13 ms·

A vast web of vengeance

229 points by tysone 6y ago

danso 6y ago
The last line FTA: > Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.” The first "traditional" result for Babcock's name is now the NYT story, but the first 5+ (even moreso on mobile) are thumbnails [0] showing his image with a text overlay of his name and "paedophile". The first 3 thumbnails link to the sites cheaterboard dot com, cheaters dot news, thecheatalert dot com. The fourth thumbnail is a Pinterest account linking to a ripoffreport post. All these "top" results feature the same "content" [1] – the victim's name spammed repeatedly, along with "paedophile" and "racist POS". I know spam abuse detection isn't trivial, but this seems like the most basic kind of spam abuse that Google claims it knows how to downrank. [0] https://i.imgur.com/gosroWQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gosroWQ.jpg [1] https://i.imgur.com/kFI9XNc.png https://i.imgur.com/kFI9XNc.png
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  Yeah I’m not sure it was a good idea of the author to include a link to that search from the article (seems like that would boost the existing results).
  - blakesterz 6y ago
    I think I'd argue that it was a good idea. This isn't me linking to that from my blog that gets 100 views to a post. This is the NY Times linking to that. Love them or hate them, them linking to something will get attention, and I would bet that attention will lead to changes.
    - sebastien_b 6y ago
      Good point.
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    I don't see how linking to a search would boost the results.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      Some percentage of the many people following the link from NYT would do so while logged into Chrome. Or maybe Google Analytics is on the web site. Or some other Google property comes into play. Google would then use its apparent popularity to boost its search engine ranking.
      - iso8859-1 6y ago
        Google has to have a method of determining whether a search query originates from a manual request, or if it is a link to the results, such as here. There are many ways this could be detected: The Referer header from old browsers, the massive amount of data that the search query URL contains (the parameters that are not "q"). Probably Google even has session tracking, and the session would be missing everything before the results page. Given that Google applies ML so heavily, and that this query would be an outlier in so many ways, I can't imagine how they wouldn't detect this.
        lovemenot 6y ago
        >> Google has to have a method of determining whether a search query originates from a manual request, or if its a link to the results The issue was about how it could be risky to one's reputation by linking from a NYT article to a disparaging page. My parent asked how such a risk might arise. I assumed they could not imagine how one's browser, NYT and the target site could conspire to affect rankings. I explained how this might happen. So Google knows there's traffic. Some traffic ranks higher than none, and much traffic ranks higher than some. So, to allow Google to be aware that a well-trafficked site is slating you, is riskier than if it's a site with few visitors because that site will now rank higher.
- gowld 6y ago
  Or is down ranked, innit? The problem was (before the NYT article) that this person is not a public persona so there's no content to uprank above it.
baybal2 6y ago
Just get used to it. It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. I've been on the Internet under a few identities since 1998, and has since stopped much trying hiding. The more your online notoriety goes, the more your IRL consequences snowball. I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," and at most it will make people chuckle, and remark on you being famous.
- xg15 6y ago
  > It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. It's been 30 years and so far it hasn't happened. I also very much doubt it will ever happen as this would go against all we know about basic human psychology. Rumor sites such as this one tap into the same mechanism that makes rumors, conspiracy theories and superstions effective since forever: Once people have decided for whatever reason they trust a particular source of information, it will take some exceptional events to make them distrust it again. Someone else simply stating that the source should not be trusted is by far not enough.
  - blululu 6y ago
    30 years is not a lot of time. People who grew up with the internet are only now coming into positions of power. A majority of American Internet users grew up in a very different era, and their experiences and expectations may not be reasonable in the current era. Furthermore they have been passing an understanding of media from the 70’s onto future generations. I suspect that it will take quite a lot of time for society at large to adjust. For example, many kids are taught in school that Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can edit it, whereas corporate publications are more trustworthy since they are written by experts whose reputation is at stake. Wikipedia is not always reliable but it is verifiable/auditable and this is a criteria of trustworthiness that is not widely appreciated for digital literacy.
sebastien_b 6y ago
Wow. The most “revenge” thing I ever did was to send a copy of the town’s noise bylaw, anonymously, to a nearby resident who had held a very loud “backyard concert” on labour day weekends over the previous two years. They didn’t have one the third year.
- coldtea 6y ago
  So his offense was having noisy fun on a bank holiday once a year?
  - IIAOPSW 6y ago
    And his punishment was a passive aggressive letter in the mail.
    - covidthrow 6y ago
      His punishment was an anonymous threat of violence by way of institutional power. But I guess it all depends on how you frame it.
      - sebastien_b 6y ago
        > His punishment was an anonymous threat of violence by way of institutional power > Yes, it is a threat to send armed agents of the State to intervene [1] This is farcical at best. No 'threat' was made, let alone any of violence. At worst, it was a reminder to the offender to get a clue in the first place, and not to do it again. I've yet to hear of any bylaw officer, anywhere, showing up in armor and weapons in order to warn a violator, or issue any citation against one, ever. You're probably the type that takes offense at "Beware of Dog" signs, believing that you shouldn't have to be bothered to 'beware' of anything. :rollseyes: [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25983682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25983682
  - sebastien_b 6y ago
