Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
tracingwoodgrains.medium.com
tracingwoodgrains.medium.com
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
> Increasingly, that’s where the culture war is headed, I think. Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents while truths inconvenient to their allies should be minimized, salivating over any opportunity to rage at the outrage du jour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
> “It may be a lie, but the fact I believed it speaks volumes about my enemies, and not me”
... that's pretty much the zeitgeist of our times. (By which I mean, people who are on Twitter and Facebook) facepalm
Ask any politically independent or moderate person, and they can tell you everyone else only sees caricatures of the other side
Generalizing about one's political enemies is the pastime of all people, including "moderates".
Ergo, all parties continually optimize their positions, and apparently meet at a boundary that's usually about half the elective.
Not really. There are basically no countries in Europe with a 50/50 split.
> There's a strong selection bias for positions which attract more votes
Again, no, not really in Europe with proportional representation or similar systems.
If 50+1 wasn't the magic number, it makes sense you'd see parties optimizing for other things.
You don't exactly need a poll for "issues" like should we legalize necrophilia or should we go to war with Australia.
Is this sarcasm/irony? Or are you doing precisely what this post talks about? Or perhaps I am parsing your words incorrectly?
The CS Lewis quote from the article:
> Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents
You can just check. It's not typing a name into google is difficult.
edit: oh, good. Cousin comment by drdec went there
That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this, is leagues more dangerous than these jokesters themselves. Sad!
Whatever fits the narrative I guess…
Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer. It's pretty much the standard one. I feel like the fact that so many people don't have a mental compartment for a basic medical term like that nowadays really has a lot to do with how much trouble we've had controlling this virus. Of course an mRNA vaccine is scary to someone who doesn't know what mRNA is.
We're never going to escape this cycle without better science education.
"Horse dewormer" is as accurate as it can possibly be. It is also used extensively as a cow dewormer and pet dewormer. People are going to veterinarian and pet shops to buy paste sold to deworm horses and cows to take it themselves. They are not taking drugs produced for human consumption. They are going with the animal products designed and sold to give to animals.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/more-people-are-pois...
Calling it a dewormer in this context is a lie of omission.
But salicylic acid is also used in skin care products like wart remover.
Here's a wart remover product for dogs and horses, which contains salicylic acid as an active ingredient: https://www.chewy.com/creative-science-wartsoff-wart-dog/dp/...
If, the next time you have a fever, you reach for the dog/horse wart remover... I'm gonna call that "dog wart remover" regardless of the fact that it contains an ingredient that is used to treat fevers in _humans_
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[0]: https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/health/covid-ivermectin-p...
It's got a picture of a horse and PASTE in a big font. But, yes, like sibling post, it's used derisively for people who won't get a free vaccine known to reduce death 10x+ but will get random shit radio hosts tell them to try.
Anyway, there's no reason ivermectin couldn't be used to treat breakthrough cases in people who have taken the vaccine as well. So it's something that could help everyone.
I'll agree that it is misleading to call it horse paste, but if you call it a de-wormer, that doesn't sound a lot better to me. It's not an anti-viral, and the only "promise" it has shown is equivalent to the promise shown by a handgun fired at a petri dish a la xkcd.
But then he got Covid and announced he was taking a medicine that some people think might help, but hasn't been proved.
Now there's all the talk about horse paste or whatever but I feel like we all skipped over a step where there's a group of people who have taken a conspiratorial approach now leaping on an unproven medicine, which just seems odd. So they've always believed in Covid, but pretended not to?
And I feel like I'm going crazy but didn't this already happen with some other drug, that people thought might be really helpful but turned out not to be?
Is it the lockdowns they don't like, the vaccines? Why is jumping on unproven meds so popular in certain circles?
Regarding Right-wing distrust: The vaccine is new tech (and I mean fundamentally new, not just another flu vaccine). This means that unlike previous vaccines, it's safety profile wasn't nearly as well understood. It's efficacy is pretty well characterized. Conversely, Ivermectin isn't just horse dewormer, it's used in humans too. It has a known safety profile, and had early research dramatic report a 90% reduction in death (the one that was later retracted). Remember, not believing in vaccines doesn't make covid go away, so you've got a chunk of people desperate for an alternative solution. So they see this "known element" and reported efficacy and think that it'll be an alternative to the vaccine.
The previous case was Hydroxy chloroquinine, and I have quite a bit of spite for both sides of that argument then too.
Right, but in all the contexts I've heard it, it's not just a "dewormer", it's a "horse dewormer". That's technically true, but it's also FDA approved for human consumption. Making fun of people for consuming "horse dewormer" is like making fun of people for consuming "horse tranquilizer" for their depression[1].
There’s more to the ivermectin story than having anti-parasitic properties, even though that’s how it became famous. It also appears to have anti-viral properties [1]. And there have been 60+ studies showing its efficacy [2]. Just because it has anti-parasitic properties doesn't mean it couldn't also block biological pathways in viral infections as well.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
FWIW researching it is good and should be encouraged but most quality clinical trials so far like NCT04429711 and NCT04391127 haven't been very promising. Those which do show a statistically significant result have been flawed in one way or another. Hopefully when the Principle Trial reports people will get over it one way or another, but it's not looking promising. It may help somewhat at best, but it's no miracle cure.
