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Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”

176 points by exolymph 5y ago

mypoormother 5y ago
Who gives a fuck about some reddit faggot drama? Kill yourself, cunt.
tuatoru 5y ago
something something death of research. Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...
- Yoric 5y ago
  Great read, thanks for the link!
- pitched 5y ago
  The last line of that article just killed me. The whole thing was a mind bender but that last line was a serious one!
bob229 5y ago
Only a fool listens to the news. Stop wasting your time, it is universally garbage
jolux 5y ago
The author of this article says it was unsubtle, obvious satire but I would say that the post they referenced was solidly in Poe’s law territory. Is it really so hard to imagine someone genuinely writing that? Perhaps they’ve never met a misogynist. Wishing for it to be true after it had been shown to be false is one thing (and clearly dumb), but I think the existence of such a subreddit is a perfectly reasonable thing to be outraged over in the first place. Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
- yanderekko 5y ago
  The problem with Poe's Law is that the person invoking it is often just revealing their own biases. It's not impossible to imagine any number of people writing any number of things, it's a failure to calibrate your expectations about the likelihood of parody properly that's the issue. Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture.. >Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me. If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?
  - jolux 5y ago
    But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire. I hold the prior that most people writing on the internet are not doing it merely to get a rise out of liberals. I have also known men who became violent and angry when a women they had sex with decided to get an abortion. What’s different about this Reddit post? What’s supposed to indicate to me that it’s obviously in jest? Genuinely asking.
    - grapist420 5y ago
      ok but I wrote some of it and it was explicitly intended to be satire for the purpose of ridiculing people dumb enough to believe it
      - jolux 5y ago
        I understand it was intended as satire. What I don’t understand is why anyone would be surprised that you fooled people. People are notoriously easy to fool! Smart people, dumb people, brilliant scientists. Happens all the time. I would go so far as to say that being fooled, and being a gigantic dumbass, is the state of nature of human beings. It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.
oregano 5y ago
Those damned “Internet Troublemakers” always causing a stir.
dabbledash 5y ago
It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
- jolux 5y ago
  If you have to rely on a news source’s veracity, I would not rely on the veracity of Vice and Business Insider, to put it mildly. And “New York Times bestselling author” is a marketing blurb, not a reputation for reporting the truth.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it. Maybe because most don’t click inside to know that the titles are invariably clickbait compared to the actual bulk of the article? I don’t know.
    - notJim 5y ago
      > I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
diogenesjunior 5y ago
rip in peace /r/deuxrama
justcool393 5y ago
Oh hi HN It's interesting to see that a lot of people still believed it, even when evidence that it was a Drama troll op was provided. The Texas bounty hunters sub wasn't the first foray of the dramanauts, but it definitely attracted the most attention out of all of them. The C.S. Lewis quote is basically my thoughts on the matter of people's reactions to these sorts of subs.
- grapist420 5y ago
  TPTK got about as much attention as the bounty sub. And loveforlandlords way outstripped both
  - justcool393 5y ago
    LoveForLandlords, BanVideoGames, etcgot a lot of attention on reddit, but not really... worldwide.
    - grapist420 5y ago
      Eh, landlords didn’t explode like this one, but over the years its memes and jokes have been shared quite a lot on twatter, probably more than either of the others total did. This was definitely more potent tho
kodah 5y ago
The journalist in this article, Steve Silberman has an entire Twitter filled with strongman rhetoric. I'm not really surprised someone with this style of rhetoric was so easily duped. I am concerned that he works for a major publication like Wired.
- tyingq 5y ago
  He's not my cup of tea either, but his bio is fairly impressive: https://www.stevesilberman.com/about-steve/ https://www.stevesilberman.com/about-steve/
  - prvc 5y ago
    >but his bio is fairly impressive Perhaps, that one may be impressed merely by reading such a blurb is part of the problem.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      It’s a remarkably impressive blurb. I especially liked the “oh, and also, in addition to all that other stuff, he has a gold record for the Grateful Dead album he produced”
      - prvc 5y ago
        To reiterate: it was surely carefully crafted to be impressive, and it has that intended effect on some. However, this fact is not as good an indicator (of anything, really) as one may be tempted to assume.