    More like being total assholes to everyone else in the area. It was VERY loud, way above “reasonable” and went on quite late. The second year made me assume they did it on purpose.
joe_the_user 6y ago
A simple thing would be for Google to de-list slander-based sites like the ones described in the article. Or just personal name search for things like that. At the same time, it's remarkable that people put credence in completely random sites that let anyone post anything.
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  Towards the end of the article they state this is what Googles has started to do with sites that make it hard to get false info removed (like requiring a fee).
  - adolph 6y ago
    That’s weird. Yelp still seems to feature prominently. Guess they’re still working on it.
    - Clewza313 6y ago
      Yelp does the opposite: they require money to get truthful info (bad reviews) removed.
      - me_again 6y ago
        We can't know which reviews are truthful. Presumably some are, some aren't. Obviously allowing the business owner to make that determination is dubious.
        melomal 6y ago
        I can go and buy however many Yelp reviews I need right now, good or bad for as little as $5/review. Dig deeper and you realize Yelp uses the same tactics as the mafia in Italy to extort store owners and use heavy handed tactics. Reviews are BS anyway, I don't know you therefore why on earth would I listen to your opinion on something?
doctor_eval 6y ago
I believe in the concept of free speech, but I’ve said it before: free speech is the right to speak without going to jail, and that’s the extent of it. It doesn’t mean the right to be heard, or the right to speak without other consequences. And this is a clear cut case where the supposed right to be heard is profoundly damaging to the targeted individuals and to society as a whole. So why don’t we apply the same standard to speech which targets larger groups? Why is it OK for platforms to publish the 30K lies [0] made by the former US president - for the profit of both the platform and the politician - but not ok for these horrid shame sites to exist? Why is it OK for Google to redirect these people and sites to /dev/null, but not for Twitter or Facebook to do the same? Anyone who is upset by this article needs to understand that the only difference between the vengeance nutbags and lying politicians is the scale of the damage they can cause. It’s got to stop. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Do...
- drdeca 6y ago
  If you only mean that you believe in the right to speak without going to jail, and no protections of speech beyond that, then ok. I mean, I strongly disagree, but I acknowledge your position of not supporting protections beyond that. But you should know that that isn't what other people generally mean when they say "free speech". For example, most people would also say that freedom of speech also requires that people aren't fined money for saying things that they believe, or things like that. If by saying this you are trying to shift the public understanding of the term in a direction of such minimal applicability, I would oppose this shift.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    I was being slightly hyperbolic. A proper definition of free speech - not my definition - is that it is the freedom to speak without interference _from the government_. So fines, jail time or anything else driven by the government is out. This I can agree with to a large extent. Free speech does not, and has never, meant the right to be free of consequences for your speech, or the right to speak anonymously in public, or to have your identity hidden. Free speech does not give you the God-given right to post anything you like to any service or publication. You can’t force the NYT to put your opinion on their home page and you can’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to, force Twitter to spread your lies. And, again in my opinion, if someone does say something harmful then there needs to be accountability. That means that if someone is hurt by someone else’s speech, then the victim should be able to sue or otherwise take action against the perpetrator. Here’s the problem. Sites like Twitter and others can publish anonymous hate speech while hiding behind the CDA. This means neither the anonymous asshole nor the profitable company can be touched, and this is causing huge damage to our society. The solution seems pretty simple. Anonymous speech should be the responsibility of the platform, and subject to civil action against the platform. Speech published by platforms which is not anonymous can and should be the responsibility of the individual making the claims. This simple change would force platforms to moderate all their anonymous content, instead of the current, low cost statistical methods they are obviously using today. Also, it does not mean that speech can’t be published anonymously. It just means that the service must know the details of the writer, and that the anonymity of a user can be uncloaked by a court. Note that this is how “letters to the editor” worked for a very long time. If you like your privacy, then don’t intentionally invade the privacy of others, or otherwise harm them, with your lies.
notacoward 6y ago
This sort of happened to me once. I was one of the first to identify children's fiction author Robert Stanek as both a terrible writer and an Amazon astroturfer. My blog post about him was widely cited by other critics as they discovered the same things. Eventually this led to posts on a couple of his "fan" sites - almost certainly set up and most content written by Stanek himself - including my home address and accusations that I'm a child molester. He also tried sending me emails threatening legal action. Besides the claims being utterly fraudulent, the letters were so clearly fake that I replied telling him to piss off (in exactly so many words). With a little effort I succeeded in having the posts taken down, or at least made invisible to Google. The more generic attacks continued on and off for years, again as more people discovered the now-numerous accounts of his transgressions and re-triggered Stanek's delusions about a cabal, but it has been at least a couple of years since the last one. Who knows, maybe he'll try again now. The point is that these kinds of revenge campaigns have been easy for a long time (my blog post was in 2003) and keep getting easier. Using Pinterest in this case seems like an interesting twist, since Google's suspicious love for them is already a matter of some discussion. It's also interesting that an NYT reporter takes a so-predictable swipe at Section 230 as part of the story. While I wouldn't be in favor of holding platform providers responsible for users' content, I do think defamation deserves to be treated with at least the same seriousness as copyright violation, for which special provisions already exist. P.S. I'm well aware that Stanek accuses me of being the defamer. Such reciprocal accusations are practically always a feature of these cases, including OP, and that should be kept in mind when considering them.