11 ms·

A harassment campaign on Goodreads

270 points by ilamont 7y ago

wyldfire 7y ago
> Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. Wow, that's devious. I wonder if any of the fake product reviews I've seen are obvious fake endorsements placed there by the competition.
- degenerate 7y ago
  This problem isn't one born with the internet. Think about all those "WE BUY HOUSES 4 CASH" signs you see at stop lights. Why can't the city simply look up the phone number on them and convict the business owner for breaking advertisement laws? Because there is no proof he put the sign there. It could be the competition trying to frame him! Thus, the signs are simply thrown out... and he can put new ones out tomorrow.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    At the same time, if that sign pops up four weeks in a row and is taken down four times - I should hope the city allocates a bit of labour to actually figure out who is doing it. And that's the answer that GR doesn't want to hear - clear patterns of abuse are apparent and they need to allocate more manual labour into moderation - automatic moderation can get pretty decent accuracy, but there's always a grey zone where you need some manual review - as much as we shrink that zone I don't think we'll ever make it disappear.
    - r_singh 7y ago
      This is where phone verification comes to use, because a user can be tracked back to their phone number which can be tracked back to a real person.
  - burundi_coffee 7y ago
    "Hello, I saw a sign that says you buy houses for cash, can I set up a meeting?" "Yes, when are you available?" > Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Surely can't be that hard to find out if the business owner set up that sign, right?
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      INB4 people complain that this is "entrapment"
    - drharby 7y ago
      Circumstantial. Go watch Zodiac to get an idea of how circumstantial evidence is insufficient
      - tzs 7y ago
        That's a common misconception. See [1] for more. [1] https://www.dummies.com/education/science/forensics/direct-versus-circumstantial-evidence/ https://www.dummies.com/education/science/forensics/direct-v...
        drharby 7y ago
        Huh - TIL
    - agrajag 7y ago
      A valid defense would just be that there was at least one legitimate advertisement that they saw. Just because one sign is illegal doesn’t mean they all are.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      Let's say you buy houses for cash and I put up a sign with your number on it. The police call you and find out that you do, indeed, buy houses for cash. They throw you in jail and I snicker, knowing that by breaking the advertising law myself but with your name I have put you out of business. While I'm at it, I leave your business card at the scene of a heist.
  - baxtr 7y ago
    This reminds me of a related point: Almost always when I find of the "We will buy your car" cards on my car's windshield I wonder what to do with the card. I don't want to litter the streets, at the same time I never asked for the stupid card. To this day, I am still not clear what is -from a morale standpoint- the right thing to do.
    - 9dev 7y ago
      You just put it in the nearest trash can.
    - therealx 7y ago
      I think the answer is obvious: a trash can or recycle bin. It's clear this could turn into a DDoS by them, but thankfully they havent thought like that. I'd prob backfire advertising wise anyway.
      - narag 7y ago
        Less obvious since I found out that my city's council taxes those cards. When the rain turns the usual dozen of flyers into a plaster that harden later with the sun, it takes a few minutes to clean at best.
        velosol 7y ago
        File a police report for vandalism by the company?
        narag 7y ago
        Vandalism? So illegal activities are now taxed instead of fined? Not that I find more logical that the council rents my car to those companies as an advertisement medium. But there's zero chance that report would be taken seriously.
        velosol 7y ago
        I understood your previous comment that you're already in a situation where it's taxed; I was thinking of someway to have it cost the advertising company money even if it only serves to have them put out the flyers on sunny days. I was thinking more as tool for insurance and/or attempting to force the company to pay for the cost of an exterior detailing of your car since they plastered something to it (with the help of the weather). In many US areas there are online police reports for minor incidents and the purpose of the report is almost solely so that you have a record for insurance. It may also help if you call up the company (or publicly shame them with a tweet) to ask for reimbursement for the cost of a car detailer to remove their litter from your car without damage. Having a police report means you could put it all in the hands of your insurance company who have lawyers on staff or use it as part of the negotiation with the company. Maybe enough police reports about a given company and you could petition the council to revoke that company's ability to flyer any longer? I know I'm probably dreaming that it would make a difference. The only time I've had an experience with this a friend used twitter and got a public apology from the company along with some monetary compensation around the removal of the ink residue from the windshield.
  - CommieBobDole 7y ago
    I always assumed that the companies behind "we buy houses 4 cash" ads did exactly that - bought houses quickly and on cash terms at far below the market value from people who are in some sort of bad situation and would agree to a lousy deal in exchange for money now. Is that not what they do? Do they do something illegal instead?
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      The advertising signs placed on public property are illegal.
      - CommieBobDole 7y ago
        Well, yeah, but the parent post talks about the police calling the number on the sign and using that to get a conviction, so I assumed that some sort of other crime was being committed, like maybe they steal the caller's bank info or sign them up for some scam service. The reason the police don't do what the parent says is not because of difficulties with attribution of the act, it's because they care so little about the offense that they're not going to expend even the slightest effort to prosecute it. If they saw someone putting out signs, they might tell them to stop. Maybe.
  - sb057 7y ago
    Similarly, a person can't be held (directly) legally responsible for receiving illicit material via postal service (at least in the United States). Otherwise, you could simply ship drugs to their home address and get them charged with any number of crimes.
    - int_19h 7y ago
      However, a person can be legally raided for the purposes of recovering said drugs, even if they have no idea that they possess them after picking the package up. Furthermore, even if the police has advance knowledge of the package and could have intercepted it earlier, they can still allow delivery and follow up with the raid, just so that they can take the recipient into custody. One prominent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor%27s_residence_drug_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  I have heard (but don't have personal experience of etc) that there is a similar tactic for “negative SEO”. Often people try to spam links to their own site to boost PageRank, leading to Google etc picking up on this and ranking websites worse for it, leading to people spamming links to competitors' sites so Google will penalise them.