aaron695 5y ago
Remember when those pranksters tried to turn the ok symbol onto a hate symbol. Luckily journalists and the Left are neither stupid or lacking backbones.
jimbob45 5y ago
I know a common tactic these days is to claim “Major Outrage from x Community” and then source said outrage from a few random tweets. It’s yellow journalism, really, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the less ethically constrained journalists were anonymously behind those tweets in order to hit their 5pm deadlines.
- yanderekko 5y ago
  >yellow journalism Coming soon: A biting expose on racist tech bros on ycombinator...
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It’s not called yellow because of the reason you’re thinking.
    - yanderekko 5y ago
      thatsthejoke.jpg
kazinator 5y ago
Trace Underwood looks like a douchebag here with his tone-deaf narrative. Women have their rights trampled upon in Texas, but let's focus on the "internet troublemakers" who draw attention to this situation using satire?
- TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
  There's been plenty of discussion on the Texas law, as indeed there has been on trans issues and the other bait they use. I'm much more interested in focusing on stories nobody else is covering, and "a bunch of low-effort trolls convince hundreds of thousands that people are gathering on reddit to plan bounty hunting" is a fascinating story that nobody was covering. Sorry it wasn't to your liking, but it's a story I think people should hear.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    Fact is, your article spends disproportionate quantity of words disparaging the behavior of the cynical satirists, compared to the aproximately zero words used to rebuke the Texas law which prompted that particular gambol of theirs. It might appear as if you support Texas' stance on abortion, and want to defend it from some trouble-making Internet miscreants who dare to mock it. You do not know every single one of these people or their motivations. Maybe for some, everything is "LOLZ", but maybe some are serious. This sort of community looks like something anyone could join, for any number of reasons. (I'm aware that there are some groups out there who perpetrate real harm, like stalking and harassing individuals ("lolcows") who are selected by the group as a target.)
- andybak 5y ago
  Can't more than one thing be important at any one time?
  - kazinator 5y ago
    Undoubtedly. But, generally speaking, an unimportant thing and an important thing cannot be important at the same time. I don't think that the "Internet troublemakers" did anything wrong, on the face of it. Making a joke forum where you pretend that you're a Texan who is seriously bounty hunting women for the crime of abortion is no worse than, oh, Jonathan Swift writing an essay about how poor people could improve their situation by their children to be eaten by the rich. If some people believed it, that's their problem.
ethbr0 5y ago
Someone taken in by the ruse, on being told it was a ruse... > “It may be a lie, but the fact I believed it speaks volumes about my enemies, and not me” ... that's pretty much the zeitgeist of our times. (By which I mean, people who are on Twitter and Facebook) facepalm
- floren 5y ago
  I believe that tweet was intended as comedy.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Many people believe the caricatures Ask any politically independent or moderate person, and they can tell you everyone else only sees caricatures of the other side
    - happytoexplain 5y ago
      Is "most people with X politics only sees caricatures" not a caricature? Generalizing about one's political enemies is the pastime of all people, including "moderates".
      - vmception 5y ago
        I would more greatly weigh the learned experiences of people who actually talk to the other side
      - kongin 5y ago
        To go full Godwin: I don't care that the majority of Germans have fulfilling spiritual lives and don't believe everything the Nazi party says. I care that enough of them have decided to invade Poland and kill every one there.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      The notion that there are sides and not a web of gradients is built on caricatures. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people believe the color painted over a state on the news tells you anything about an individual there.
jancsika 5y ago
I mean honestly, MSM: what are the odds an actual group of bona fide Texans takes the time to create a forum to help each other collect their $10,000 abortion bounties over the next few months? Seriously, what are the goddamned odds? I'm completely illiterate when it comes to statistics. Irregardless, I do know I'd bet anything the odds are infinitesimally low given the poor track record of the MSM.
- grapist420 5y ago
  Iirc there was an actual tip line, so nonzero. The content was very obvious satire though
  - quantified 5y ago