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Assuming your statements are true, username checks out. How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible? I have yet to tick someone off enough for them to try something like this, but knowing myself it'll probably happen someday.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    > Assuming your statements are true, username checks out. Heh. Thanks for the chuckle. > How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible? I made my own legal threats, basically. One site was a ProBoards forum, so I contacted them. I didn't pretend to be a lawyer or anything, just told them I'd get one if needed. I never received any acknowledgement, but the posts did disappear from view. I think they were made private, not deleted. Good enough as far as I was concerned. The other site was kind of a cross between Wikipedia and Quora. In that case I found the site owner and sent a similar email. That time I did get a quite-reasonable response, and the article was taken down. I haven't been involved in a lot of legal stuff, on either side, but enough to know how it works and not fear the process. Once someone realizes that you have the resources and determination to drag them into actual court, they tend to think pretty hard about what persisting might cost them - in this case possibly in terms of reputation even more than money. No surprise that he/they folded quickly.
crispyambulance 6y ago
This reminds me of those "MyLife" low-lifes who mine the internet on everyone's "behalf" and then email people telling them they have a "negative reputation". It's possible to remove yourself so that your name does not appear when someone searches on MyLife.com by making a tedious phone-call to their call-center in India, but then they email you EVERY DAY with offers to clean up your online reputation for some fee. The vengeance griefer in the NYT story is obviously a deranged crazy, but one person can only do so much. The guy who started MyLife however, Jeffrey Tinsley, is a multi-millionaire who has successfully gotten venture capital funding-- and causes grief on an internet-scale. I wish there would be more media take-downs of MyLife, Classmates, Radaris, other scummy operations. Even better, I would expect that GDPR rules put in place for the USA would put these people out of business?
theknocker 6y ago
Archive link for those of us who don't understand why we have to make an account to read a news article that's being aggregated: https://archive.is/oQIOd https://archive.is/oQIOd (I would tend to conclude that they don't want it aggregated to begin with.)
- jessaustin 6y ago
  To avoid hassling on NYT, just turn off javascript on nytimes.com.
  - thih9 6y ago
    It’s a pain to remember which workaround still works at specific sites. I like archive links because they’re easy to find in the comments and they tend to work.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      That's true, but I just leave javascript off for sites where that's enough. Various things break, e.g. you don't get pictures on NYT, but those don't add much to the story.
sebmellen 6y ago
This is a stunning article. Imagine if everyone focused their deplatforming efforts on sites like this. - DDOS attacks, if those don't work aggressively go after Cloudflare or their DDOS shield - Pressure their payment processors to deplatform them - Get Visa and Mastercard to drop these sites - Once they have no DDOS shield, pressure their hosting providers to drop them - Set up landing pages to bump them out of search results - Aggressively pressure Pinterest et al. to take down any posts with "Ripoff Report" or "Cheat Alert" in the name A similar playbook to Gab/Parler, but efforts like this would really, tangibly help people and right a serious wrong that can affect anyone, regardless their beliefs or politics.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  The reason why we don't focus on deplatforming sites like this is precisely because it's a concrete problem with a concrete solution. If instead you're a culture warrior fighting "fascism" or "the alt-right" you'll never run out of blue check marks to deplatform and your personal influence will never stop growing.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem? You don’t think people will just adapt to accomplish their goals within the technicality of the law? Cyberbullying was a huge problem when I was growing up and laws were constantly being passed. Did cyberbullying somehow become less prevalent or their criminals easier to punish? It seems like the problem has only gotten worse. The reason is one of organization. Gab/Parler was intentionally trying to organize white supremacists. That is the entire goal and motivating raison d’etre. Cyberbullying like this is not some shared idealogy but a personal vendetta. As such it’s impossible to solve with the legal system or technology - at best you get a punishment effect a small fraction of the time for such a small expense that punishment is reserved for extreme cases that devolve to real-world altercations as an add-on multiplier as it takes a significant amount of time and effort to convince authorities whose the party telling the truth. Slander and libel are already things but people can’t seem to acknowledge that you can’t legislate away the fundamental problem that communication is now cheaper and more widespread than ever. Imagine if you could anonymously distribute pamphlets in multiple cities with minimal effort with very difficult ways to trace it back to you. The problem here is people fail to recognize that there’s nothing technology can do to solve a fundamental human failure mode here. People get pissed off at each other, and one party starts slandering the other. The legislation needs to focus on making it easier to deanonymize. But such legislation is actually bad for the internet and doomed to fail anyway since technology makes it easier than ever in ever increasing ways. From a social well-being perspective, anonymity is critically important for those who legitimately speak truth to power (eg sources for reporters).
EGreg 6y ago
It seems to be much easier to attack a reputation than to fix it. Like if enough women accuse Bill Cosby of something, then the court of public opinion will say he’s guilty. (I understand that in a real court he was convicted by a jury based on his own deposition from 2005 though). But on the Web, what does it cost people to just make stuff up and use botnets or GPT?