  - yellow_lead 7y ago
    This is a thing and it can be combatted by "disavowing" links through Google webmaster tools somehow, I believe. Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.
  - oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
    Wouldn’t that problem disappear if google just ignored spam links rather than penalising them?
jshevek 7y ago
Some people are trying to battle against negative fake reviews by posting positive fake reviews. It's not clear to me that they are as morally superior as they evidently believe. Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further because you believe you are virtuous.
- matsemann 7y ago
  I hope you see the difference between fake praise and harrassment. "Both sides are wrong" doesn't mean they are equally bad.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    That's why I used relative language such as "as morally superior as they evidently believe" Edit: If someone is caught posting fake positive reviews to boost a rating[1], that doesn't make it okay to post fake negative reviews 'to fight the good fight'. [1] As opposed to impugning someone's character via impersonation, as appears to be happening here
  - deith 7y ago
    It's not fake praise vs harassment, it's fake praise vs fake criticism. In any case this will make for an excellent marketing campaign. I don't even know what the book is about (I assume something politically charged because of this campaign) but now I know the book!
    - catalogia 7y ago
      It can be [and is] fake criticism and harassment at the same time. These are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        Excerpt from the article: "Jason: I saw one troll spoofing your name and picture post an extremely nasty, long-winded comment on Goodreads, discussing intimate details of your family life and making it sound like you want to kill yourself. None of this could be considered a review of your book by any conceivable means, yet Goodreads still hasn't removed it. What's going on here?" I'm really curious how anybody thinks this isn't harassment.
Brain_Thief 7y ago
Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication. Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations; since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.
- mc32 7y ago
  I think this is a good intention but it would end up with little difference. My iconic example is that Marin county with some of the highest levels of tertiary education are also the highest in terms of not getting their kids vaccinated. Also seen in campaigns against drunk driving and campaigns for eating balanced diets. People become aware of the pros and cons (after exposure) but continue unabated in their behavior. I’m a pessimist on this.
  - Brain_Thief 7y ago
    These are good points you raise. I suppose what I'm really thinking is that there needs to be some sort of "interpersonal digital communications normalization process" for young people that functions similarly to how being at school around teachers / outside at recess around peers functions to normalize children's behavior toward others (or at least serves to mitigate the most blatantly anti-social behaviors in many cases). As it stands, many children are introduced to the web and online communications without much (or any) guidance whatsoever as far as I can tell; it seems like the impact of this hands-off approach is quite negative in many cases, with young people lacking the tools to healthily manage their interactions with the web.
jasonpbecker 7y ago
Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best of times?
  - yazan94 7y ago
    I want to second this question - this is a relatively easy-to-fix issue on GR's side to have more moderation tools and powers. But otherwise, are there any other substantial complaints?
    - lkbm 7y ago
      1. "Date Read" UX is terrible: My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX. As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read." 2. It's slow. Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images. 3. Nav is bad This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books: - Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds) - Click "My Books" (5+ seconds) - Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.) - Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds) - Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds) (Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.) 4. The recommendation engine is bad. Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!) 5. Lists aren't super-accessible As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists. There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists. If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this. 6. Search Breaks Middle-Click When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab. 7. Their export tool doesn't work right. This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying. Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined. It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!
rodgerd 7y ago
Goodreads is cancer.
withinrafael 7y ago
I'm not familiar with the backend of Goodreads but perhaps one tiny step forward would be for the book page to not open for ratings/comments prior to review copy distribution. And because review copy users already have to on-board (in some way) to get those copies, Goodreads could provide an integration point for authors to plug that reader list in and only let those folks respond initially, with restrictions lifting at launch. Anyway, I wish them best of luck. This problem is widespread, see: Amazon, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, et al.
- larnmar 7y ago
  My solution: “Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”
  - floren 7y ago
    I read it on Kindle, oops. Edit: "What's the second word of chapter 4" would work better but that's assuming harassers can't source an ebook and share it around... it'd prevent pre-release spam like this but so would disabling reviews until the book is actually released
  - johnnyo 7y ago
    Page 93 of the Kindle version? The hardback? the paperback? or the large print version?
    - anon73044 7y ago
      Maybe something like "The last sentence in Chapter 8" "Fourth sentence in chapter 9" and so on.
      - johnnyo 7y ago
        I still think GoodReads would have issues there. The first thing Goodreads asks you to do when you create a new account is to list and rate a bunch of books you've read and either liked or hated. This is important, because they (ostensibly) want to recommend other books to you. When I first created an account, I quickly rated maybe 50 books on a 1-5 scale I had read over the years. I didn't have most of them handy.
jshevek 7y ago
It's absurd that pre-release reviews are available to the general public. This should be easy to fix, if GR cared to do so.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Goodreads is owned by Amazon, who is incentivized by the pre-release purchases that these reviews drive. They're not going to put a lock on pre-release reviews (nor should they) to solve a trolling/bad actor issue.
