For
quite some time, liberals have had a natural advantage over conservatives in
cyberspace. Liberals are younger and more likely to adopt new technologies
earlier. Conservatives are more likely to be cranky old poops sitting in their
lounge chairs listening to their Glen Campbell eight-tracks (look it up, kids).
But
after the Obama team used social media to launch a historical victory in 2008,
conservatives began scrambling to figure out how to harness all these new
tools. They haven’t done very well: their leaders and followers are by
definition averse to new things, and cyberspace is a place for people who have good
new ideas and can defend them in an open arena – concepts which are terrifying
to conservatives.
But
there is one area in which conservatives always excel: gutter political
tactics. So now they have found a way to exploit weaknesses in the new social
networking milieu.
A
key weakness in Facebook, for example, is that although Team Zuckerberg is
filthy rich and pulling in billions in profit each year, they can’t be bothered
to provide quality customer service. Getting an actual human to address a
problem you have with Facebook is essentially impossible: the vast majority of
processes at Facebook – even customer service and troubleshooting – are
automated. Performed by machines. Or else farmed out to dollar-a-day peasants
in places like Pakistan and the Middle East, people who barely speak English.
So
the conservatives set to work, trying to figure out how to game the system. And
unsurprisingly they found many flaws. One key problem is that, instead of
establishing a proper oversight process, the Facebook system takes the easy way
out: they set their machines to look out for events that happen many times,
rather than once. If someone posts something that irritates another person, who
then complains, that could fall through the cracks. But if ten people all
complain to the machines about the same post all at once, then the person who
posted it is likely to be banned, by the machines. And if the victim of this
attack wants to protest this, there is no one to complain to, except the
machines, because he’s just one guy. The machines will tell you quite
forthrightly that such bans cannot be appealed, because reviewing such an
appeal would require a human.
The
conservatives figured out that if they could set up teams of a dozen or so
people, for the express purpose of “gang-reporting”, they could get their
enemies thrown out of Facebook. They simply took the lynch-mob tactic they
perfected a century ago and updated it for the 21st century.
Recently
this phenomenon was spotted in, of all places, a conservative-run site for
survivors of domestic violence. This site ostensibly focuses on domestic
violence, but the true goal is to pounce on the victims of violence at their
moment of greatest vulnerability, and try to rope them into the evangelical
movement. And their subordinate goal, believe it or not, is to visit other
(better-run) domestic violence sites, trying to disrupt them by launching
“gang-report” attacks. In other words they identify the managers of the other
sites and send in a dozen people to report the managers, all at the same time,
to try get the managers banned and wreck the other site. That drives victims of
violence away from the site that was attacked, and one such targeted site
eventually collapsed. In other words Facebook is rewarding the gang-attackers
by punishing the victims.
Now
another purveyor of this tactic apparently has emerged: a gigantic conservative
site called Conservative Daily, with something like three million Likes. Their
members have filed so many complaints against people they don’t like, that
Facebook apparently has had to proactively “protect” Conservative Daily from all
the people whom its members are complaining about – protecting the attackers. All
a non-conservative needs to do is visit that site and question anything posted
there, and no matter how politely they do it, the Facebook machines will either
demand that the visitor reenter their phone number, on pain of being ejected
from Facebook as a security violator, or simply toss them into the Ban Bin
right away. And the purveyors of Conservative Daily apparently know that their
incessant whining has afforded them this protection, because now they are
flagrantly posting inflammatory posts attacking liberals and moderates, and
openly daring them to visit the site and respond – so the “gang-report” posse
can get them thrown out of Facebook. “We’re offended, ban him!”
And
again, there is no recourse, because there is no human to complain to.
It
is a virtual certainty that somewhere, right under the noses of Facebook, these
guys have a little chat room or Secret Group, where they coordinate all this:
“Hey, some guy just came and said Obama cut the deficit – here’s his name and
the thread, go report him! Yee haw!”
There
are other conservative sites that use the same tactic. Conservatives realize
their ideas and philosophies are so fallacious and dishonest that they can’t
possibly win a fair debate, so their only recourse is to work the refs. Which
is particularly easy when the refs are badly managed machines and minimum-wage
subcontinentals who haven’t a prayer of figuring out what is really “offensive”
in the American political arena.
Anything
to see to it that fewer moderate and liberal voices are heard, and that
conservative hate, lies, attacks, evasions don’t get as much scrutiny as they
would otherwise.
And
Facebook is not just a passive participant in this. Outside sites which
criticize these Facebook practices have been labeled “spam” by Facebook –
Facebook doesn’t want you to hear anything critical of Facebook. So now,
amazingly, they are even trying to censor content outside of Facebook.
**UPDATE**
-- now nobody can post in Conservative Daily at all, without a security check.
Wow! They have Facebook protecting them around the clock. So, Mark, where do
the rest of us get customer service like that? Do they get mints on their
pillows too?