Come on, nobody calls it that, ketamine is generally known by the epithets:
"Date rape drug"
also
"Drug used to murder Elijah McClain"
So, at best, people take a sane dose and it has no effect whatsoever as covid is not an intestinal worm. At worst, they take too much and it makes them more ill. There are indeed people hospitalised for it, whether that's a global, national, local or non-issue I can't say but that any unnecessarily sick person in the context of a pandemic takes another bed away is pretty obvious.
And what is required to prevent it is every single journal to not fall for it. And all it takes in one journal to fall for it.
No, their professional livelihood is predicated specifically on the opposite: to lie to the public, but to do so convincingly. Falling for anything that fits their narrative is par for the course, since discovering and reporting truth is literally the opposite of their mandate.
Journalism is a profession filled by people who would push their own mother down a flight of stairs to earn a "Pulitzer Prize", a prize that is literally named after one of the most dishonest propagandists whose lies are directly responsible for the Spanish-American War and the fate of millions of Cubans for a century after.
These are people PROUD to win something named after this scumbag. They CRAVE it. This small fact is all you need to know about the character of the kind of people who choose to work in this "profession".
Imagine investment bankers scrambling over each other to win a coveted "Ponzi Award", or pastors working to earn a "Payne Award"
I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.
> I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke")
Should read and not immediately?
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
tl;dr: don't have display texts like "here" or "this" or "this comment" etc, it's bad for people who use screenreaders, and super easy to fix, but almost no one knows about this issue, which is why I go around spamming people about it.
I also encourage everyone reading this to start spamming this advice to everyone you encounter!
More to the point, the satire is obvious because the posts are absurd, over-the-top, and deeply implausible. Spray-painting your baby's mouth and crushing hormone pills to put in your teenager's food, then bragging about it on reddit, are not things people do. Writing a meandering post in southern vernacular about bounty hunting your sex partner is not a thing people do. Do people do insane things sometimes? Yes. But when you want to use a genuinely insane thing as evidence for any sort of political message, you should put more work into it than just assuming whatever outlandish story someone's spinning online that happens to be perfect culture war fuel is truth.
A minimal level of fact-checking and scrutiny would have been enough in this case.
If the "joke" is supposed to be similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does, this isn't enough. Like his Erran Moorad stuff, a reasonable person would look up his claims before sitting in for an interview or "training" with him and asking for 3 year olds to be given guns. In Borat 2, the disguises seemed to be intentionally bad.
Most importantly, at the end of the joke he came out to the world and said it WAS a joke and publicized that it was a joke. What r/Drama is doing is less like a joke and more just ways to basically start a civil war. If they were genuine clowns and cultural critics like Cohen(who is literally a classical clown according to Wisecrack) they would come out and proudly declare it in public.
Their inability to verify the claims. The proper approach to journalism is to neither dismiss nor accept claims, but to investigate them. If the investigation yields a story, you publish the evidence collected; if it's a dead end then nothing gets published. In this case, the journalists clearly never did any actual investigation.
I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.
As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.
However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.
[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.
It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as they know it will get clicks. FTFY ;)
The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".
There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation.
Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.
It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.
I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.
Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congres...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-runn...
Perhaps, that one may be impressed merely by reading such a blurb is part of the problem.
I especially liked the “oh, and also, in addition to all that other stuff, he has a gold record for the Grateful Dead album he produced”
Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...
They're always talking about how many people they've fooled and the numbers, objectively are not very high.
"I fooled the underpaid person who writes clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs to adverts by doing their job for them" isn't really the great triumph it is often made out to be.
It's like 'revealing' the mermaid you donated to PT Barnum's museum was a fish and a monkey sewed together. He knows and doesn't care.
If people come to see it, he profits, if they don't, well it was worth a go.
Also, it strips away the institutional trust and prestige layer by layer.
The media outlets cited are Vice and Business insider, the Twitter feed of a science journalist and several subreddits.
This is not convincing anyone of anything they don't want to be convinced of.
It would be like someone thinking they'd struck a blow against academic fraud with the Barnum stunt.
I'm not saying that academic fraud isn't a real problem, but this 'attack' on it is simply pathetic by any objective measure.
It's interesting to see that a lot of people still believed it, even when evidence that it was a Drama troll op was provided.
The Texas bounty hunters sub wasn't the first foray of the dramanauts, but it definitely attracted the most attention out of all of them.
The C.S. Lewis quote is basically my thoughts on the matter of people's reactions to these sorts of subs.
Coming soon: A biting expose on racist tech bros on ycombinator...
It’s not called yellow because of the reason you’re thinking.
Seriously, what are the goddamned odds? I'm completely illiterate when it comes to statistics.
Irregardless, I do know I'd bet anything the odds are infinitesimally low given the poor track record of the MSM.
I can guess how accepting you are of alternate viewpoints.