  - Vrondi 7y ago
    This book is still in editing, though. It isn't even available as a pre-release review copy at all yet.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      I mean, this is assuming that pre-release reviews are from advance copies, not WIP.
  - halfcreative 7y ago
    Why shouldn't they? I think it's ridiculous to be able to review something which you have not experienced and I don't see a good reason why they should be allowed. The lockout should be until at least one person (ideally more) have experienced the fully released product.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Authors and publishers ship pre-release advance copies to popular reviewers, as part a part of the promotion leading up to launch, like movies do with prescreenings. Goodreads is notorious for having these types of reviewers, in fact, it's one of the carrots that serial reviewers go after.
- halfcreative 7y ago
  Pre-release reviews is a problem on more than just books too. I wish there were more systems to verify that you've at least bought the book, movie, or the product in general before you can review it.
Vrondi 7y ago
This has been a problem on Goodreads for a few years now.
joncp 7y ago
Well, goodreads is owned by Amazon. I'm not at all surprised that their lackadaisical attitude toward abuse cuts across the whole business.
wayneftw 7y ago
The original title, "Lax Security and Moderation at Goodreads Allows Trolls to Spoof People, Harass Authors" seemed pretty straightforward to me. How is it misleading or "linkbait"?
- gravitas 7y ago
  In my observation of the edit patterns being used by moderators, titles are frequently edited when they contain emotionally charged words ("spoof" "trolls" "harass" in this one) to create bland, boring titles no matter what the source article is titled (not violating guidelines).
  - kbenson 7y ago
    One person's idea of making titles more boring is probably another person's idea of removing bias. Bland might not necessarily be bad in these cases.
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      People who read the article will be exposed to this "bias" anyway. Leaving the title as-is would then be more informative. Here, the change is okay. Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog". I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine. And what's with the bias-paranoia? People, including journalists, are allowed to have opinions and emotions. They do not have to equivocate: "The sanitary situation in the camp is becoming dangerous" does not require "...but someone on YouTube believes germ theory is a hoax, so who is to say if sleeping in feces isn't just a good way to stay warm".
      - rgoulter 7y ago
        > Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog". My understanding of this policy is that the editorializing should be done in the comments rather than the submission of the title. -- A submission (and presumably number of upvotes/comments from others) already indicates that the article has some importance, and opinions about it have a 'level playing field' in the comments. I think this also supports that the comment section is the place for interesting/insightful discussion.
deepsun 7y ago
Don't forget that it may be an ad campaign to promote a book, though.
campee 7y ago
The pests are at it again, classic O&A fans.
harrisonjackson 7y ago
There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside. Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up. This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?
- crazygringo 7y ago
  I think there's a big difference between moderation according to standards, and false reviews. It's comparatively easy to determine if any single post is using banned language, is abusive, etc. The single post can then be removed. False reviews, on the other hand, are virtually impossible to identify individually. People's opinions on a book legitimately differ. There isn't an obvious way to distinguish between a review that's part of a harrassment campaign or paid brigade, versus one that's genuine. It's only in aggregate that something seems to be wrong -- but how do you fix it? How do you select which individual reviews get removed? Moderation is not really a solution here, because all individual reviews will be approved.
  - harrisonjackson 7y ago
    One of the fake reviews was by someone who had passed away with a picture obtained from their obituary. A moderator who knows an author or book has been flagged could spend a minute to find this out. It is definitely a difficult problem - I'll agree with you there. There are some other good suggestions in the thread on making it easier to flag the false reviews/moderate reviews beyond "community standards" I like the idea of using a captcha that prompts you to enter a random word from a random chapter in the book. Another system could just hide reviews that are not verified - and tie into amazon purchases to verify them - I don't know why Amazon would not lean on the fact that they own Goodreads to do this... Make all the reviews visible if the user prompts to see the unverified ones, but as the default just shows the reviews for people that bought the book through Amazon.
anotherevan 7y ago
How does https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ compare these days?
throwno 7y ago
I can't imagine how frustrating this is for business owners. There are a bunch of obviously fake reviews by people in India on the local GNC branch. If you just look at the star rating, you'll think "Wow, that place must suck!". Then you read the reviews and it's from people who have never set foot in the United States never mind GNC. Reviews are basically useless.
SignalsFromBob 7y ago
Instagram is another site with this problem. Someone supplied my email address when creating an account in late 2018. I only know this because I started receiving emails to confirm my email address. Then I started to get a bunch of emails telling me about new posts from other users. Gmail account history only showed logins from my browser and IP address, so I don't believe my account was compromised. I finally got tired of the emails, so I told the site I forgot the password, changed the password to something long and random, then deleted all the content. I remember having to do something unusual to delete the content, like spoof my useragent to pretend to be a mobile device, or something like that. I've never used Instagram before or since, but it really annoyed me that I have a problem due to their lax controls. Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity until the email address was verified, which I never did. If a big site like Instagram can't get this right, it doesn't surprise me that a small site like Goodreads can't either.
- EvanAnderson 7y ago
  Just did this last week with an Instagram account tied to a free email I hardly ever use. Epic Games also doesn't verify the email address, because my email account "had" an account there too. Worse, it had a credit card saved and appeared to be ready to allow me to use the card after I did the "forgot password" and gained access to the account. I ended-up deleting both accounts.
- harryh 7y ago
  Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity until the email address was verified Essentially zero services on the internet operate this way because it increases the friction to signing up & getting started with the service. Some services do somewhat better by including a "this wasn't me" link in the email verification email to make it as easy as possible to remove your email from the account in question. IMHO, this is a fine way to handle the problem.
  - pferde 7y ago
    Except that users are (or should be) trained NOT to click on any links in spurious e-mails they receive. No, dear sites, kindly deal with a little bit of sign-up friction and stop offloading to others the fallout from people abusing your services.
oehpr 7y ago
I find topics like this very interesting. Fake reviews on Amazon, vote bombing on youtube, fake upvotes on reddit, fake likes on facebook. I'd even extend this tangentially to cyber squatting DNS records, email spam, and robo callers. It's a matter of trust. We think we can just make a big polling station somewhere and get the communities opinion on something, one person one vote. "Here's the big central aggregate, take the law of averages and you have a good sense of how good something is". But on the internet the Sybil attack reigns supreme. This assumption doesn't hold. Whenever I read articles on problems like these the topic of "Why it's happening and how to fix it" invariable drifts to "We need better moderation". I never think that. I think "Stop trusting Sybil". Not even THAT! Stop asking me to trust random people I don't trust! What if instead of having an single aggregate review, we "web of trust" it instead? Here's the system as I imagine it, and it's not fully thought out at this point, please chime in with criticisms if you have them. The jist: Every user has their own list of ratings for books in the system, and a list of people they "trust". The rated list of books you see the average rating of the people you trust, recursing out through the web of trust. The ratings are calculated live, on demand. With the only thing held in constant being each individuals personal ratings. I'm leaving a lot undefined right now, but an example of how I imagine such a system to work: Lets say you know Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the perfect book. You go to the books page and review the ratings. Your rate is obviously 5. You see lots of other people in your list who have rated it 5 (naturally). But you also see that there are some 3's in there. You can click on the 3's and see how they reached you through the web of trust. It turns out a bunch of 3's are coming from your someone named Bob, Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has trusted a bunch of people from some kind of Harry Potter hating cabal of philistines. You could blacklist the cabal, but there's too many of them, so instead you blacklist Alice. All the 3's are gone, and so are all the other reviews from the cabal. Your list of reviews now more accurately reflects views that you would trust. In this way, your effort to moderate away the opinions of people you don't trust has done double duty, it has cleared views you disagree with and do not trust, and it has also done so for the people who trust you as well. It is decentralized moderation. There's some challenges here, for example, how to bootstrap the system for new users? What is the best way to calculate the average reviews in a timely manner? How much weight should be applied to a friend of a friend of a friend? What kind of feedback could we give to users to incentivize them against trusting people like the philistine cabal? etc. I have some thoughts on this, I'll spare you. Like any decentralized system, it's more work, it's more complex, and it has some surprising and ugly edge cases. I also don't think I'm some genius for coming up for this, it's just an application of Web of Trust. But I have not seen a system such as this in practice. Nor do I ever seem to see people talk about it when the topic of moderation and spam come up. If you know of any such case studies, let me know!
Gatsky 7y ago
Right, another online group of people conducting orchestrated campaigns of harassment. They seem to come together with highly tenuous pretexts (eg some random radio show that isn't even on the air any more) yet the members are highly motivated and resourceful. It is a very strange phenomenon, like a cult worshipping nastiness as the supreme expression of existence. These groups seem particularly against art and creativity, their targets are often novelists, artists and performers. I suppose if you are deeply unhappy and disempowered then any form of art must seem like an affront. Only if all creative acts are stupid may you feel good about your own life chewing cud on a forum somewhere. The more online everyone and everything becomes the more prevalent these generalised and distributed lynch mobs are likely to be. The also function with impunity (eg kiwi farms).
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  Was Gamergate the index case, or merely the first time people outside the intel community took notice?
nl 7y ago
I read with some surprise his claims that Amazon wouldn't take down a fake review (which posted fake anti-Semitic quotes, even when the publisher sent them the pages the quotes were supposed to be from). So I checked Amazon myself, and sure enough there is the number one review[1] claiming this tome continues the unfortunate slide of Patrick S. Tomlinson into an alt-right provocateur with blatant anti-Semitic tropes and characters littered throughout the book. Ironically, most of the other one star reviews claim the book is full of "thinly-veiled, progressive tropes" [1] https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-Tomlinson/dp/1250302714 https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-Tomlinson/dp/...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
logicallee 7y ago
This definitely seems to cross the line from troll to criminal: >Many of the spoofed accounts use the identities of Tomlinson’s friends and peers in the author community, creating the illusion that people he knows are giving one-star reviews and saying bad things about him. Dozens of authors have been spoofed in this manner, including the entire board of directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. >Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. These spoofed reviews often also show Tomlinson falsely saying things which would hurt his own reputation. >Gareth L. Powell and Beth Cato were among the authors spoofed, with their photos and names used to create fake accounts to attack Tomlinson’s books. I think calling these "trolls" doesn't go far enough. I am sure this crosses criminal lines, or at the very least probably several laws. The victims should sue or the government should pursue actions that rise to this level. It's not just "trolling" to do this, in my opinion.
qndreoi 7y ago
In Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", a woman becomes a victim of organized online harassment. The harassers keep repeating the same accusation. She has a rich tech friend who invents "Organized Proxies for Execration" or APEs that overwhelm the internet with huge volumes of contradictory messages. As the inventor says: "-why, even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their minds as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole." Here "Miasma" is Stephenson's word for the cesspool that is social networks. The strategy works more or less for the victim, but (spoiler) has unintended consequences.