    Sometimes hard to tell, especially after all these years of Trump. Is “the election was stolen” satire? The difference between satire and reality is in the intent of the author, harder and harder to detect as people read less and less of it
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      I completely agree -- hell, I still can't work out if "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election" was satire or if people actually believed it.
      - tadfisher 5y ago
        You do recall the months-long investigation into this question ? One that resulted in 37 indictments and 5 prison sentences? Even if it exonerated the Trump campaign, which it didn't, I don't think you're very accepting of alternate viewpoints.
        throwawaylinux 5y ago
        No, I don't recall that. I recall a years long investigation into it that conceded that no evidence was ever found that implicated Trump or his campaign of colluding with Russians. I kind of have to wonder why people like Adam Schiff are still hiding all that "ample evidence" of collusion they insisted existed -- is he also in Putin's pocket and covering up for Trump? I can guess how accepting you are of alternate viewpoints.
TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
Oh hey, cool to see my article here. If anyone has questions or wants further details on anything, I'm happy to stick around this thread for a bit. I've paid altogether too much attention to this saga; glad it's going to some use.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Definitely an interesting article. Have a clap or two. (I have no idea what that's worth on Medium anymore.) I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    Did you leave a word out here: > I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") Should read and not immediately?
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      You are correct! I am ___ always the best proofreader. :)
  - redleggedfrog 5y ago
    I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos. One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less. I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
lr4444lr 5y ago
Groups like this are very important to have around for the rest of us to periodically recalibrate our bull@#$% detectors against. That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this, is leagues more dangerous than these jokesters themselves. Sad!
- tyingq 5y ago
  They should amp it up into an automated gullibility meter for news outlets and journalists.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    They can go meta, and have all the links to justify their ratings be fake bs. Maybe the occasional rickroll.
- deelowe 5y ago
  Same sort of bs is happening with the horse paste stuff now. The story about hospitals being overrun due to people oding were wildly inaccurate at best. Whatever fits the narrative I guess…
  - msrenee 5y ago
    Horse paste? It's not you specifically, but you're not the first person I've seen recently who has referred to it and didn't appear to understand what the substance is. Someone I know called it a "horse tranquilizer" in a conversation the other day. It's Ivermectin. It's a dewormer. It shows some promise, but more research is needed into its efficacy. Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer. It's pretty much the standard one. I feel like the fact that so many people don't have a mental compartment for a basic medical term like that nowadays really has a lot to do with how much trouble we've had controlling this virus. Of course an mRNA vaccine is scary to someone who doesn't know what mRNA is. We're never going to escape this cycle without better science education.
vmception 5y ago
This takes me back to my /b/ trollarmy days Any stickam and gaia trolls here? That was so funny lol It is so funny to read this, tempting not to jump in, roflcopter
scythe 5y ago
You can also see some more rdrama handiwork in the fatuous "/r/transpets", where they pretend to perform gender reassignment surgery on their animal companions.
- prvc 5y ago
  Which seems to have been banned. Were the admins fooled by the satire, as well?
r00fus 5y ago
Is it me or does this sounds like early 4chan?
- FunkyDuffy 5y ago
  rDrama commonly refers to itself as a "4chan retirement home"
- segfaultbuserr 5y ago
  Not just "early" 4chan. It's still a thing on current 4chan, but in an even more strange and twisted form. But yeah, it definitely means the early 4chan trolling has fully entered the mainstream world.
JoeyBananas 5y ago
This whole shitstorm was based on false interpretations of Texas law that were incredibly easy to debunk. When I saw these fake stories pop up (and they did pop up on HN) I wasn't fooled for a second. Yet, people were saying things like "In Texas you can get paid 10 grand for every woman you rape!!" and they even got GoDaddy to take down a law-abiding pro-life website that was involved.
MMS21 5y ago
I love marsey!
- Aevann 5y ago
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jimt1234 5y ago
The ease at which misinformation flows these days reminds me of a scene in "The Big Short", where Steve Carell's character says to a group of Wall Street investors, expressing his discontent for the profession, "I thought we were better than this. I really did." I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed; I bought into all the "Blair Witch" hype twenty years ago. LOL
