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Comment by alva | Hacker News Reader

Certain communities are extremely sensitive to disruption through trolling, especially if the group inherently places high importance on highlighting differences between members and in-groups.

"Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is child's play. Trolling is an exceptionally powerful weapon if targeted communities have a particular outlook. It has been a full on blitzkrieg the last 12 months and until fundamental issues are addressed by targeted groups, they will be vulnerable.

An interesting area of research would be the relationship between individual trolls, collective trolls and emergent behaviour of these.

edit: A group defined by division, will divide and die.

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You'll find that political, religious, and any other extreme group is an easy target, in direct proportion to their sincerity. It's not like it's hard to target Alex Jones' followers... Lady Gaga did it without even trying. Any group of passionate people is usually easy to get a rise out of.

The opposite!

The aim isn't to get a rise out of them, it is to split them. Lighting the spark that causes significant in-fighting means they do all the work for you. The environment in some of these vulnerable groups make this simple. Divide them into a couple of sections based on ideological disagreements and it comes crashing down quickly and hard.

Religious and many political groups are easy to get a rise out of, but their commitment to a common goal is greater than internal power struggles. It is much harder to split these groups when their common aim is so clear and hard felt.

When groups with a strong common aim and a sense of unity are attacked by the out-group, they get stronger in their resolve.

I don't think this is at all the mechanism at work. It's much more accurate to think of trollers as spammers -- and the effect they can have on discourse is almost akin to violence as they attack the means by which the mediums they troll could otherwise support meaningful communication.

You suppose that variations in response to trolling from Religious communities vs liberal communities has some fundamental relationship to the intrinsic properties of those communities. In reality, I think trolling is a weapon and the difference you see in how these communities respond reflects the difference in the amount of ammunition spent on trolling those communities vs the size and efficacy of any agenda that tried to counter the influence of trolls.

One example might help reinforce my case. Note to commenters, I am not making any judgements on these communities, these are just my observations.

A hard left community which is heavily invested in identity politics is inherently vulnerable to this type of destruction. It is in the DNA of the movement. I have witnessed this in many groups.

Group starts building large number of members for a cause, lets call it "Womans March". Initially all unified behind a common cause. Exploit identity politics to break it.

"Wow, I can't believe ALL the admins are white woman" "smh, these people need to stay in their lane and lets POC take charge" "my trans* friend was just messaged by an admin telling them "men" aren't allowed" "some of the people on this page are too ghetto"

As long as the culture is focused on grievance and division, they will divide and divide with a miniscule amount of pushing. Resentment and infighting grow almost exponentially.

A group of 5 co-ordinated trolls using these tactics collapse massive communities over and over again. You would not believe how effective it is. These are all old CIA tactics, unclassified manuals are studied and disseminated.

I think the actual explanatory power from your example comes from the fact that these are communities whose purpose is to grow over time. The coordinated trolling is a means to attack that growth by destroying the means of legitimate discourse (particularly around any form of disagreement) and by recruiting more trolls (who aren't part of the original 5 coordinators but who might share the goal of the coordinators).

The efficacy of this tactic has nothing to do with the properties of the community being attacked (other than that it's a community that exists to grow) and everything to do with the properties and volume of the attackers.

Additionally -- I think the women's march example undermines your claim. Despite significant coordinated deployment of these tactics, the group became quite large indeed. The only people who now subscribe to your view that it has collapsed are those who oppose the agenda of the women's march. There is nothing objective to substantiate your claim that it has collapsed.

What did the women's march accomplish? Any policy changes? Any social reform?

Frankly, it was rather absurd seeing posters of a woman in a hijab as a poster for freedom and equality considering the hijab is a tool of social oppression. In the Middle East women's rights groups protest against the hijab, not for it.

Not to mention it did get hijacked by groups with disparate agendas.

At the end of the day, it's already been forgotten and accomplished nothing.

If it has been forgotten than why are we talking about it?

I challenge you to support the argument that your perception that the movement accomplished nothing is unbiased.

The reality is that the movement hasn't ended yet. It was the largest protest in American history and there will be fruits born from that. The opposition party is without any official power in government at the moment so if your expectation was an immediate sea change in policy that seems an unrealistically high standard. Other areas (that carry real effects) are already affected however -- that kind of political expression has many soft power effects. Companies are marketing to that demographic (rather than sticking to non-political messaging), government officials who disagree with illegal policy orders presented to them are seeing and feeling support from a large segment of the population to oppose and resist. Many local governments are seeing sharp increases in community participation at local events. Congress critters are being stalked by opposition supporters, cancelling public speaking events sometimes, their call centers are overwhelmed with dissenting opinions. This stuff is going to matter despite your promises of non-effect.

You frame an ongoing movement as entirely impotent and by doing so you very much ignore the important reality of soft power in government and politics.

Occupy Wall Street was also a big movement. What did it accomplish? Bernie's rise in the primaries was a movement, he brought out big crowds, what good did that do?

Let's face it, the Republicans winning all 3 branches of power and a majority of state institutions is far more of a statement than a large turnout for a protest.

Some people think the tea party movement caused the republicans to gain control over congress in 2010.