270 points by ilamont 7y ago

> Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. Wow, that's devious. I wonder if any of the fake product reviews I've seen are obvious fake endorsements placed there by the competition.

degenerate 7y ago
This problem isn't one born with the internet. Think about all those "WE BUY HOUSES 4 CASH" signs you see at stop lights. Why can't the city simply look up the phone number on them and convict the business owner for breaking advertisement laws? Because there is no proof he put the sign there. It could be the competition trying to frame him! Thus, the signs are simply thrown out... and he can put new ones out tomorrow.
- munk-a 7y ago
  At the same time, if that sign pops up four weeks in a row and is taken down four times - I should hope the city allocates a bit of labour to actually figure out who is doing it. And that's the answer that GR doesn't want to hear - clear patterns of abuse are apparent and they need to allocate more manual labour into moderation - automatic moderation can get pretty decent accuracy, but there's always a grey zone where you need some manual review - as much as we shrink that zone I don't think we'll ever make it disappear.
  - r_singh 7y ago
    This is where phone verification comes to use, because a user can be tracked back to their phone number which can be tracked back to a real person.
- burundi_coffee 7y ago
  "Hello, I saw a sign that says you buy houses for cash, can I set up a meeting?" "Yes, when are you available?" > Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Surely can't be that hard to find out if the business owner set up that sign, right?
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    INB4 people complain that this is "entrapment"
  - drharby 7y ago
    Circumstantial. Go watch Zodiac to get an idea of how circumstantial evidence is insufficient
    - tzs 7y ago
      That's a common misconception. See [1] for more. [1] https://www.dummies.com/education/science/forensics/direct-versus-circumstantial-evidence/ https://www.dummies.com/education/science/forensics/direct-v...
      - drharby 7y ago
        Huh - TIL
  - agrajag 7y ago
    A valid defense would just be that there was at least one legitimate advertisement that they saw. Just because one sign is illegal doesn’t mean they all are.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Let's say you buy houses for cash and I put up a sign with your number on it. The police call you and find out that you do, indeed, buy houses for cash. They throw you in jail and I snicker, knowing that by breaking the advertising law myself but with your name I have put you out of business. While I'm at it, I leave your business card at the scene of a heist.
- baxtr 7y ago
  This reminds me of a related point: Almost always when I find of the "We will buy your car" cards on my car's windshield I wonder what to do with the card. I don't want to litter the streets, at the same time I never asked for the stupid card. To this day, I am still not clear what is -from a morale standpoint- the right thing to do.
  - 9dev 7y ago
    You just put it in the nearest trash can.
  - therealx 7y ago
    I think the answer is obvious: a trash can or recycle bin. It's clear this could turn into a DDoS by them, but thankfully they havent thought like that. I'd prob backfire advertising wise anyway.
    - narag 7y ago
      Less obvious since I found out that my city's council taxes those cards. When the rain turns the usual dozen of flyers into a plaster that harden later with the sun, it takes a few minutes to clean at best.
      - velosol 7y ago
        File a police report for vandalism by the company?
        narag 7y ago
        Vandalism? So illegal activities are now taxed instead of fined? Not that I find more logical that the council rents my car to those companies as an advertisement medium. But there's zero chance that report would be taken seriously.
        velosol 7y ago
        I understood your previous comment that you're already in a situation where it's taxed; I was thinking of someway to have it cost the advertising company money even if it only serves to have them put out the flyers on sunny days. I was thinking more as tool for insurance and/or attempting to force the company to pay for the cost of an exterior detailing of your car since they plastered something to it (with the help of the weather). In many US areas there are online police reports for minor incidents and the purpose of the report is almost solely so that you have a record for insurance. It may also help if you call up the company (or publicly shame them with a tweet) to ask for reimbursement for the cost of a car detailer to remove their litter from your car without damage. Having a police report means you could put it all in the hands of your insurance company who have lawyers on staff or use it as part of the negotiation with the company. Maybe enough police reports about a given company and you could petition the council to revoke that company's ability to flyer any longer? I know I'm probably dreaming that it would make a difference. The only time I've had an experience with this a friend used twitter and got a public apology from the company along with some monetary compensation around the removal of the ink residue from the windshield.
- CommieBobDole 7y ago
  I always assumed that the companies behind "we buy houses 4 cash" ads did exactly that - bought houses quickly and on cash terms at far below the market value from people who are in some sort of bad situation and would agree to a lousy deal in exchange for money now. Is that not what they do? Do they do something illegal instead?
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The advertising signs placed on public property are illegal.
    - CommieBobDole 7y ago
      Well, yeah, but the parent post talks about the police calling the number on the sign and using that to get a conviction, so I assumed that some sort of other crime was being committed, like maybe they steal the caller's bank info or sign them up for some scam service. The reason the police don't do what the parent says is not because of difficulties with attribution of the act, it's because they care so little about the offense that they're not going to expend even the slightest effort to prosecute it. If they saw someone putting out signs, they might tell them to stop. Maybe.
- sb057 7y ago
  Similarly, a person can't be held (directly) legally responsible for receiving illicit material via postal service (at least in the United States). Otherwise, you could simply ship drugs to their home address and get them charged with any number of crimes.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    However, a person can be legally raided for the purposes of recovering said drugs, even if they have no idea that they possess them after picking the package up. Furthermore, even if the police has advance knowledge of the package and could have intercepted it earlier, they can still allow delivery and follow up with the raid, just so that they can take the recipient into custody. One prominent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor%27s_residence_drug_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
I have heard (but don't have personal experience of etc) that there is a similar tactic for “negative SEO”. Often people try to spam links to their own site to boost PageRank, leading to Google etc picking up on this and ranking websites worse for it, leading to people spamming links to competitors' sites so Google will penalise them.
- yellow_lead 7y ago
  This is a thing and it can be combatted by "disavowing" links through Google webmaster tools somehow, I believe. Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
  Wouldn’t that problem disappear if google just ignored spam links rather than penalising them?