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
These kind of articles concern me. Not because what they expose, but what they incite. I am very concerned that instead of strengthening legal path for defamation, politicians will take the easy (and favored) path of government control of speech. Do not misunderstand, I am not even remotely suggesting that somehow we need to protect such behavior. What I am suggesting is that the laymen will demand blood, and the easiest and most vocal way to do it is government, or agents of the government (in this case large internet content controlling organizations) will restrict speech. That is already fraught with political vengeance and revenge. Find the culprits. Prosecute & punish. Force large internet content companies to scrub. We can demand to force sites to pop up about cookies. Certainly we can demand that with a single quick request "to be forgotten". (Mark my words - if this gets legs, it will be the speech control, and the control will be handed to companies or quasi-government agencies, made of companies.)
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  What _should_ happen is that people should not believe allegations that have no evidence. Censorship and defamation law are just patches that we're desperately trying to use to make up for the sad fact that critical thinking was never strong in humans at seemingly any point in known history.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Yes, it’s a wonder these idiotic apes somehow created the modern world... We are wired to live in groups of a couple hundred individuals, at most. We can “default to truth” in that setting because all of our interactions are repeated indefinitely over time, and the stable solution to such an iterated prisoners dilemma is to be honest because cheating will be swiftly punished. Mass media, and especially the Internet, breaks all of our social brain circuitry, and that is not a trivial problem to address.
    - WaitWaitWha 6y ago
      Whoa! That is very succinctly stating something that I have been trying to express. Would you happen to have some research reference on this?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Whenever I see the name “Babcock,” I think of The Passage. This kind of obsession is nothing new, but, is (thankfully) rare; as is the case for a lot of diseased behavior. What is new, however, is the modern, interconnected world (air travel, the Internets Tubes, etc.). This acts as a multiplier for this kind of thing; affording lone actors a powerful gun platform, and allowing extremists that would normally be confined in small, local quarantines, the capacity to band together. Not sure what the answer is. There’s talk of changing Section 230; not just from authorities, but also, from many mainstream communities. On one hand, I think that the ability for minorities to band together, and seek strength and support in numbers, is amazing, but you also get stories like this (and it isn’t really unique). At the risk of “Godwining” the thread, it could be argued that Hitler wouldn’t have been able to come to power without a powerful and efficient propaganda machine, looking a lot like this, so it predates the Internet.
xondono 6y ago
I'm by no means a SEO expert, but how much would it cost to completely drown this search results into oblivion? Pay someone to set up your own site, your business, etc... Pay for some ads, heck, even pay some click farms if needed. Because I'd bet it's way less than the cost of the lawyers..
- notacoward 6y ago
  Having been involved in one such affair (see my other comments on this story), I'd put that in the "true but not useful" category. It still allows a form of blackmail. Why should the target of defamation have to pay to do this? What happens when most people's online reputation is mostly a matter of how much they were willing to pay to a reputation-washing company, and people in the lower economic echelons can't afford to play? These kinds of companies already exist, and make as much money burying genuine misdeeds or making up accomplishments as anything else. How is increasing the size and importance of that industry a good thing?
  - xondono 6y ago
    It’s just a way of breaking the “business model” for this companies. If you pay up, there’s nothing preventing them from trying to hit you again with more demands (in fact it makes economic sense since they don’t need to generate new “content”). If you go and hire a SEO company, you’ve broken the economic reward for the scammers, or at least you’ve reduce it.
WaldoLydecker 6y ago
Get rid of 230. It’s worse than the alternative.
specialist 6y ago
We need to label inauthentic speech. As well as have verified authentic speech. Not ban inauthentic speech. I'm NOT saying ban trolls, bots, insurrectionists, and vexatious people like Nadire Atas. I'm simply saying that if we also have authentic speech, people (culture) would have a tool to discern inauthentic speech. And then hopefully wise up a bit.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  What exactly is the difference between authenic and inauthentic speech and who is doing the labeling? What is stopping an "authenic" source from taking money to launder authenticity? The term 'Authenic' is often used as a deep well of bullshit to arbitrarily filter ingroups and outgroups with about as coherent logic as middle school students deciding what is cool.
  - specialist 6y ago
    If you sign your (verified) name, it's authentic. Not to be confused with factual (truthiness).
LurkersWillLurk 6y ago
I feel like this would be the one legitimate criticism of Section 230, but I don't really know how you would "solve" this problem. Maybe a DMCA-esque system for defamation, but on the other hand I feel like that's also ripe for abuse and would hamper online anonymous speech. Is it fair use to post a picture of someone if the text accompanying that picture is libel?
peterk222 6y ago
Paedophile spelling is used about Guy Babcock in all the posts ???? This is the british word and spelling. Perhaps the internet post were made in England . https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-babcock-is-a-pedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-pedophile-who-let-guy-babcock-out-of-his-cage-guy-babcock-is-a-soc/ https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-gu...
peterk222 6y ago
Paedophile spelling is used about Guy Babcock in all the posts ???? This is the british word and spelling. Perhaps the internet posts were made in England . https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-babcock-is-a-pedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-pedophile-who-let-guy-babcock-out-of-his-cage-guy-babcock-is-a-soc/ https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-gu...