rejectedandsad 5y ago
I feel like Reddit drama is a few pegs less important than actual abortion bounties being ostensibly legal by a 5-4 SCOTUS decision in Texas?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I understand your concern that discussing this incident will prevent anyone from talking or thinking about the abortion ban. But you'll be thrilled to hear that HN actually supports sharing and discussing more than one link! In fact, at any one time there are dozens and dozens of links being shared. On top of that, there are new ones everyday. I hope that puts your concern to rest. Unless there's some other reason that you think discussing this topic binds everyone into a magical compact forbidding them from discussing the ban itself?
burlesona 5y ago
>Reading responses like this, more than anything, I am reminded of C.S. Lewis: > Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. > Increasingly, that’s where the culture war is headed, I think. Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents while truths inconvenient to their allies should be minimized, salivating over any opportunity to rage at the outrage du jour.
- rendaw 5y ago
  It's anger at the paper for not checking their stories and wasting my time/emotion.
- draw_down 5y ago
  “Do not give too much to the devil” People want the other side to be as evil as possible. Not a commendable tendency.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Human nature never changes. In that passage CS Lewis is literally a prophet foreseeing the major role partisan media will play in unleashing hell during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Also Rwanda and Radio des Mille Collines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
- 5y ago
shephardjhon 5y ago
so what exactly should have tipped off the journalists or commentators? and yes, I mean not just the bounty hunters but also the trans one. If the idea was that this was some elaborate puzzle to solve, what EXACTLY was the solution and how should they have come to it? This is not a cleaver joke, the people supporting this aren't Sacha Baron Cohen. In Borat, there were many things that would tip people off beyond just the absurdity of what he was saying or doing. So what EXACTLY were journalists on either side supposed to pick up on?
- esyir 5y ago
  The fundamental rule imo should be that the more absurd the claim, the more it deserves a double check. That hospitals are prioritising gunshots below ivermectin is absurd to what I hope is most people.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    The fundamental rule is to double check everything. Otherwise you end up letting false stories through that confirm your preexisting biases, since they don't sound "absurd" to you. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      Yup, and the common excuse that you don't have time to check everything out is nonsense too. You're not required to have an opinion on everything, and you shouldn't have an opinion on anything you haven't bothered to inform yourself about.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I feel like trolls are a bit too self-congratulatory. They're always talking about how many people they've fooled and the numbers, objectively are not very high. "I fooled the underpaid person who writes clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs to adverts by doing their job for them" isn't really the great triumph it is often made out to be. It's like 'revealing' the mermaid you donated to PT Barnum's museum was a fish and a monkey sewed together. He knows and doesn't care. If people come to see it, he profits, if they don't, well it was worth a go.
- cemkum 5y ago
  The people they fool write articles for places that have institutional prestige. They might just be fooling some clickbait farmer which is not super interesting, but when you see outcomes of your work in "real and trusted™" news sites, it's something a lot more interesting. Also, it strips away the institutional trust and prestige layer by layer.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    This comes back to my comment on objectively low impact. The media outlets cited are Vice and Business insider, the Twitter feed of a science journalist and several subreddits. This is not convincing anyone of anything they don't want to be convinced of. It would be like someone thinking they'd struck a blow against academic fraud with the Barnum stunt. I'm not saying that academic fraud isn't a real problem, but this 'attack' on it is simply pathetic by any objective measure.
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
All of this talk about doing it for the lulz leading to extremism may have some merit to it, since it can normalize extremist positions, even behind humour. However, let’s not ignore that there are actual extremists right now on the knee jerk side that escalated literal bullshit to national media before discovering the ruse. People are more worried about the potential of new extremists vs handling the ones we already have.

