There are a few differences of opinion within DP [Digg Patriots], although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.That's an awful lot of hate. Can we maybe harness that as an alternate power source?
"We should make it our sacred mission to gang-bang this liberal bitch."That last guy delivered, by the way. Repeatedly. Attempts at graphic sexual innuendo from right-wing shut-ins is as amusing as it is disturbing.
"I reported DDR Skata for using the racist term ‘Beulahs and Uncle Toms’ when referring to a conservative black woman. Additionally, I also told a fib and I stated I was African-American. I said that I was deeply offended by the terms he used."
"what we should do is start a fake liberal public site where we all use their names to post digg and bury submissions. We would have to figure out to do it anonymously."
"I have an interesting plan for screwing over the No-brigade guy. First we need to find a female conservative/libertarian who is very active on digg and comments a lot. We coordinate with her to be the knowing victim of sexual harassment. (Yeah, this is going to be a false flag trolling operation.) Meanwhile, I will create about 3 bogus no accounts that won’t bury anything but will pose as the guy that calls us all “son” and trolls our submissions. After about a few weeks all three no accounts will let loose with some heinous sexual innuendo. Several of us will then proceed to report all no accounts and accuse all of them of being the troll. After a while, many diggers will just blindly report any no account that posts. Remember that Herkimer, Onetimer, and JCM267 all got banned when they stirred up a shitstorm. Now we just have to foment one behind the scenes. Do you know of any willing falseflag female targets on Digg?"
I’m amazed at their lack of organization. If they had half a wit among them they could bury any and every submission we have but as in real life I guess, liberals just roll with the tide through Digg like they do in real life. They have no work ethic, no core values and no common sense beneath the paper thin liberal skin they cover themselves with.We're just too used to welfare to get anything done!
When do we get to the part where we tell people that liberals never firebombed a building they don't morally believe in because, unlike conservatives, liberals never resort to violence.That seems a bit disingenuous; at the very least, you lumped bomb-throwing radicals in with the larger set of liberals. Your point is a good one, though, and it's the same thing that occurs on the right. Each "side" feels that its well-behaved put-upon moderates are the norm, while the other side's assholes are representative.
...
I never lumped liberals in with bomb throwing radicals. My main problem is with a hypocrisy that somehow manages to categorise this kind of stunt as purely right wing.
Hacked GOP site infects people with malwareseanyboy, I really want to back you up here in the discussion of the dangers of confirmation bias and outgroup homogeneity bias but you're not making it easy with this kind of stuff.
...
The aforementioned "miserable failure" googlebomb
...
Anonymous vs Scientology (Not specifically politically left-wing, but an example where people with left wing views are probably represented)
...
Donor database stolen from IT illiterate republican's website
Anyway - A couple of examples. Feel free to refudiate these as being completely different because of some technical point.seanyboy, again I want to emphasize that your broader point is important, but you are lying in order to make it. You listed bad things that happened to conservatives and said that they were examples of liberals doing bad things. That's a lie, and you're making it easier for the people you're complaining about to ignore you and other conservative voices in the future. That's regrettable.
If a modern day Ken Kesey pulled this stunt on a Fox News website, or 4Chan took it upon themselves to push left wing stories up Digg, you'd be clapping them.Come on, seanyboy. The point you were making is an important one. This type of comment is nothing more than a lazy assumption of bad faith, and it is an example of the dangers of defensive thought-closure, rather than a warning to avoid it.
seanyboy, again I want to emphasize that your broader point is important, but you are lying in order to make it.goddamnit, that's what I'm talking about. conservatives say that about liberals, liberals say that about conservatives. It's a plague at this point. Look at the mosque thread -- how many people said "Most New Yorkers support the mosque" in that thread, even though the majority oppose it? I know I did, reflexively, when I was thinking of Manhattanites. Others brought up the point and it was ignored. By the standards of discourse that are becoming normed in our society, that was lying to make support for the mosque sound more mainstream than it is.
Not surprising to hear.
Whether he is conservative or not is not why I'm not surprised that he's lying. No need to grind any teeth.Heh. Touché.
