are platforms that contain communities within them; they do not have platform-wide admins granting moderation authority to individuals for specific territories. You couldn't get a Violentacrez type on LJ, because LJ's staff have no say in who moderates any portion of the site. All they can do are site-wide bans -- and yes, those have historically turned out pretty badly.
But if Reddit is going to be organizing a volunteer moderation force, they can (and should) exercise better judgment in how they do it. Drawing the line at "if it isn't illegal, we don't give a damn" is going to produce exactly the kind of result we see here -- but nothing says that initial decision has to be inevitable.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:51 pm (UTC)I don't use Facebook, but on LJ, at least, (as I understand it; last time I looked; I could be wrong) moderation in communities works almost exactly like subreddits. Community admins can decide what can be posted and who can post, and anyone can start a community.
But if Reddit is going to be organizing a volunteer moderation force, they can (and should) exercise better judgment in how they do it. Drawing the line at "if it isn't illegal, we don't give a damn" is going to produce exactly the kind of result we see here -- but nothing says that initial decision has to be inevitable.
I agree, and I think they should have done better. But so far, nobody seems to have found a strategy that is anything like good enough for that scale. That might be a problem of technology, it might be Dunbar's number, or it might be just that nobody has tried hard enough.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 08:55 pm (UTC)My impression (from Chen's article) was that Reddit's paid staff have the ability to grant or revoke that authority from the volunteer mods, which LJ's paid staff almost certainly do not have the ability to do. (Short of completely banning the user, but I've never heard of that happening.) Am I wrong?
I agree, and I think they should have done better. But so far, nobody seems to have found a strategy that is anything like good enough for that scale. That might be a problem of technology, it might be Dunbar's number, or it might be just that nobody has tried hard enough.
My money is on the latter, or at least I think the latter has to be resolved before we can start to suss out what else might be in the mix. Reddit's people didn't even bother trying. If you don't care enough to try, then no trick of technology etc is going to solve the problem for you.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 11:01 pm (UTC)I actually don't know whether you're right or wrong in either case. Chen's article doesn't say for sure one way or another. I couldn't find a case via Google of someone being enmodded or demodded by admins on either Reddit or LJ. In the case of LJ, staff can directly control community moderation, but the policy seems to be to do it very rarely; I've never heard of this happening. Reddit seems to have roughly the same policy for abandoned subreddits, but otherwise doesn't mention admins adding or removing moderators.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 04:00 pm (UTC)See this quote from the faq, for instance:
"Again, moderators have no special powers outside of the community they moderate, and are not appointed by reddit."
Or "How do you get to be a moderator?
If you create a reddit, you will automatically become its moderator. If you'd like to become a moderator of an existing reddit, ask one of the community's moderators! It's mostly a thankless task, though, but that does mean that moderators are usually looking for volunteers."
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 02:16 am (UTC)LJ is unlike Reddit in that there is no reward system for being a popular moderator. Your community rises and falls on it's own and the mods of OhNoTheyDidn't don't have any more privileges than the mods of a community that gets one post every six months.
A Violentacrez is much less likely on LJ than on Reddit.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 03:07 am (UTC)But it's not enough to ban people for the bad stuff -- you have to also not ban people for the not-bad stuff (i.e. photos that happen to involve breastfeeding; LJ bans people for that).
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 03:23 am (UTC)There may well be places on the forums that are problematic in either direction, but in my experience the level of moderation seems to follow common sense.
EDIT: There is also a "not mind safe" tag for things that might gross people out (ranging from crawling spiders to gore). The general feeling with both the NMS and NWS tags is that...you've been warned. If you click on the link and are offended because you find things that are not work safe or not mind safe, that's your own damn problem. Excepting, again, things like child porn.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 12:37 pm (UTC)...I'll still take it over Reddit any day.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 09:46 pm (UTC)And, as somebody pointed out in Scalzi's comment thread, Reddit's brand of free speech crowds out other kinds. Unfettered reedom for the trolls and the racists and the misogynists and the homophobes and all the other antisocials creates an environment that suppresses the speech of people of color and women and QUILTBAG individuals and so on, because they're frightened and humiliated into silence. Good moderation creates greater freedom for that latter category of people, at the expense of the former category. And, to echo Chen, I'm OK with that. I'm not asking for legal enforcement of such things -- even anti-hate speech laws are a complicated and thorny problem -- but community enforcement, yes.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 10:00 pm (UTC)Everyone's free to not pay any attention to Reddit. From my own experience, it turns out to be quite a solid strategic decision.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 10:09 pm (UTC)Except those women and girls who get their photos taken and posted, without their consent, in a "jailbait" forum, and possibly amended with slanderous and/or threatening text.