jshevek 7y ago

Some people are trying to battle against negative fake reviews by posting positive fake reviews. It's not clear to me that they are as morally superior as they evidently believe. Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further because you believe you are virtuous.

matsemann 7y ago
I hope you see the difference between fake praise and harrassment. "Both sides are wrong" doesn't mean they are equally bad.
- jshevek 7y ago
  That's why I used relative language such as "as morally superior as they evidently believe" Edit: If someone is caught posting fake positive reviews to boost a rating[1], that doesn't make it okay to post fake negative reviews 'to fight the good fight'. [1] As opposed to impugning someone's character via impersonation, as appears to be happening here
- deith 7y ago
  It's not fake praise vs harassment, it's fake praise vs fake criticism. In any case this will make for an excellent marketing campaign. I don't even know what the book is about (I assume something politically charged because of this campaign) but now I know the book!
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It can be [and is] fake criticism and harassment at the same time. These are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Excerpt from the article: "Jason: I saw one troll spoofing your name and picture post an extremely nasty, long-winded comment on Goodreads, discussing intimate details of your family life and making it sound like you want to kill yourself. None of this could be considered a review of your book by any conceivable means, yet Goodreads still hasn't removed it. What's going on here?" I'm really curious how anybody thinks this isn't harassment.

Brain_Thief 7y ago

Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication. Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations; since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.

mc32 7y ago
I think this is a good intention but it would end up with little difference. My iconic example is that Marin county with some of the highest levels of tertiary education are also the highest in terms of not getting their kids vaccinated. Also seen in campaigns against drunk driving and campaigns for eating balanced diets. People become aware of the pros and cons (after exposure) but continue unabated in their behavior. I’m a pessimist on this.
- Brain_Thief 7y ago
  These are good points you raise. I suppose what I'm really thinking is that there needs to be some sort of "interpersonal digital communications normalization process" for young people that functions similarly to how being at school around teachers / outside at recess around peers functions to normalize children's behavior toward others (or at least serves to mitigate the most blatantly anti-social behaviors in many cases). As it stands, many children are introduced to the web and online communications without much (or any) guidance whatsoever as far as I can tell; it seems like the impact of this hands-off approach is quite negative in many cases, with young people lacking the tools to healthily manage their interactions with the web.

jasonpbecker 7y ago

Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best of times?
- yazan94 7y ago
  I want to second this question - this is a relatively easy-to-fix issue on GR's side to have more moderation tools and powers. But otherwise, are there any other substantial complaints?
  - lkbm 7y ago
    1. "Date Read" UX is terrible: My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX. As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read." 2. It's slow. Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images. 3. Nav is bad This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books: - Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds) - Click "My Books" (5+ seconds) - Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.) - Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds) - Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds) (Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.) 4. The recommendation engine is bad. Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!) 5. Lists aren't super-accessible As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists. There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists. If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this. 6. Search Breaks Middle-Click When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab. 7. Their export tool doesn't work right. This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying. Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined. It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!

rodgerd 7y ago

Goodreads is cancer.

withinrafael 7y ago

I'm not familiar with the backend of Goodreads but perhaps one tiny step forward would be for the book page to not open for ratings/comments prior to review copy distribution. And because review copy users already have to on-board (in some way) to get those copies, Goodreads could provide an integration point for authors to plug that reader list in and only let those folks respond initially, with restrictions lifting at launch. Anyway, I wish them best of luck. This problem is widespread, see: Amazon, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, et al.

larnmar 7y ago
My solution: “Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”
- floren 7y ago
  I read it on Kindle, oops. Edit: "What's the second word of chapter 4" would work better but that's assuming harassers can't source an ebook and share it around... it'd prevent pre-release spam like this but so would disabling reviews until the book is actually released
- johnnyo 7y ago
  Page 93 of the Kindle version? The hardback? the paperback? or the large print version?
  - anon73044 7y ago
    Maybe something like "The last sentence in Chapter 8" "Fourth sentence in chapter 9" and so on.
    - johnnyo 7y ago
      I still think GoodReads would have issues there. The first thing Goodreads asks you to do when you create a new account is to list and rate a bunch of books you've read and either liked or hated. This is important, because they (ostensibly) want to recommend other books to you. When I first created an account, I quickly rated maybe 50 books on a 1-5 scale I had read over the years. I didn't have most of them handy.

jshevek 7y ago

It's absurd that pre-release reviews are available to the general public. This should be easy to fix, if GR cared to do so.

bduerst 7y ago
Goodreads is owned by Amazon, who is incentivized by the pre-release purchases that these reviews drive. They're not going to put a lock on pre-release reviews (nor should they) to solve a trolling/bad actor issue.
- Vrondi 7y ago
  This book is still in editing, though. It isn't even available as a pre-release review copy at all yet.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    I mean, this is assuming that pre-release reviews are from advance copies, not WIP.
- halfcreative 7y ago
  Why shouldn't they? I think it's ridiculous to be able to review something which you have not experienced and I don't see a good reason why they should be allowed. The lockout should be until at least one person (ideally more) have experienced the fully released product.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Authors and publishers ship pre-release advance copies to popular reviewers, as part a part of the promotion leading up to launch, like movies do with prescreenings. Goodreads is notorious for having these types of reviewers, in fact, it's one of the carrots that serial reviewers go after.
halfcreative 7y ago
Pre-release reviews is a problem on more than just books too. I wish there were more systems to verify that you've at least bought the book, movie, or the product in general before you can review it.