But yeah let's talk about what's literally on videotape
Biden is on tape talking about he passed along the message that Ultimate had to fire a corrupt prosecutor who was refusing to investigate companies including Burisima the company whose board Hunter Biden was on.
VP Biden was merely the messanger Getting rid of the corrupt Shokin was supported by the rest of the Obama administration, the State Department, the EU, and many Republicans.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-senators-pushed-for...
Trump was impeached for trying to pressure the Ukrainian president into making up bullshit investigation of Biden to tarnish his name. For trying to abuse American aid money to blackmail a friendly foreign leader
You have been taken by a conspiracy theory. You were lied to by people you trust, etc. I know it's hard or impossible to accept that, but that's what it is.
However, let’s not ignore that there are actual extremists right now on the knee jerk side that escalated literal bullshit to national media before discovering the ruse.
People are more worried about the potential of new extremists vs handling the ones we already have.
I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed; I bought into all the "Blair Witch" hype twenty years ago. LOL
Wishing for it to be true after it had been shown to be false is one thing (and clearly dumb), but I think the existence of such a subreddit is a perfectly reasonable thing to be outraged over in the first place. Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture..
>Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?
It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.
Have you considered how far we would have gotten as a species if we had a pervasive assumption of bad faith in our interactions with other people? Complex societies depend on assuming good faith. People who assume others are always acting in bad faith are often traumatized or suffering from other forms of mental illness. I don’t find it “ridiculous” that people believe stupid things. I believe stupid things, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s certainly bad, but I’m not quite sure how your contributions improve the situation. Mostly they seem calibrated to reduce social trust and push people towards assuming bad faith. What if you wrote about how to identify satire instead?
Maybe stuff like this exposes the fact that the media are not as reliable as we think. If they are propagating this fake news, what other fake news are they propagating?
It doesn't cut equally both ways because there's an obvious ground truth that exonerates those who believe it's satire. I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure. But the deflection of "can't blame me, Poe's Law" doesn't hold when plenty of people are able to see through the ruse.
> I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure
You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?
Not the op, but it clearly was detached from reality. 1) It was false, therefore not reality. 2) The people who believed it were journalists, who should know to check first and also should know not to believe everything you read.
Sure, I get that.
> If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick?
I appreciate what you’re trying to say, and indeed I am well aware of how many times I have been wrong. It has happened several times a day, at varying scales, for my whole life so far. It takes a lot to make me mad. People acting in bad faith and creating a hostile information environment just to prove that other people are gullible is one of the things that does it.
Jokes aren’t sociopathic? We make fun of anyone, and where else can you demonstrate that people are too willing to fall for stories they’re mad at but with topics they are super invested in in an over the top way?
In isolation, this view might be rational. However, in aggregate, this mindset can cause a cycle of increasing extremism. A good portion of those misogynists you speak of came to their views because they have read countless fake left-wing content that they thought was real, and in response became more entrenched in their opposing views.
The cycle goes like this - a fairly sane, conservative person sees someone on a conservative subreddit post a link to the 'transparents' subreddit, and sees posts they believe are real that talk about parents giving their kids hormones against their will. A natural response is to think "Woh, those trans rights people are crazy, maybe we should push back against trans rights"... and they become a little bit more extreme in their beliefs. Multiply this by a thousand, and you have a crazy extremist on your hands.
The same thing happens on the other side, and you get more and more extremists on the left. Now the cycle becomes even more self-sustaining, because now you have legitimate crazy extremists adding fuel to the fire by making real posts that sound a lot like the satire posts. So now, the satire has to be even MORE extreme to be humorous, and the cycle deepens.
This is a really hard problem to combat. I agree with you that this Texas law is absolutely insane and dangerous. However, I don't think the solution is to stop being critical of evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true, just because we are so sure of what we believe.
No, I don’t believe that.
I hope that puts your concern to rest. Unless there's some other reason that you think discussing this topic binds everyone into a magical compact forbidding them from discussing the ban itself?
If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Any stickam and gaia trolls here?
That was so funny lol
It is so funny to read this, tempting not to jump in, roflcopter
Women have their rights trampled upon in Texas, but let's focus on the "internet troublemakers" who draw attention to this situation using satire?
It might appear as if you support Texas' stance on abortion, and want to defend it from some trouble-making Internet miscreants who dare to mock it.
You do not know every single one of these people or their motivations. Maybe for some, everything is "LOLZ", but maybe some are serious. This sort of community looks like something anyone could join, for any number of reasons.
(I'm aware that there are some groups out there who perpetrate real harm, like stalking and harassing individuals ("lolcows") who are selected by the group as a target.)
I don't think that the "Internet troublemakers" did anything wrong, on the face of it.
Making a joke forum where you pretend that you're a Texan who is seriously bounty hunting women for the crime of abortion is no worse than, oh, Jonathan Swift writing an essay about how poor people could improve their situation by their children to be eaten by the rich.
If some people believed it, that's their problem.
Is that what you do yourself; or else, why are you recommending it to me, then?