You think none of the hundreds of thousands of redditors never saw any faces they recognized on that site? Or never entered any of the photos into Google image search to identify the girls?
no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 04:19 am (UTC)But sure, if you want to call the latter category "censorship," I won't disagree. I fully support the right of a community to censor things that are distasteful to their members. And I also fully support the right of broader society to censure them for their decisions on that front: whether they're too lax ("if it isn't illegal, we don't care") or fascist ("we'll kick out anybody who doesn't toe the party line").
What's going on here is broad censure of Reddit for excessively lax censorship. We don't have the power to impose any control there; we don't have mod privileges. But we can give them the stink-eye, and we are.
The rest of the time, yeah, I don't pay any attention to Reddit. But it's been rising on my radar despite that, because they're getting more and more of a reputation for being a libertarian jungle in which women and other "target" groups aren't safe. That's the point at which I start to care. Allowing antisocial behavior to fester there has spillover effects for the rest of the world, that I can't just ignore.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 04:45 am (UTC)Anyway, what I see is that you think it's a good idea to shame people for their sexuality as long as you find it icky; that you want to drive them out of society in order to preserve the "safety" of people you care about more than them; and that actually doing the work to get rid of them is somebody else's job. This is, of course, exactly the same attitude conservatives take toward homosexuality. You can't both be right, but you can both be very wrong.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 05:10 am (UTC)And no, I'm not "shaming people for their sexuality" because I "find it icky," nor am I attempting to "drive them out of society" (even if we define "society" here as "Reddit"). If this were an argument over a community of guys who get off by finding unsuspecting women and girls and punching them in the face, it would be more obvious that what's at stake here isn't "ickiness" but rather harm, and that the point isn't to shame them, it's to limit their ability to do harm. As for the work to get rid of them -- or more accurately, to moderate their behavior -- I'm doing what I can right here, by promoting attitudes that say this kind of predatory behavior isn't okay. I don't have the power to do anything more directly, because I'm not a Reddit mod. In theory I could join the community and try to build up the cred to earn that authority, but given that you were advocating a solution of ignoring Reddit just a bit upthread, I'd be surprised if you're telling me that's what I should be doing.
As for you mapping my objections here to conservatives against homosexuality . . . I acknowledge that they believe homosexuals are, in fact, harming themselves and others by their behavior, in which respect their attitude is comparable to mine. But I also believe they are extremely wrong about this. Do you think I am wrong to believe that creepshots etc are harmful to others? You say we can't both be right, but we can both be wrong; you say nothing about one of us can be right and the other wrong. By dragging that in here, it really leaves the impression that a) you believe Brutsch's behavior should be condoned like that of gays in a consensual relationship or b) you're attempting to score some kind of cheap rhetorical point, for what reason I cannot discern.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 05:13 am (UTC)2. Do you think I am wrong to believe that creepshots etc are harmful to others?
Yes. Photographs are not voodoo dolls.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 10:09 am (UTC)Not even getting into your government comments.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 04:34 am (UTC)And let's not forget that the issue here is not merely the Jailbait subreddit, but the Deadjailbait subreddit (pictures of teenaged girls' corpses), the Creepshot subreddit (shots taken up the skirts or down the blouses of unsuspecting women), and a whole crapton more of things that are offensive on other axes, like racism. Ickiness is not remotely the problem here.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 12:51 pm (UTC)...Excuse me? Just so everyone's on the same page here, we're talking about condemning the action of posting inappropriate photos of underage girls publicly online (and hence adults' attraction to underage kids), and you are comparing that condemnation to homophobia. Yes?
Okay, if I've got that correct...No. Absolutely not. This is sort of a slippery slope argument that you're trying to make, in reverse (usually it's "homosexuality --> pedophilia," and it seems you're trying to argue that "homosexuality = pedophilia so don't diss on pedophilia"). You and the people who make the former argument always forget one really, REALLY important fact: a homosexual relationship involves two consenting adults. A pedophilial relationship does not. This has very important social and legal implications in our society that, personally, I tend to agree with.
Please correct me if I've read your statement above incorrectly and that therefore my interpretation is wrong, but from what I can see you are comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, and that is extremely offensive to me.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 05:34 am (UTC)And there's some really good discussion both there and in the Scalzi comments on the subject of employment rights.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-18 02:39 pm (UTC)Also, it was good to see you at Sirens again this year. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 12:45 am (UTC)