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The Slander Industry
- CopBlaster 5y agoAt least Foul Speakers makes an effort to educate people https://foulspeakers.com/dumbass/ https://foulspeakers.com/dumbass/
- bondarchuk 5y agowww.nytimes.com
- peppermint_tea 5y agothis makes my blood boil, the author is obviously technically savvy, but how damaging it can be for someone (even technically inclined) in this day and age. related horror story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-goog... it would be a real shame if an organised group of person would start posting programatically to these slander sites with material from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and randomly generated names. Storing all these pictures will cost something afterall.
- peppermint_tea 5y agoon a second thought, we could re-use the names and some of the texts on these slander sites with the newly generated posts (with the generated picture) to give website administrators a hard time figuring out which post is a real person and which one is a duplicate, bonus, google will index all these "john doe" and "jane doe", bluring the real person/victim in a ton of results with different pictures so anyone looking at the results will think the site is total garbage (which it is)
- llarsson 5y agoThis is truly despicable. Using SEO tactics to launch an automated slander campaign against common people, who likely have very little other web presence so that the slanderous material som be among the top hits, and then charging them money to have it removed. Horrible, considering how many recruiters will lazily just Google a candidate's name and blindly trust the results.
- mbg721 5y agoThis, along with many of the excesses of cancel-culture, goes away if recruiters/employers stop acting like twelve-year-olds who just heard a piece of juicy gossip. What do we think when someone in their personal life cuts off a friend with the reasoning "I don't mind this person, but what will my other friends think of me??"
- gadf 5y agoIt's actually a positive. The commoditization and proliferation of content-free and evidence-free complaints against people will lead inexorably to the distrust of all such things, leading to a birth of a future "evidenced-based" moral culture that will wipe the slanderous, coercive and blackmail-esque "fake accusation" intelligence-industrial complex from the face of the earth, break it into ten thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds upon the waste. The trend is already in progress, and much of the blackmail networks are already undone. The pendulum will swing back. We're just in the the lowest, and fastest, point of its arc right now.
- splithalf 5y agoUsed to think this but now I’m not so sure. If you aren’t already a skeptic I can’t imagine what else you need. People used to pay the national enquirer for fake news. People want to believe horrible things about other people and will not be encumbered by facts or rationality.
- xbar 5y agoDo you have an accurate pendulum measuring system?
- jcadam 5y agoThis is one of those instances where it is fortunate I have a common name. The top results if you google my name is some 18th century scottish architect. Hell, there's even another software engineer with the same name in the UK who always appears above me in search results. He had made a name for himself in the RoR community, apparently - I get emails from recruiters who apparently think I'm him (looking for a RoR expert) all the time.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yifanl 5y ago> Mr. Sullivan told us that copying content was a great way to lure people to his sites. (He said he didn’t feel bad about spreading unverified slander. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet,” he said.) The fact that his business relies on people not being able to teach themselves not to believe what they read on the internet proves that he doesn't actually believe that this is effective mitigation. We aren't going to see a cultural shift in timescales shorter than a decade.
- litoorachure 5y ago>We aren't going to see a cultural shift in timescales shorter than a decade. Why not? We already did. 2000 was still in the era of "never give out accurate personal information online." 2005 was fully in the MySpace/Facebook social media era.
- yifanl 5y agoFacebook captured not just internet powerusers, but an entirely new (and eventually, a substantially larger) audience. I would very much doubt there's a larger audience currently offline out there today.
- anarazel 5y agoIt seems like a model fairly vulnerable to a few people with resources suing? Both from a copyright and a defamation angle?
- gizmo 5y agoClearly the people running these sites are true scumbags. However, the article doesn't mention that the only reason these sites making false claims have any value is because google directs traffic to them! If somebody slanders me on a site nobody reads why would I care? I only care if Google slanders me through their search results. That's what you're paying for to get the slander removed: removal from search results. And yet nobody talks about the responsibility search engines have to prune obvious scams, viruses, and the like from their index. Google is not a neutral actor in this, it's Google's algorithm that's getting exploited, so Google has both a moral responsibility and the actual capability to fix this. Legal action against these slander sites is important too, but more of a secondary concern.
- Dumblydorr 5y agoVery good point about Google. Will they care enough to ever leave their "neutrality" behind? This reminds me of Yelp asking for tribute or protection payments lest they put all the worst reviews on top and bury the great reviews.
