<story><title>Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account</title><url>https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1371183849712009219</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don&amp;#x27;t bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring &lt;i&gt;zero&lt;/i&gt; attention to them.&lt;p&gt;Trolls&amp;#x27; game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they&amp;#x27;ll cease to bother you much.&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&amp;gt; They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don&amp;#x27;t act in good faith.</text></item><item><author>cbozeman</author><text>There &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be.&lt;p&gt;The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries.&lt;p&gt;However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to &lt;i&gt;HAVE&lt;/i&gt; to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no technology &lt;i&gt;on&lt;/i&gt; &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.</text></item><item><author>ve55</author><text>In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions&amp;#x2F;billions of users is a fool&amp;#x27;s errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we&amp;#x27;ve ended up with.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.&lt;p&gt;Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn&amp;#x27;t a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing.&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, unevenly distributed. If you’re a white guy you have to work at it to get the same level of resentment in certain circles that other people start with by being female, brown, gay, etc.&lt;p&gt;GamerGate is well worth learning about as an extreme example of how far it can get beyond the level where blocking works: it started with one person (Eron Gjoni) trying to clinch the “worst ex ever” title by rallying a hate mob against his ex girlfriend with some fake claims, which produced hate spasms for over a year, multiple police investigations, and fed into the 2016 US Presidential election.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gamergate_controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gamergate_controversy&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account</title><url>https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1371183849712009219</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don&amp;#x27;t bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring &lt;i&gt;zero&lt;/i&gt; attention to them.&lt;p&gt;Trolls&amp;#x27; game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they&amp;#x27;ll cease to bother you much.&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&amp;gt; They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don&amp;#x27;t act in good faith.</text></item><item><author>cbozeman</author><text>There &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be.&lt;p&gt;The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries.&lt;p&gt;However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to &lt;i&gt;HAVE&lt;/i&gt; to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no technology &lt;i&gt;on&lt;/i&gt; &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.</text></item><item><author>ve55</author><text>In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions&amp;#x2F;billions of users is a fool&amp;#x27;s errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we&amp;#x27;ve ended up with.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.&lt;p&gt;Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn&amp;#x27;t a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulv</author><text>Blocking, muting, or ignoring a handful of people may work. But when you have hundreds or thousands or more people harassing you, blocking them all isn&amp;#x27;t practical or sufficient. Get enough people mad at you and you&amp;#x27;ll end up being SWATted or doxxed (or turned in to deepfake porn). At some point the trolls start feeding each other. Next thing you know we end up with another gamergate (which started because some dude was mad at his ex).</text></comment>