229 points by tysone 6y ago

The last line FTA: > Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.” The first "traditional" result for Babcock's name is now the NYT story, but the first 5+ (even moreso on mobile) are thumbnails [0] showing his image with a text overlay of his name and "paedophile". The first 3 thumbnails link to the sites cheaterboard dot com, cheaters dot news, thecheatalert dot com. The fourth thumbnail is a Pinterest account linking to a ripoffreport post. All these "top" results feature the same "content" [1] – the victim's name spammed repeatedly, along with "paedophile" and "racist POS". I know spam abuse detection isn't trivial, but this seems like the most basic kind of spam abuse that Google claims it knows how to downrank. [0] https://i.imgur.com/gosroWQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gosroWQ.jpg [1] https://i.imgur.com/kFI9XNc.png https://i.imgur.com/kFI9XNc.png

sebastien_b 6y ago
Yeah I’m not sure it was a good idea of the author to include a link to that search from the article (seems like that would boost the existing results).
- blakesterz 6y ago
  I think I'd argue that it was a good idea. This isn't me linking to that from my blog that gets 100 views to a post. This is the NY Times linking to that. Love them or hate them, them linking to something will get attention, and I would bet that attention will lead to changes.
  - sebastien_b 6y ago
    Good point.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  I don't see how linking to a search would boost the results.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Some percentage of the many people following the link from NYT would do so while logged into Chrome. Or maybe Google Analytics is on the web site. Or some other Google property comes into play. Google would then use its apparent popularity to boost its search engine ranking.
    - iso8859-1 6y ago
      Google has to have a method of determining whether a search query originates from a manual request, or if it is a link to the results, such as here. There are many ways this could be detected: The Referer header from old browsers, the massive amount of data that the search query URL contains (the parameters that are not "q"). Probably Google even has session tracking, and the session would be missing everything before the results page. Given that Google applies ML so heavily, and that this query would be an outlier in so many ways, I can't imagine how they wouldn't detect this.
      - lovemenot 6y ago
        >> Google has to have a method of determining whether a search query originates from a manual request, or if its a link to the results The issue was about how it could be risky to one's reputation by linking from a NYT article to a disparaging page. My parent asked how such a risk might arise. I assumed they could not imagine how one's browser, NYT and the target site could conspire to affect rankings. I explained how this might happen. So Google knows there's traffic. Some traffic ranks higher than none, and much traffic ranks higher than some. So, to allow Google to be aware that a well-trafficked site is slating you, is riskier than if it's a site with few visitors because that site will now rank higher.
gowld 6y ago
Or is down ranked, innit? The problem was (before the NYT article) that this person is not a public persona so there's no content to uprank above it.

baybal2 6y ago

Just get used to it. It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. I've been on the Internet under a few identities since 1998, and has since stopped much trying hiding. The more your online notoriety goes, the more your IRL consequences snowball. I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," and at most it will make people chuckle, and remark on you being famous.

xg15 6y ago
> It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. It's been 30 years and so far it hasn't happened. I also very much doubt it will ever happen as this would go against all we know about basic human psychology. Rumor sites such as this one tap into the same mechanism that makes rumors, conspiracy theories and superstions effective since forever: Once people have decided for whatever reason they trust a particular source of information, it will take some exceptional events to make them distrust it again. Someone else simply stating that the source should not be trusted is by far not enough.
- blululu 6y ago
  30 years is not a lot of time. People who grew up with the internet are only now coming into positions of power. A majority of American Internet users grew up in a very different era, and their experiences and expectations may not be reasonable in the current era. Furthermore they have been passing an understanding of media from the 70’s onto future generations. I suspect that it will take quite a lot of time for society at large to adjust. For example, many kids are taught in school that Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can edit it, whereas corporate publications are more trustworthy since they are written by experts whose reputation is at stake. Wikipedia is not always reliable but it is verifiable/auditable and this is a criteria of trustworthiness that is not widely appreciated for digital literacy.

sebastien_b 6y ago

Wow. The most “revenge” thing I ever did was to send a copy of the town’s noise bylaw, anonymously, to a nearby resident who had held a very loud “backyard concert” on labour day weekends over the previous two years. They didn’t have one the third year.

coldtea 6y ago
So his offense was having noisy fun on a bank holiday once a year?
- IIAOPSW 6y ago
  And his punishment was a passive aggressive letter in the mail.
  - covidthrow 6y ago
    His punishment was an anonymous threat of violence by way of institutional power. But I guess it all depends on how you frame it.
    - sebastien_b 6y ago
      > His punishment was an anonymous threat of violence by way of institutional power > Yes, it is a threat to send armed agents of the State to intervene [1] This is farcical at best. No 'threat' was made, let alone any of violence. At worst, it was a reminder to the offender to get a clue in the first place, and not to do it again. I've yet to hear of any bylaw officer, anywhere, showing up in armor and weapons in order to warn a violator, or issue any citation against one, ever. You're probably the type that takes offense at "Beware of Dog" signs, believing that you shouldn't have to be bothered to 'beware' of anything. :rollseyes: [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25983682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25983682
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  More like being total assholes to everyone else in the area. It was VERY loud, way above “reasonable” and went on quite late. The second year made me assume they did it on purpose.