Where is the aforementioned MetaTalk thread about people gaming sites in this manner?The MeTa thread was about the Cordoba house mosque thread. It's a pretty good example of how ideological momentum can skew discussion (and cause a group of people who agree with each other to ignore unpleasant facts and bowl over one or two people who disagree). It's not, however, an example of a small group of people deliberately trying to manufacture ideological momentum on a site in order to ensure that effect kicks in.
Heh. Guess that whole MeTa thread on how stupid people are for thinking conservatives might pay people to game stuff wasn't so silly after all. I need one o' them snark retractors.- I guess I missed that stuff in the Cordoba House thread. Thanks!
posted by shinybaum at 7:34 PM
Hey JHarris. I was under the assumption that it just happens, and it's not really news. Anyone who has been paying attention to some of these sites over time (not that you haven't) has seen polls taken over by groups of people with a less conservative bent (on reddit, 4chan, wherever), simply to make a political/social point.A couple points -- telling people to vote in open public polls, and creating an organized campaign of deception in order to steer the content of a major online news site's front page, aren't really in the same class. Yes, this kind of thing is common blackhat SEO thinking, but hopefully, conservatives don't want to be the blackhat SEO scammers of public discourse.
..even if you accept the framing of such sites as hotbeds of craziness and rabid disorder, there is a method to their madness. As for what that madness is, once you get past the persistent ironic glorifications of perversity and take a look at how the people who frequent these sites actually behave, and more importantly, who they target, it becomes abundantly clear that not only are the values of such sites fundamentally conservative, but that their communications strategies, even if toned down for a mainstream audience, are nothing less than the perfect weapons for disassembling the Obama Presidency...Granted, the person advocating this was a crazy, annoying right-wing kid fresh out of college, but it does give you an idea about the sort of mindsets that conservatives identify with: it's all about a form of bullying to enforce conservative norms. So while 4chan is neither conservative nor liberal, the value system of harassment and public shaming and bullying of chosen scapegoats can be said to be part and parcel of the conservative mindset.
While one can disapprove of the tactics used against these institutions/individuals (some of which make the much vilified “enhanced interrogation techniques” look positively benign by comparison), it is worth noting that ultimately, the power of internet goons lies in their ability to enforce social norms against the most flagrantly vile members of society through private sanction – something which conservatives from Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol to Tom Coburn and Dick Cheney have endorsed.
They often serve the same purpose, though, to bend results that may not reflect true public opinion, to make a counter point. And if the major difference is that efforts are public versus private, well, that doesn't create much of an ethical division, really, where one is okay, and the other is worthy of public outrage.Just to be clear:
To be clear, I don't like the efforts that happened here. But if we are going to show intent, I think it's clear that no one is really above working the system, if it benefits their side. And I really doubt that the rabbit hole that was uncovered here is really too low for any one particular group, if it's large enough.You know, I'm a big proponent of fair-mindedness, but the story here is pretty straightforward: a group of conservatives is caught deliberately and repeatedly lying, creating sock puppets and fake identities to inflate their own numbers and provide strawmen, framing liberals, abusing moderation systems to actively hide news from liberal sources... and that is proof that both liberals and conservatives 'game the system?' Traditionally, one tries to at least cite instances where things like this have happened on the other side before announcing equivalency.
I just wouldn't put [4chan] in a conservative camp, although perhaps not the best off-the-cuff example..Either would I, but that's the point: 4chan was cited as an example of how liberals do the same thing that the Digg Patriots group did. Have we reached the point where conservatives behaving badly is, in and of itself, proof that liberals behave badly? That's just bizarre.
There are people who are using Greasemonkey scripts to customize their view of the site. I think this does have the potential to seriously alter the full-view community tradition.True, but the Digg Patriots group was not simply upvoting -- they were burying stories by people they had identified as liberal, and stories from domains they had identified as liberal. For example, the New York Times.
(To emphasize: my argument is not "both sides do it!" but both sides could just as easily do it. Castigate the right for getting caught doing it, but don't try to make that into an argument that It Can't Happen On My Side.)Agreed. Earlier in the thread, I argued the same, I was just startled to see the discussion suddenly shift from "Hey, don't say only conservatives do this!" to "Well, this isn't a big deal because liberals do it too," with the only evidence being that conservatives did it. I'm not sure I even have words to properly articulate how bizarre that is.