Vrondi 7y ago

This has been a problem on Goodreads for a few years now.

joncp 7y ago

Well, goodreads is owned by Amazon. I'm not at all surprised that their lackadaisical attitude toward abuse cuts across the whole business.

wayneftw 7y ago

The original title, "Lax Security and Moderation at Goodreads Allows Trolls to Spoof People, Harass Authors" seemed pretty straightforward to me. How is it misleading or "linkbait"?

gravitas 7y ago
In my observation of the edit patterns being used by moderators, titles are frequently edited when they contain emotionally charged words ("spoof" "trolls" "harass" in this one) to create bland, boring titles no matter what the source article is titled (not violating guidelines).
- kbenson 7y ago
  One person's idea of making titles more boring is probably another person's idea of removing bias. Bland might not necessarily be bad in these cases.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    People who read the article will be exposed to this "bias" anyway. Leaving the title as-is would then be more informative. Here, the change is okay. Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog". I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine. And what's with the bias-paranoia? People, including journalists, are allowed to have opinions and emotions. They do not have to equivocate: "The sanitary situation in the camp is becoming dangerous" does not require "...but someone on YouTube believes germ theory is a hoax, so who is to say if sleeping in feces isn't just a good way to stay warm".
    - rgoulter 7y ago
      > Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog". My understanding of this policy is that the editorializing should be done in the comments rather than the submission of the title. -- A submission (and presumably number of upvotes/comments from others) already indicates that the article has some importance, and opinions about it have a 'level playing field' in the comments. I think this also supports that the comment section is the place for interesting/insightful discussion.

deepsun 7y ago

Don't forget that it may be an ad campaign to promote a book, though.

campee 7y ago

The pests are at it again, classic O&A fans.

harrisonjackson 7y ago

There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside. Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up. This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?

crazygringo 7y ago
I think there's a big difference between moderation according to standards, and false reviews. It's comparatively easy to determine if any single post is using banned language, is abusive, etc. The single post can then be removed. False reviews, on the other hand, are virtually impossible to identify individually. People's opinions on a book legitimately differ. There isn't an obvious way to distinguish between a review that's part of a harrassment campaign or paid brigade, versus one that's genuine. It's only in aggregate that something seems to be wrong -- but how do you fix it? How do you select which individual reviews get removed? Moderation is not really a solution here, because all individual reviews will be approved.
- harrisonjackson 7y ago
  One of the fake reviews was by someone who had passed away with a picture obtained from their obituary. A moderator who knows an author or book has been flagged could spend a minute to find this out. It is definitely a difficult problem - I'll agree with you there. There are some other good suggestions in the thread on making it easier to flag the false reviews/moderate reviews beyond "community standards" I like the idea of using a captcha that prompts you to enter a random word from a random chapter in the book. Another system could just hide reviews that are not verified - and tie into amazon purchases to verify them - I don't know why Amazon would not lean on the fact that they own Goodreads to do this... Make all the reviews visible if the user prompts to see the unverified ones, but as the default just shows the reviews for people that bought the book through Amazon.

anotherevan 7y ago

How does https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ compare these days?

throwno 7y ago

I can't imagine how frustrating this is for business owners. There are a bunch of obviously fake reviews by people in India on the local GNC branch. If you just look at the star rating, you'll think "Wow, that place must suck!". Then you read the reviews and it's from people who have never set foot in the United States never mind GNC. Reviews are basically useless.

SignalsFromBob 7y ago

Instagram is another site with this problem. Someone supplied my email address when creating an account in late 2018. I only know this because I started receiving emails to confirm my email address. Then I started to get a bunch of emails telling me about new posts from other users. Gmail account history only showed logins from my browser and IP address, so I don't believe my account was compromised. I finally got tired of the emails, so I told the site I forgot the password, changed the password to something long and random, then deleted all the content. I remember having to do something unusual to delete the content, like spoof my useragent to pretend to be a mobile device, or something like that. I've never used Instagram before or since, but it really annoyed me that I have a problem due to their lax controls. Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity until the email address was verified, which I never did. If a big site like Instagram can't get this right, it doesn't surprise me that a small site like Goodreads can't either.