joe_the_user 6y ago

A simple thing would be for Google to de-list slander-based sites like the ones described in the article. Or just personal name search for things like that. At the same time, it's remarkable that people put credence in completely random sites that let anyone post anything.

sebastien_b 6y ago
Towards the end of the article they state this is what Googles has started to do with sites that make it hard to get false info removed (like requiring a fee).
- adolph 6y ago
  That’s weird. Yelp still seems to feature prominently. Guess they’re still working on it.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Yelp does the opposite: they require money to get truthful info (bad reviews) removed.
    - me_again 6y ago
      We can't know which reviews are truthful. Presumably some are, some aren't. Obviously allowing the business owner to make that determination is dubious.
      - melomal 6y ago
        I can go and buy however many Yelp reviews I need right now, good or bad for as little as $5/review. Dig deeper and you realize Yelp uses the same tactics as the mafia in Italy to extort store owners and use heavy handed tactics. Reviews are BS anyway, I don't know you therefore why on earth would I listen to your opinion on something?

doctor_eval 6y ago

I believe in the concept of free speech, but I’ve said it before: free speech is the right to speak without going to jail, and that’s the extent of it. It doesn’t mean the right to be heard, or the right to speak without other consequences. And this is a clear cut case where the supposed right to be heard is profoundly damaging to the targeted individuals and to society as a whole. So why don’t we apply the same standard to speech which targets larger groups? Why is it OK for platforms to publish the 30K lies [0] made by the former US president - for the profit of both the platform and the politician - but not ok for these horrid shame sites to exist? Why is it OK for Google to redirect these people and sites to /dev/null, but not for Twitter or Facebook to do the same? Anyone who is upset by this article needs to understand that the only difference between the vengeance nutbags and lying politicians is the scale of the damage they can cause. It’s got to stop. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Do...

drdeca 6y ago
If you only mean that you believe in the right to speak without going to jail, and no protections of speech beyond that, then ok. I mean, I strongly disagree, but I acknowledge your position of not supporting protections beyond that. But you should know that that isn't what other people generally mean when they say "free speech". For example, most people would also say that freedom of speech also requires that people aren't fined money for saying things that they believe, or things like that. If by saying this you are trying to shift the public understanding of the term in a direction of such minimal applicability, I would oppose this shift.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  I was being slightly hyperbolic. A proper definition of free speech - not my definition - is that it is the freedom to speak without interference _from the government_. So fines, jail time or anything else driven by the government is out. This I can agree with to a large extent. Free speech does not, and has never, meant the right to be free of consequences for your speech, or the right to speak anonymously in public, or to have your identity hidden. Free speech does not give you the God-given right to post anything you like to any service or publication. You can’t force the NYT to put your opinion on their home page and you can’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to, force Twitter to spread your lies. And, again in my opinion, if someone does say something harmful then there needs to be accountability. That means that if someone is hurt by someone else’s speech, then the victim should be able to sue or otherwise take action against the perpetrator. Here’s the problem. Sites like Twitter and others can publish anonymous hate speech while hiding behind the CDA. This means neither the anonymous asshole nor the profitable company can be touched, and this is causing huge damage to our society. The solution seems pretty simple. Anonymous speech should be the responsibility of the platform, and subject to civil action against the platform. Speech published by platforms which is not anonymous can and should be the responsibility of the individual making the claims. This simple change would force platforms to moderate all their anonymous content, instead of the current, low cost statistical methods they are obviously using today. Also, it does not mean that speech can’t be published anonymously. It just means that the service must know the details of the writer, and that the anonymity of a user can be uncloaked by a court. Note that this is how “letters to the editor” worked for a very long time. If you like your privacy, then don’t intentionally invade the privacy of others, or otherwise harm them, with your lies.

notacoward 6y ago

This sort of happened to me once. I was one of the first to identify children's fiction author Robert Stanek as both a terrible writer and an Amazon astroturfer. My blog post about him was widely cited by other critics as they discovered the same things. Eventually this led to posts on a couple of his "fan" sites - almost certainly set up and most content written by Stanek himself - including my home address and accusations that I'm a child molester. He also tried sending me emails threatening legal action. Besides the claims being utterly fraudulent, the letters were so clearly fake that I replied telling him to piss off (in exactly so many words). With a little effort I succeeded in having the posts taken down, or at least made invisible to Google. The more generic attacks continued on and off for years, again as more people discovered the now-numerous accounts of his transgressions and re-triggered Stanek's delusions about a cabal, but it has been at least a couple of years since the last one. Who knows, maybe he'll try again now. The point is that these kinds of revenge campaigns have been easy for a long time (my blog post was in 2003) and keep getting easier. Using Pinterest in this case seems like an interesting twist, since Google's suspicious love for them is already a matter of some discussion. It's also interesting that an NYT reporter takes a so-predictable swipe at Section 230 as part of the story. While I wouldn't be in favor of holding platform providers responsible for users' content, I do think defamation deserves to be treated with at least the same seriousness as copyright violation, for which special provisions already exist. P.S. I'm well aware that Stanek accuses me of being the defamer. Such reciprocal accusations are practically always a feature of these cases, including OP, and that should be kept in mind when considering them.