- Nemi 5y agoThis may be controversial, but I don't agree. Any legitimate item can be used for bad things if someone wants. At the risk of making a bad analogy, a car can be used by someone to go on a rampage and mow down hundreds of people. If that happened you can be sure that someone, somewhere would suggest that the auto manufacturers have a responsibility to stop this kind of thing from happening again by making a "kill switch" available to police that can be used to stop the vehicle remotely. Another bad analogy would be using a hammer to kill someone. Clearly there is a fuzzy line there somewhere. I am not saying that companies have no responsibility in keeping their products from being used in bad ways by bad people, but I do think it is important not to only look at the bad thing and say that companies need to stop that bad thing from happening at all costs.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y agoIt's not controversial, it's just Google's search engine has become extremely complex and there is a lot of manual intervention going on already. It is very convenient for them to say they want to keep neutral but it doesn't work this way. To use your analogy, imagine a wave of murders done only with a specific brand of hammer. As the CEO of the company manufacturing these hammers, at the very least you would want to inquire as to why your hammers were used and if there are ways to modify your product in order to avoid this kind of hammer misuse of your product in the future. At least any decent person would do that. On the other hand, you could argue in the world where the so called "shareholder value" is the ultimate reference, the CEO would see it not as a misfortune but rather an opportunity to sell more hammers.
- zarkov99 5y agoThe irony. The NYT, an institution that betrayed the society in which its hosted to embrace misinformation, flattery and reputation destruction as the primary tools of its trade, publishes an article on the evil people that specialize on one aspect of its own operations. Next: an article on how dangerous Substack is.
- gizmo 5y agoDoing good journalism is hard. Yes, the NYT sucks, but they do good reporting too. And this article is very good, so if you want to complain about how bad the NYT is maybe reserve that criticism for those times when a bad article from the NYT hits the front page.
- imwillofficial 5y agoNah, a reminder of how bad the NYT is, is always a good reminder. NYT isn’t guilty of making mistakes, they are guilty of spreading lies. To frame their deception as an honest mistake, is deceptive in and of itself.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI wish these kinds of vitriolic posts cited some specific instances and sourced their claims. Otherwise I'm left to Google "NYT bad" to try to corroborate any of it.
- throwitaway1235 5y agoAnd imagine if Google is in bed with corporate media, vice versa? Good luck searching for examples.
- AlexandrB 5y agoSo what you're saying it that's it's utterly essential for the posters complaining about The NY Times to source their claims? Why don't they do it then?
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/iMGwD https://archive.md/iMGwD
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoI’m kind of surprised at the absence of Scientology from the article. They pioneered slander sites in the early millennium in order to attack their critics, and they had excellent SEO-fu that would usually make the slander sites rank higher than the target’s own site. Because they have branched out into other businesses to bring in money, upon seeing the title of this article I half-expected them to be offering services to third parties in this vein, too.
- tomohawk 5y agoThis is rich comming from the NYT. They are now only the 8th defendant since 1964 to be in the situation they are in for likely acting with "actual malice" and "reckless disregard" in making defamatory statements. https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/project-veritas-wins-early-round-in-defamation-lawsuit-against-new-york-times/ https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/project-veritas-wins-ea...
- Vaslo 5y agoThey are no longer an independent news organization and instead are a trafficker and sycophant for one set of views masquerading as independent journalism.
- AlexandrB 5y agoProject Veritas? Really? These are the guys who have cut together several "Homer Badman" style videos of their political opponents and tried to pass them off as news. They also tried to plant literal fake news and were caught[1] by a traditional media organization. I'll be surprised if this lawsuit results in anything. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42150322 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42150322
- timeschange 5y agoIf you look closer at O'Keefe and his organization you'll find that since the ham-fisted attempts to slander ACORN backfired, they've grown more savvy, and they now release more unedited footage and have won more lawsuits than they've lost
- c3534l 5y agoThey are, ironically, professional slanderers.
- Ferrington 5y agoYour complaints regarding Veritas hardly compare to the wrongdoings of the New York Times. Just recently you had the NYT reporting that Trump supporters had murdered a police officer with a fire extinguisher, then retracting that story and claiming he died from exposure to bear spray only for the truth to finally come out that he had died from natural causes the day after the alleged murder. As for edited videos complaint all media outlets take this approach, with Vertias being one of the few to release their videos in unedited form.
- xyzzy21 5y ago"Slander Machine"?? You mean like the NYT?