Actually, it was cited as an example of a non-conservative group, as I was going for more of a "human nature" argument to simply show that behavior of this type isn't an issue specific to conservatives.I think there were some crossed wires -- seanyboy, earlier in the thread, specifically cited Anonymous vs. Scientology as an example of liberal system-gaming. He mentioned that someone would probably dismiss it "on some technicality," and it really stood out to me as a lazy, arbitrary "They're doing it, too!" gesture.
My thoughts were more about the way we analyze this issue, rather than whether or not this kind of behavior is justifiable, based on who's doing what and where.Yep -- totally agreed. Realistically, there's been quite a bit of "Hey, don't smear everyone just because of these tools..." discussion. It's the false equivalency stuff, rather than the "Don't smear everyone who's not ingroup," that bothers me.
This is why favorites are a bad idea - they enable gaming and tend to enforce bias skew. All browsers have bookmarking so why duplicate functionality?That isn't really related to the issue being discussed; one can argue that we shouldn't show the number of favorites, but Digg specifically hides stories that have been 'buried' by enough users, and promotes stories that have been 'Dugg,' so it isn't just an opinion-expression. It controls what content appears on the site.
No, there is no conspiracy. Yes, it's just you. No, "they" aren't out to get you. Even suggesting that "American conservatives" are halfway organized enough to do something like this at best gives them far too much credit and at worst is downright paranoid.Does this mean you've changed your position?
If you're noticing anything it's simply a response to the trillions in deficit spending proposed in the last two months.
Get a grip.
It should lead us to say, let's all stop being lame, and I'll go first; not that I should be left off the hook because you are lame, too.Amen to that. I think that's one of the things that depressed me so much about the response many liberal friends had to what they saw as "Karl Rove Tactics" -- there was a lot of "Okay, the gloves come off now, we have to play dirty!" At what point is losing to a cheater the best response? Surely, that time must come eventually.
Since elections are a zero-sum game, this point is just about never. The proper response to unacceptable tactics by the other side is to up the ante so high that the cost of using them becomes too much to bear. At that point, both sides can agree to stop.There must come a point at which losing the election to terrible, terrible, evil people is not as bad as becoming a terrible, terrible, evil person. That's what I'm saying.
Politics also has real world consequences to real live people.That's why these Digg Patriot types felt it was necessary to lie, frame liberals, and suppress pro-liberal news items. Because a liberal getting into power has real world consequences, and that must be stopped.
The point of bringing up 4chan v scientology is that it's an example of a subversive organised process that most likely includes liberals. The whole point of everything I've said is that this behaviour isn't a right-wing behaviour. Hence phrases like "holier than thou"Sure -- that's bad. But the idea of bringing 4chan into it still baffles me. This story is not about a group of people who gamed a web site, and happened to be conservative: it's about a group of self-identified conservatives who organized a deliberate campaign of deception in order to shape a news site's content. That is the story. Discussing it, and discussing how it reflects on the current state of conservative activism, is not inappropriate or inherently one-sided.
I'm not entirely sure either if I disagree with the behaviour of 4chan in this situation. I'm not sure if (other than the politics) I disagree with gaming digg is a bad thing. (The bullying and race stuff is an other thing entirely).I'd agree that I don't think it's some kind of terrible, unholy darkness unleashed across the planet. I think it's more interesting from a social software perspective, and because the members of the DiggPatriots repeatedly demonstrate bizarre projection issues: they have to conduct organized campaigns of deception because surely, that is already being done to us!
Also - I've been accused of lying. I don't think that's fair. It's pretty hurtful too.Apologies if my statement came across as too harsh -- it's possible that the list of events you posted just included lots of unvetted links you grabbed from someone else's complaints about liberal evildoing. (I'm not being arch or sarcastic, btw -- I've fallen prey to the same trap: quickly googling for some supporting links to help make a point, and not realizing that the ones I find were compiled by someone misrepresenting them.) If that's the case, then they were lying by using "Republicans accidentally posting donor lists to public web sites" and "GOP sites getting infected by the Storm botnet" as examples of liberal attacks on conservatives. The Jane Austin Fan Site just got hit by that, too, and I don't think it should be cited as an example of evildoing by Anthony Trollope fans.