EvanAnderson 7y ago
Just did this last week with an Instagram account tied to a free email I hardly ever use. Epic Games also doesn't verify the email address, because my email account "had" an account there too. Worse, it had a credit card saved and appeared to be ready to allow me to use the card after I did the "forgot password" and gained access to the account. I ended-up deleting both accounts.
harryh 7y ago
Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity until the email address was verified Essentially zero services on the internet operate this way because it increases the friction to signing up & getting started with the service. Some services do somewhat better by including a "this wasn't me" link in the email verification email to make it as easy as possible to remove your email from the account in question. IMHO, this is a fine way to handle the problem.
- pferde 7y ago
  Except that users are (or should be) trained NOT to click on any links in spurious e-mails they receive. No, dear sites, kindly deal with a little bit of sign-up friction and stop offloading to others the fallout from people abusing your services.

oehpr 7y ago

I find topics like this very interesting. Fake reviews on Amazon, vote bombing on youtube, fake upvotes on reddit, fake likes on facebook. I'd even extend this tangentially to cyber squatting DNS records, email spam, and robo callers. It's a matter of trust. We think we can just make a big polling station somewhere and get the communities opinion on something, one person one vote. "Here's the big central aggregate, take the law of averages and you have a good sense of how good something is". But on the internet the Sybil attack reigns supreme. This assumption doesn't hold. Whenever I read articles on problems like these the topic of "Why it's happening and how to fix it" invariable drifts to "We need better moderation". I never think that. I think "Stop trusting Sybil". Not even THAT! Stop asking me to trust random people I don't trust! What if instead of having an single aggregate review, we "web of trust" it instead? Here's the system as I imagine it, and it's not fully thought out at this point, please chime in with criticisms if you have them. The jist: Every user has their own list of ratings for books in the system, and a list of people they "trust". The rated list of books you see the average rating of the people you trust, recursing out through the web of trust. The ratings are calculated live, on demand. With the only thing held in constant being each individuals personal ratings. I'm leaving a lot undefined right now, but an example of how I imagine such a system to work: Lets say you know Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the perfect book. You go to the books page and review the ratings. Your rate is obviously 5. You see lots of other people in your list who have rated it 5 (naturally). But you also see that there are some 3's in there. You can click on the 3's and see how they reached you through the web of trust. It turns out a bunch of 3's are coming from your someone named Bob, Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has trusted a bunch of people from some kind of Harry Potter hating cabal of philistines. You could blacklist the cabal, but there's too many of them, so instead you blacklist Alice. All the 3's are gone, and so are all the other reviews from the cabal. Your list of reviews now more accurately reflects views that you would trust. In this way, your effort to moderate away the opinions of people you don't trust has done double duty, it has cleared views you disagree with and do not trust, and it has also done so for the people who trust you as well. It is decentralized moderation. There's some challenges here, for example, how to bootstrap the system for new users? What is the best way to calculate the average reviews in a timely manner? How much weight should be applied to a friend of a friend of a friend? What kind of feedback could we give to users to incentivize them against trusting people like the philistine cabal? etc. I have some thoughts on this, I'll spare you. Like any decentralized system, it's more work, it's more complex, and it has some surprising and ugly edge cases. I also don't think I'm some genius for coming up for this, it's just an application of Web of Trust. But I have not seen a system such as this in practice. Nor do I ever seem to see people talk about it when the topic of moderation and spam come up. If you know of any such case studies, let me know!

Gatsky 7y ago

Right, another online group of people conducting orchestrated campaigns of harassment. They seem to come together with highly tenuous pretexts (eg some random radio show that isn't even on the air any more) yet the members are highly motivated and resourceful. It is a very strange phenomenon, like a cult worshipping nastiness as the supreme expression of existence. These groups seem particularly against art and creativity, their targets are often novelists, artists and performers. I suppose if you are deeply unhappy and disempowered then any form of art must seem like an affront. Only if all creative acts are stupid may you feel good about your own life chewing cud on a forum somewhere. The more online everyone and everything becomes the more prevalent these generalised and distributed lynch mobs are likely to be. The also function with impunity (eg kiwi farms).

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Was Gamergate the index case, or merely the first time people outside the intel community took notice?

nl 7y ago

I read with some surprise his claims that Amazon wouldn't take down a fake review (which posted fake anti-Semitic quotes, even when the publisher sent them the pages the quotes were supposed to be from). So I checked Amazon myself, and sure enough there is the number one review[1] claiming this tome continues the unfortunate slide of Patrick S. Tomlinson into an alt-right provocateur with blatant anti-Semitic tropes and characters littered throughout the book. Ironically, most of the other one star reviews claim the book is full of "thinly-veiled, progressive tropes" [1] https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-Tomlinson/dp/1250302714 https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-Tomlinson/dp/...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

logicallee 7y ago

This definitely seems to cross the line from troll to criminal: >Many of the spoofed accounts use the identities of Tomlinson’s friends and peers in the author community, creating the illusion that people he knows are giving one-star reviews and saying bad things about him. Dozens of authors have been spoofed in this manner, including the entire board of directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. >Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. These spoofed reviews often also show Tomlinson falsely saying things which would hurt his own reputation. >Gareth L. Powell and Beth Cato were among the authors spoofed, with their photos and names used to create fake accounts to attack Tomlinson’s books. I think calling these "trolls" doesn't go far enough. I am sure this crosses criminal lines, or at the very least probably several laws. The victims should sue or the government should pursue actions that rise to this level. It's not just "trolling" to do this, in my opinion.

qndreoi 7y ago

In Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", a woman becomes a victim of organized online harassment. The harassers keep repeating the same accusation. She has a rich tech friend who invents "Organized Proxies for Execration" or APEs that overwhelm the internet with huge volumes of contradictory messages. As the inventor says: "-why, even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their minds as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole." Here "Miasma" is Stephenson's word for the cesspool that is social networks. The strategy works more or less for the victim, but (spoiler) has unintended consequences.