Unmasking a Troll: Aussie Australi Witness a 20-year-old American Nerd | Hacker News Reader

Unmasking a Troll: Aussie Australi Witness a 20-year-old American Nerd

smh.com.au

72 pointsaltern838 comments

Trolling can be as simple as rick rolling someone or telling people that "Alt+F4" will make your game run faster. This is so far past trolling that there should be a better descriptor for it. Inciting terrorist activities is criminal, not trolling.

Trolling is not necessarily harmless - I'd say that parts are still trolling (e.g. the Times of Israel article), while the incitations aren't.

This is where the definition of 'trolling', as understood in the traditional Usenet sense of the word, diverges from what the media has come to call trolling.

In The Times of Israel article, he was impersonating somebody in order to generate anger toward the supposed author. Trolling was originally understood to be more specific than simply doing things that the instigator find amusing at the expense of others.

Fair enough. I called it trolling since it was posting a message (even if in the Times) with the intention of generating an heated argument and flames. It seemed more or less in line with the definitions I remember (mostly from early 2000s websites).

To be honest, I actually think you were right after all. I don't think I was justified in saying he impersonated the author in order to trash his reputation, now that I've looked into it a bit more: he created several personas, mostly for the purpose of getting people's goat. It's just that in this case, his persona happened to be a real person.

What mostly bothers me is that the media can't seem to tell the difference between trolling, and what in this case was collateral damage that went far beyond trolling.

By the way, telling people that pressing "Alt-F4" makes their game run faster would not have originally been considered trolling.

There's a movement to start calling such things "abuse" rather than "trolling", but I don't see it picking up much steam.

Because almost everyone who conjurs up that moral authority argument is outed as wild eyed twitter troll themselves engaging in harassment.

The guy's activities certainly included trolling. From what I've read so far, if ever there was a troll, it's this guy. I guess incitement to violence or personal abuse[1] might be said to be outside the scope of trolling, but even there it's a matter of having crossed a hazy line (admittedly by some distance in this case) rather than the activity being non-trollish in nature.

1) I don't specifically know he directed such abuse towards people who weren't his sockpuppets, but it doesn't seem improbable

And I thought I had too much free time.

Here is the reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3komj2/redd...

It's exceptionally disingenuous to describe this as either trolling or a fun exercise in free speech rights. It is neither.

It's especially poor journalism to treat Goldberg's observations on free speech and targeting of perceived anti-free-speech organizations as sincere whilst acknowledging he spent much of the time creating both sides of an argument between his sockpuppets and picked his own ethnic group as one of his main targets. I'd go so far as to speculate that if he ever reads the article, the subject would probably wish he'd written it himself.

This is the state of journalism in Australia. All our major newspapers are either staffed by amateur media graduates who can't even construct a sentence, or the entire publication is a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch.

Anyone up for collecting all his 'contributions'? This would be a goldmine for forensic text analysis and authorship attribution studies/ proof that they are all sensitive to context of the text. Prof. Patrick Juola, if you're reading this, the public would absolutely benefit from public research on this. Anyone in stylometry here? Drexel grads?

There is already heavy digging on Reddit. as for the rest of the sites he was on, not sure.

LOOK AT THIS BASEBALL CAP. IT MUST BE HIM. RedCircleOnPhoto.png

We have our top men working on it. Top. Men.

Can you please explain in simple terms all those buzzwords and fancy terms you listed in your comment as even though I'm a techie by profession, I couldn't really get even the slightest idea what you're talking about there?

You might find this thread useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9716837

There was also a popular story on there the other day (which I've been unable to find) about how people engaging in deceptive behavior could be detected via topics of speech.

Describing this guy as a troll is dismissive/revisionist. He was a terrorist, even if he was not the exact variety of terrorist that he was presenting himself as.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

I believe this guy is correct.

Criminal complaint: http://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/file/769491/download (I assume this is allowed?)

I'm always shocked by how much damage a single sociopath can do.

Religion is a powerful thing.

This subthread was about sociopaths.