- throwitaway1235 5y agoOff the charts hypocrisy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- makomk 5y agoThis is, of course, not new - it's been going on for at least a decade. One of the networks of sites like this even funded a lawsuit against one of the big revenge porn site networks that was carefully written to be entirely porn-specific and avoid any arguments that touched the shared parts of their business model - presumably because revenge porn was so evil it was bringing unwanted attention and they wanted it gone before someone took action that might affect them. I remember noticing this same thing back then with those sites as well: "Most sidebar ads are programmatic. That means they are served up by an ad network with no involvement by the people who run a site, and they change every time you visit. That wasn’t the case here. The RepZe ads were permanent fixtures, written into the websites’ coding." It was really obvious that the adverts for removal services on that network of sites weren't standard programmatically-selected ads, that they must have some kind of business arrangement. On that network, they also seemed to be the only genuine ads - meaning that the removal fees were presumably their sole source of income.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoIt seems like the value proposition of this sort of extortion would rapidly fall if you just made a GPT3 bot that slandered people using a name generator to iterate over the less than 1 billion unique names that exist in the world. Publish and spam social media, mangle search results, then we'll be back to where we were in the 90s, with no one believing the contents of search engine results.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoYou need more than GPT3-generated text. As the article notes, slander sites often feature photos of specific individuals, taken from their social media profiles or other sources, and sometimes cropped in some way to make the target look even more ridiculous.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoWell, it's a good thing nothing like that exists anywhere online. :)
- FridayoLeary 5y ago-with no one believing the contents of search engine results. History is merely repeating itself i guess. Is Google is becoming the problem that it originally came to solve?
- roflc0ptic 5y agoNeal Stephenson wrote about something like this in “Fall” - mass slander bots. Ultimate goal was destroying the credibility of the internet. In his world, it worked, and people started to watch only curated feeds. But it didn’t help much..
- ec109685 5y agoWithout all the black hat SEO techniques, those auto generated results wouldn’t rank.
- jrochkind1 5y ago> We asked her whether this was extortion. “I can’t really give you a direct answer,” she said. I feel like attorneys general should be prosecuting these sites.
- tartoran 5y agoThis is a good reason to keep off the social media as much as possible because anything can be doctored to go against you. Starting from the real name, anything you say and and opinion, photos of you, all can be used against you not only if they’re public but if the attacker can get into your private circle (eg, hack the accont of a person that is and vaccum up all info about you).
- mikem170 5y agoThe only downside is if an attacker's post is the first result on a google search of your name, which can easily happen for an unusual name having no other internet presence. Some people figure it is good to have a lot of other results under their name, results they have seeded themselves.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- textgel 5y agoCough Cough Massive Hypocrite Cough https://www.dailywire.com/news/lawyer-covington-kids-threatens-sue-nyt-obvious-james-barrett https://www.dailywire.com/news/lawyer-covington-kids-threate... Cough
- prezjordan 5y agoNot a trustworthy news source
- textgel 5y agoagreed, but generally that comes with being a slanderous news organisation
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_... See citations, trustworthy enough for wikipedia
- sanity31415 5y agoNo less trustworthy than the NYT.
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoWas the NYT's reporting false? Someone on Twitter saying something is obvious libel doesn't necessarily make it so.
- textgel 5y agoYes, they were even forced to walk it back https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/covington-teenagers-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/covington-teenage...
- PhasmaFelis 5y ago"Forced to walk it back" is an oddly condemnatory way to describe admitting to a mistake. Granted the mistake has already been made, surely it's a good thing to own up to it?
- gnicholas 5y ago> In certain circumstances, Google will remove harmful content from individuals’ search results, including links to “sites with exploitative removal practices.” If a site charges to remove posts, you can ask Google not to list it.... I eventually found the Google form. I submitted a claim to have one URL removed. “Your email has been sent to our team,” Google told me. Three days later, I received an email from Google saying the URL would be removed from my search results. Useful information, though one would hope to never need to use it!
- yrgulation 5y agoOn a tangent, the author could have used "this person does not exist" to generate fake images of people and a random name generator. EDIT: If it weren't for hosting costs, it might actually be fun to spam the slanderers with fake posts on fake people.
- adolph 5y agoThe "Slander Industry" has existed for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell
- WalterBright 5y agoThis can be combated to some extent by registering yourname.com and using it to present yourself. No reason one can't do a little SEO for themselves.
- theknocker 5y agoYeah tell us more about reporting agencies who pretend to be independent so they can propagate information to a network of hacks, and really it’s all a big shakedown.
- steve76 5y agoLet's look at big tech's track record: - Don't hire anyone - Notorious interview process - Took everyone's money with bank bailouts and inflated stock prices - Dump problems on everyone else. Debt, price inflation, job loss - H1B visas only to win foreign contracts from hostile nations. Now, not only do they hire no one, their product keeps people from getting any job. Their recent activism doubled the murder rate. That's more people killed than bin Laden, who we just launched a two decade world war against. One day the doors of those luxury buses will open, and charging out, nothing but monsters, ones of their own creation. funny.
- happynacho 5y agoOh, is that website the one being sued by James O'Keefe for Defamation?? The irony...
- gumby 5y agoA side point: these sites are referred to as “clunky and text-heavy”. Text heavy is what I want; generally a site with mostly images is something I’ll close. The NYT article itself did not have an obnoxious level of photographs, for that matter.