Like it or not, more than half the population of voters is not represented in the federal government currently. They are actively expressing their voices. Ignoring that (as is being done on a grand scale) will have political consequences.

> The aim isn't to get a rise out of them, it is to split them.

Not necessarily. 4chan often trolls other communities (and even other boards within 4chan) not out of deep opposition but for sports. Certainly, trolling or related tactics can be used to further some agenda, but that is not essential to the trolling itself.

It can also be used to require some conformance to community rules. If no moderation tools are available to the users then they can simply tell outsiders that they are not welcome by trolling them. That does not mean they try to disrupt or divide the community from which the outsider came. No, they're actually defending their own community.

Of course getting other communities to tear themselves apart would be "mission accomplished" for a troll, but that does not mean it is the end-goal, just one possible outcome.

>"Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is child's play.

That raises the question, whose fault is it? If people are so sensitive that they get spooked by halloween masks and triggered by witty remarks, does the world around them have to change, or do they have to change?

I don't think it raises any questions about strawmen descriptors of the "modern left" at all. The pearl-clutching over "ess jay doublyous" far outweigh any impact they have in real life.

For the most part, they're more annoying than anything else.

But wow, are they annoying.

Which one is annoying -- the SJWs or the pearl clutchers?

A few people lose their jobs as authorities try to placate the SJWs and the chilling effect over the whole society is palpable. Ask Brendan Eich or the leaders of that University in Missouri or the guy who made an innocent dongle joke at a conference.

People remember that kind of thing and millions edit themselves in a general low-level miasma of fear they might get targeted.

Im not sure what the answer to that question is.

What appears to be the case is that if certain movements at their core significant weight on identifying/separating groups of people, especially based on grievance, it will inevitably split.

A group that bases itself on division, will inevitably divide and weaken.

> "Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is child's play.

that is not my experience at all, modern left leaning groups instantly ban people with even slightly different opinions.

Nah, that's amateur hour.

They're easy to disrupt because if you throw out a piece of fake or mostly fake information that accedes to some viewpoint they hold holy they'll throw themselves into a rabid fury without much thought.

For an example just look at the 0-60 leg humping of lyft they did last week because of that selectively true uber story. All that despite Icahn and Thiel each having 9 (?) figures invested in lyft. L to the ol.

Trolling? :P

This is true for just about any superficial community, which reddit is full of. Clickbait driven logic.

It is absolutely a biased perspective to pretend that left leaning communities are more likely to be "rabidly supportive" of fake news that conforms to their worldview than right leaning communities.

Right leaning community discourse is almost entirely oblique references to trigger topics and meme images that use simplistic analogies to pattern match against the audiences worldview.

Or for another example, look at this story and how the folks against GamerGate responded to it:

https://medium.com/@mombot/zachattack-how-i-tricked-anti-har...

All it took was a bit of fake evidence and a story these people wanted to believe (that someone they disliked 'wasn't a minority'), and suddenly you had a whole bunch of people looking like idiots and making fools of themselves.

So easy to then ramp this up to focus on someone in the activist's/extremists' own community and hey, the whole group is now up in flames over a fabricated story.

I'm not familiar with GamerGate. Can you explain this story?

From reading the article I make some inferences and try to explain what I understood -- I explain below just to illustrate what I understand coming from a place of zero information on the topic -- please clarify and correct my understanding as presented.

GamerGate is a movement of some kind (I actually have no idea what they support) that began deploying an attack called 'doxing' (which I understand involves publicly disclosing the identity behind social media personas in order that real life attacks/intimidation can be conducted against the actual humans) against people they are against.

Anti-GamerGate is a movement with the agenda to 'dox the GamerGate doxxers'. The above article claims to be an account of how two individuals worked together to convince anti-GamerGaters to dox a fake identity and in the process uncovered the identity of the anti-GamerGaters and proceeded to 'dox' them with that information.

What I'm failing to undestand is how exactly this proves anything about left-leaning groups in general? Is it your position that coordinated deployment of fake information can only be used against communities with certain philosophical properties commonly identified as 'liberal'? In your opinion what kind of information would be required to prove this perspective? Do you have evidence to support the idea that communities with a different philosophical leaning would not succumb to such a coordinated mis-information campaign?

That means that get rid of unintelligent trolls -- the best trolls are the one who hang around and worm their ways into position of power, so they can do the banning.

My experience has been people who claim they're banned from groups for espousing different opinions actually did so in the least constructive way possible. They weren't banned for the opinion, they were banned for their conduct.

See: Reddit. With the notable exception of alt-right subs like /r/The_Donald -- who apparently have no issue with banning anyone they even _think_ is going against the hive mind.

That's true. People complain about being banned, and then it turns out that they called someone's mother a hamster.

Not that there isn't some awful part of me thinks it's a little bit funny to tweet gay porn at the alt-right, but if you do something like that, than don't complain about getting banned: you had it coming.

Exactly. That behaviour shows you they can be split easily.

Medium term infiltration into these groups is straightforward as the external signifiers of group membership are known and easy to emulate.

Stimulate what appears to be a genuine disagreement and sides quickly form. As they are used to banning people quickly, the culture is strong and hard disagreement. If they can be turned on each other, it quickly collapses.

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