The implied meaning being that the single sociopath in question would not have been able to cause much damage if not for the dormant power of religion within other sociopaths.

Religion was only one of several controversial things he used to to drum up controversy. Here's one of his controversial articles that has nothing to do with religion: https://archive.is/3vwXz

Here's a post criticizing that previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/isrconspiracyracist/comments/3jlggb...

Turns out that post is also by him as well (Emily_Americana).

As the original article mentions, he also created a fake twitter account pretending to be an anti-sexploitation campaigner, and posted anti-transexual tweets with it.

My mistake, I must have set the bar for "damage" a bit too high, only considering the shot policeman and the two dead terrorists. Controversy is obviously quite damaging to everyone involved. I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to read hateful tweets.

Hopefully his 20 years in prison will give him time to ponder over the harm he did to Jews, immigrants and transexuals.

Yes, 20 years for hurting someone's feeling is such a great way for our society to proceed! It's a bit weird though, how suddenly more and more things are hurtful.

If he impersonated an actual living person, he should be on the hook for that. What was his involvement in the attacks? There are contradictory news. He built a bomb? Or he just said some generic nonsense about attacking, to the tune of actual imams?

NYT just ran a lovely article how all middle and eastern European countries are white nationalistic bigoted homophobic nazies because they refuse to allow to have immigrants dumped on them (immigrants, who would have been held there by force - they want to go to Germany or France or UK, and are coughcough incredibly vocal about that)

Do I get to put NYT away for 20 years for hurting my feelings and my health (bullshit induced hypertension followed by migraine) ?

>Hopefully his 20 years in prison will give him time to ponder over the harm he did to Jews, immigrants and transexuals.

Out of curiosity, would you also be in favor of prison time for the large swaths of Russia that hold and speak negative views against the same groups?

A bomb threat should result in an arrest every time, but offensive speech? Maybe in a police state or a theocracy that would be an appropriate response, but hopefully not in a healthy democracy.

What damage? He antagonized crazies and fanatics. You could even argue its the classic case of shooting the messenger.

On his Reddit account, he writes:

Jews aren't white or human, despite being Jewish himself.

Makes me wonder how many internet white nationalists are in person self-hating minorities

But this big story is the thwarted bomb attack, which is why he was arrested. The trolling is secondary.

The another big story could be:

"In the leadup to an exhibition in Garland, Texas, at which pictures of the Prophet Mohammed were to be displayed, "Australi Witness" tweeted the event's address and reposted a tweet urging people to go there with "weapons, bombs or with knifes".

Two Muslim men attempted an attack at the exhibition, and were killed by police. Australi Witness then praised them online as martyrs."

But it's seems it's not known if they would have gone there even without his tweets?

How can you know if it is self-hate? He participated in many arguments, often arguing against himself. He just liked the drama, probably.

>thwarted bomb attack

Except there was no bomb, and there was never going to be any attack. It was another FBI manufactured threat. Usually its FBI undercover agents providing all the incentives(kill those people, they are bad mmkay), plans (do it there) and means (here, have this rifle and two crates of c4). This was different in only one detail - FBI agent was on the other side of the equation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-p...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Terror-Factory-Manufactured-Terror...

Apparently its all well and good when FBI manufactures terrorists, but internet troll? burn the witch!!1

and there it is:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150913/23335432247/one-m...

FBI agent was the one contacting Goldberg and begging for some incriminating material, Goldberg merely tweeted him "five URLs to public facing websites". This is your FBI catching 'dangerous terrorists' :/

"The suspect is a Jewish American, who possesses dual citizenship in the United States and Israel, is identified by law enforcement as 20-year-old Joshua Ryne Goldberg"

And here are a few of his Reddit accounts.

/u/European88 (behind most of the "racism" subs)

/u/Gas-the-kikes

/u/kill_all_pakis

/u/Nuke_Europe

There is going to be a lot of digging on this character it will be interesting to see if accomplices turn up of if he was just a lone wolf.

Has trolling finally gone too far? Find out tonight at 11.

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