Shared404 6y ago
Assuming your statements are true, username checks out. How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible? I have yet to tick someone off enough for them to try something like this, but knowing myself it'll probably happen someday.
- notacoward 6y ago
  > Assuming your statements are true, username checks out. Heh. Thanks for the chuckle. > How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible? I made my own legal threats, basically. One site was a ProBoards forum, so I contacted them. I didn't pretend to be a lawyer or anything, just told them I'd get one if needed. I never received any acknowledgement, but the posts did disappear from view. I think they were made private, not deleted. Good enough as far as I was concerned. The other site was kind of a cross between Wikipedia and Quora. In that case I found the site owner and sent a similar email. That time I did get a quite-reasonable response, and the article was taken down. I haven't been involved in a lot of legal stuff, on either side, but enough to know how it works and not fear the process. Once someone realizes that you have the resources and determination to drag them into actual court, they tend to think pretty hard about what persisting might cost them - in this case possibly in terms of reputation even more than money. No surprise that he/they folded quickly.

crispyambulance 6y ago

This reminds me of those "MyLife" low-lifes who mine the internet on everyone's "behalf" and then email people telling them they have a "negative reputation". It's possible to remove yourself so that your name does not appear when someone searches on MyLife.com by making a tedious phone-call to their call-center in India, but then they email you EVERY DAY with offers to clean up your online reputation for some fee. The vengeance griefer in the NYT story is obviously a deranged crazy, but one person can only do so much. The guy who started MyLife however, Jeffrey Tinsley, is a multi-millionaire who has successfully gotten venture capital funding-- and causes grief on an internet-scale. I wish there would be more media take-downs of MyLife, Classmates, Radaris, other scummy operations. Even better, I would expect that GDPR rules put in place for the USA would put these people out of business?

theknocker 6y ago

Archive link for those of us who don't understand why we have to make an account to read a news article that's being aggregated: https://archive.is/oQIOd https://archive.is/oQIOd (I would tend to conclude that they don't want it aggregated to begin with.)

jessaustin 6y ago
To avoid hassling on NYT, just turn off javascript on nytimes.com.
- thih9 6y ago
  It’s a pain to remember which workaround still works at specific sites. I like archive links because they’re easy to find in the comments and they tend to work.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    That's true, but I just leave javascript off for sites where that's enough. Various things break, e.g. you don't get pictures on NYT, but those don't add much to the story.

sebmellen 6y ago

This is a stunning article. Imagine if everyone focused their deplatforming efforts on sites like this. - DDOS attacks, if those don't work aggressively go after Cloudflare or their DDOS shield - Pressure their payment processors to deplatform them - Get Visa and Mastercard to drop these sites - Once they have no DDOS shield, pressure their hosting providers to drop them - Set up landing pages to bump them out of search results - Aggressively pressure Pinterest et al. to take down any posts with "Ripoff Report" or "Cheat Alert" in the name A similar playbook to Gab/Parler, but efforts like this would really, tangibly help people and right a serious wrong that can affect anyone, regardless their beliefs or politics.

deathgrips 6y ago
The reason why we don't focus on deplatforming sites like this is precisely because it's a concrete problem with a concrete solution. If instead you're a culture warrior fighting "fascism" or "the alt-right" you'll never run out of blue check marks to deplatform and your personal influence will never stop growing.
vlovich123 6y ago
Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem? You don’t think people will just adapt to accomplish their goals within the technicality of the law? Cyberbullying was a huge problem when I was growing up and laws were constantly being passed. Did cyberbullying somehow become less prevalent or their criminals easier to punish? It seems like the problem has only gotten worse. The reason is one of organization. Gab/Parler was intentionally trying to organize white supremacists. That is the entire goal and motivating raison d’etre. Cyberbullying like this is not some shared idealogy but a personal vendetta. As such it’s impossible to solve with the legal system or technology - at best you get a punishment effect a small fraction of the time for such a small expense that punishment is reserved for extreme cases that devolve to real-world altercations as an add-on multiplier as it takes a significant amount of time and effort to convince authorities whose the party telling the truth. Slander and libel are already things but people can’t seem to acknowledge that you can’t legislate away the fundamental problem that communication is now cheaper and more widespread than ever. Imagine if you could anonymously distribute pamphlets in multiple cities with minimal effort with very difficult ways to trace it back to you. The problem here is people fail to recognize that there’s nothing technology can do to solve a fundamental human failure mode here. People get pissed off at each other, and one party starts slandering the other. The legislation needs to focus on making it easier to deanonymize. But such legislation is actually bad for the internet and doomed to fail anyway since technology makes it easier than ever in ever increasing ways. From a social well-being perspective, anonymity is critically important for those who legitimately speak truth to power (eg sources for reporters).

EGreg 6y ago

It seems to be much easier to attack a reputation than to fix it. Like if enough women accuse Bill Cosby of something, then the court of public opinion will say he’s guilty. (I understand that in a real court he was convicted by a jury based on his own deposition from 2005 though). But on the Web, what does it cost people to just make stuff up and use botnets or GPT?