Digg has different biases but essentially the same result. The crowd ain't that wise.That's true, but in this case we're not even talking about "the wisdom of crowds" being stupid. We're looking at a case where a group of people lied, framed others, and organized a campaign of identity falsification in order to pose as a larger part of the crowd than they were.
My links were all examples of the left hacking. I wasn't trying to prove any equivalancy to the digg, just (as requested) making the point that people on the left do hack.Not to put too fine a point on it, but saying that you posted examples of "the left hacking" is what people refer to as "a lie." I don't want to be an ass, here, but you're digging deeper: save the example of one kid guessing Sarah Palin's hotomail password, your examples don't even demonstrate what you're talking about.
>Hacked GOP site infects people with malware...Except in that case, there was no hacking involved, there was no malware involved, and the only thing that visitors to the site did was actually use the URL shortener. The GOP didn't like the URLs they were shortening, and they shut it down.
I actually posted the wrong link here. I meant to post details of GOP.am.
>Anonymous vs ScientologyAnd I've pointed out that this is absurd. As I noted, pointing out that a random group of troublemaking hentai fans probably, statistically, has liberals in it is not the same as saying that "The left" "routinely" engages in "hacking."
I specifically stated here that this is "Not specifically politically left-wing, but an example where people with left wing views are probably represented"
>Donor database stolen from IT illiterate republican's websiteYou specifically said that it was "proof of the hacking that the left routinely engages in." And that is why I said that you lied. I offered you a pretty graceful out -- even giving you links to stories that more clearly demonstrated the kind of correlation you were asserting -- but you're doubling down.
Yeah - Not hacking per-se, but someone went to the trouble to find, download and propagate private information. This is (to my eyes) highly unethical.
How about the whole Journolist scandal? I haven't really been following it, because US politics, meh, but it seems to fit your criteria.Well, I was referring to seanboy's critiera. That started as "Liberals lie and cheat to manipulate public opinion, too" and then morphed into "Liberals routinely hack conservative web sites" and then seems to have drifted to "Sometimes, liberals are not nice."
This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics.posted by Joe in Australia at 5:31 PM on August 7, 2010
The Journolistas include real journalists representing traditional media, and they conspired to swing a Presidential election by burying stories, smearing opponents, and at least discussing the possibility of having the government censor a rival news organisation.I went through and read the stories you linked to, and not unlike seanyboy's linked articles, I'm scratching my head. No matter what you declare those Journolist stories to be about, the meat of the links you've given don't back up your claims.
You distinguish between the DiggPatriots and the members of Journolist by depicting the latter as a mere debating society. I think this lets them off the hook too lightly.To recap, the "conspiracy to smear opponents" was a discussion thread where some people got angry at Sarah Palin, the "conspiracy to bury stories" was a couple of people angry that a story they thought was absurd did get weeks of coverage, and the "discussing government censorship of a rival" conversation was just that -- someone suggested it and was soundly smacked down. Frankly, when one actually reads the text of the discussions you link to, they come out looking pretty good: they are all liberals, to be sure, and they are opinionated, but they clearly take their responsibility to the truth very seriously.
no decent person would resort to the DiggPatriots' techniques. None the less, their tactics simply reflect the infantilised US political culture. It's not about reason or cogent arguments; it's about shouting down your opponents. That's the whole idea of the Digg ranking method and I think it's perverse to say that the DiggPatriots's ought to have limited themselves to more traditional methods of gaming the system.The dangers of "shout 'em down, then you win!" political discourse are real, and I agree with you 100%. But as someone who spends a fair amount of time working on social ranking algorithms for a variety of sites, I can say wholeheartedly that what you describe is the abuse that Digg and other social sites try to prevent, not the expected mode of operation. I fail to see what is "perverse" about telling people they shouldn't lie, conduct extended campaigns to frame their opponents of sexual harassment, create fake black sock puppets to appear minority-friendly, or deliberately bury news stories they agree with just to prevent their ideological opponents from gaining a following.
« Older Tired of that NES controller digging into your pal... | Hopeless romantic... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by zwemer at 4:46 PM on August 5, 2010 [39 favorites]