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

These kind of articles concern me. Not because what they expose, but what they incite. I am very concerned that instead of strengthening legal path for defamation, politicians will take the easy (and favored) path of government control of speech. Do not misunderstand, I am not even remotely suggesting that somehow we need to protect such behavior. What I am suggesting is that the laymen will demand blood, and the easiest and most vocal way to do it is government, or agents of the government (in this case large internet content controlling organizations) will restrict speech. That is already fraught with political vengeance and revenge. Find the culprits. Prosecute & punish. Force large internet content companies to scrub. We can demand to force sites to pop up about cookies. Certainly we can demand that with a single quick request "to be forgotten". (Mark my words - if this gets legs, it will be the speech control, and the control will be handed to companies or quasi-government agencies, made of companies.)

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
What _should_ happen is that people should not believe allegations that have no evidence. Censorship and defamation law are just patches that we're desperately trying to use to make up for the sad fact that critical thinking was never strong in humans at seemingly any point in known history.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Yes, it’s a wonder these idiotic apes somehow created the modern world... We are wired to live in groups of a couple hundred individuals, at most. We can “default to truth” in that setting because all of our interactions are repeated indefinitely over time, and the stable solution to such an iterated prisoners dilemma is to be honest because cheating will be swiftly punished. Mass media, and especially the Internet, breaks all of our social brain circuitry, and that is not a trivial problem to address.
  - WaitWaitWha 6y ago
    Whoa! That is very succinctly stating something that I have been trying to express. Would you happen to have some research reference on this?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Whenever I see the name “Babcock,” I think of The Passage. This kind of obsession is nothing new, but, is (thankfully) rare; as is the case for a lot of diseased behavior. What is new, however, is the modern, interconnected world (air travel, the Internets Tubes, etc.). This acts as a multiplier for this kind of thing; affording lone actors a powerful gun platform, and allowing extremists that would normally be confined in small, local quarantines, the capacity to band together. Not sure what the answer is. There’s talk of changing Section 230; not just from authorities, but also, from many mainstream communities. On one hand, I think that the ability for minorities to band together, and seek strength and support in numbers, is amazing, but you also get stories like this (and it isn’t really unique). At the risk of “Godwining” the thread, it could be argued that Hitler wouldn’t have been able to come to power without a powerful and efficient propaganda machine, looking a lot like this, so it predates the Internet.

xondono 6y ago

I'm by no means a SEO expert, but how much would it cost to completely drown this search results into oblivion? Pay someone to set up your own site, your business, etc... Pay for some ads, heck, even pay some click farms if needed. Because I'd bet it's way less than the cost of the lawyers..

notacoward 6y ago
Having been involved in one such affair (see my other comments on this story), I'd put that in the "true but not useful" category. It still allows a form of blackmail. Why should the target of defamation have to pay to do this? What happens when most people's online reputation is mostly a matter of how much they were willing to pay to a reputation-washing company, and people in the lower economic echelons can't afford to play? These kinds of companies already exist, and make as much money burying genuine misdeeds or making up accomplishments as anything else. How is increasing the size and importance of that industry a good thing?
- xondono 6y ago
  It’s just a way of breaking the “business model” for this companies. If you pay up, there’s nothing preventing them from trying to hit you again with more demands (in fact it makes economic sense since they don’t need to generate new “content”). If you go and hire a SEO company, you’ve broken the economic reward for the scammers, or at least you’ve reduce it.

WaldoLydecker 6y ago

Get rid of 230. It’s worse than the alternative.

specialist 6y ago

We need to label inauthentic speech. As well as have verified authentic speech. Not ban inauthentic speech. I'm NOT saying ban trolls, bots, insurrectionists, and vexatious people like Nadire Atas. I'm simply saying that if we also have authentic speech, people (culture) would have a tool to discern inauthentic speech. And then hopefully wise up a bit.

Nasrudith 6y ago
What exactly is the difference between authenic and inauthentic speech and who is doing the labeling? What is stopping an "authenic" source from taking money to launder authenticity? The term 'Authenic' is often used as a deep well of bullshit to arbitrarily filter ingroups and outgroups with about as coherent logic as middle school students deciding what is cool.
- specialist 6y ago
  If you sign your (verified) name, it's authentic. Not to be confused with factual (truthiness).

LurkersWillLurk 6y ago

I feel like this would be the one legitimate criticism of Section 230, but I don't really know how you would "solve" this problem. Maybe a DMCA-esque system for defamation, but on the other hand I feel like that's also ripe for abuse and would hamper online anonymous speech. Is it fair use to post a picture of someone if the text accompanying that picture is libel?

peterk222 6y ago

Paedophile spelling is used about Guy Babcock in all the posts ???? This is the british word and spelling. Perhaps the internet post were made in England . https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-babcock-is-a-pedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-pedophile-who-let-guy-babcock-out-of-his-cage-guy-babcock-is-a-soc/ https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-gu...

peterk222 6y ago

Paedophile spelling is used about Guy Babcock in all the posts ???? This is the british word and spelling. Perhaps the internet posts were made in England . https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-paedophile-guy-babcock-is-a-pedophile-guy-sanderson-babcock-is-a-pedophile-who-let-guy-babcock-out-of-his-cage-guy-babcock-is-a-soc/ https://dirtyscam.com/reports/guy-babcock-is-a-paedophile-gu...