176 points by exolymph 5y ago

Who gives a fuck about some reddit faggot drama? Kill yourself, cunt.

something something death of research. Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...

Yoric 5y ago
Great read, thanks for the link!
pitched 5y ago
The last line of that article just killed me. The whole thing was a mind bender but that last line was a serious one!

bob229 5y ago

Only a fool listens to the news. Stop wasting your time, it is universally garbage

jolux 5y ago

The author of this article says it was unsubtle, obvious satire but I would say that the post they referenced was solidly in Poe’s law territory. Is it really so hard to imagine someone genuinely writing that? Perhaps they’ve never met a misogynist. Wishing for it to be true after it had been shown to be false is one thing (and clearly dumb), but I think the existence of such a subreddit is a perfectly reasonable thing to be outraged over in the first place. Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.

yanderekko 5y ago
The problem with Poe's Law is that the person invoking it is often just revealing their own biases. It's not impossible to imagine any number of people writing any number of things, it's a failure to calibrate your expectations about the likelihood of parody properly that's the issue. Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture.. >Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me. If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?
- jolux 5y ago
  But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire. I hold the prior that most people writing on the internet are not doing it merely to get a rise out of liberals. I have also known men who became violent and angry when a women they had sex with decided to get an abortion. What’s different about this Reddit post? What’s supposed to indicate to me that it’s obviously in jest? Genuinely asking.
  - grapist420 5y ago
    ok but I wrote some of it and it was explicitly intended to be satire for the purpose of ridiculing people dumb enough to believe it
    - jolux 5y ago
      I understand it was intended as satire. What I don’t understand is why anyone would be surprised that you fooled people. People are notoriously easy to fool! Smart people, dumb people, brilliant scientists. Happens all the time. I would go so far as to say that being fooled, and being a gigantic dumbass, is the state of nature of human beings. It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.

oregano 5y ago

Those damned “Internet Troublemakers” always causing a stir.

dabbledash 5y ago

It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
jolux 5y ago
If you have to rely on a news source’s veracity, I would not rely on the veracity of Vice and Business Insider, to put it mildly. And “New York Times bestselling author” is a marketing blurb, not a reputation for reporting the truth.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it. Maybe because most don’t click inside to know that the titles are invariably clickbait compared to the actual bulk of the article? I don’t know.
  - notJim 5y ago
    > I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

diogenesjunior 5y ago

rip in peace /r/deuxrama

justcool393 5y ago

Oh hi HN It's interesting to see that a lot of people still believed it, even when evidence that it was a Drama troll op was provided. The Texas bounty hunters sub wasn't the first foray of the dramanauts, but it definitely attracted the most attention out of all of them. The C.S. Lewis quote is basically my thoughts on the matter of people's reactions to these sorts of subs.

grapist420 5y ago
TPTK got about as much attention as the bounty sub. And loveforlandlords way outstripped both
- justcool393 5y ago
  LoveForLandlords, BanVideoGames, etcgot a lot of attention on reddit, but not really... worldwide.
  - grapist420 5y ago
    Eh, landlords didn’t explode like this one, but over the years its memes and jokes have been shared quite a lot on twatter, probably more than either of the others total did. This was definitely more potent tho

kodah 5y ago

The journalist in this article, Steve Silberman has an entire Twitter filled with strongman rhetoric. I'm not really surprised someone with this style of rhetoric was so easily duped. I am concerned that he works for a major publication like Wired.

tyingq 5y ago
He's not my cup of tea either, but his bio is fairly impressive: https://www.stevesilberman.com/about-steve/ https://www.stevesilberman.com/about-steve/
- prvc 5y ago
  >but his bio is fairly impressive Perhaps, that one may be impressed merely by reading such a blurb is part of the problem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    It’s a remarkably impressive blurb. I especially liked the “oh, and also, in addition to all that other stuff, he has a gold record for the Grateful Dead album he produced”
    - prvc 5y ago
      To reiterate: it was surely carefully crafted to be impressive, and it has that intended effect on some. However, this fact is not as good an indicator (of anything, really) as one may be tempted to assume.

aaron695 5y ago

Remember when those pranksters tried to turn the ok symbol onto a hate symbol. Luckily journalists and the Left are neither stupid or lacking backbones.

jimbob45 5y ago

I know a common tactic these days is to claim “Major Outrage from x Community” and then source said outrage from a few random tweets. It’s yellow journalism, really, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the less ethically constrained journalists were anonymously behind those tweets in order to hit their 5pm deadlines.

yanderekko 5y ago
>yellow journalism Coming soon: A biting expose on racist tech bros on ycombinator...
- jimbob45 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It’s not called yellow because of the reason you’re thinking.
  - yanderekko 5y ago
    thatsthejoke.jpg

kazinator 5y ago

Trace Underwood looks like a douchebag here with his tone-deaf narrative. Women have their rights trampled upon in Texas, but let's focus on the "internet troublemakers" who draw attention to this situation using satire?

TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
There's been plenty of discussion on the Texas law, as indeed there has been on trans issues and the other bait they use. I'm much more interested in focusing on stories nobody else is covering, and "a bunch of low-effort trolls convince hundreds of thousands that people are gathering on reddit to plan bounty hunting" is a fascinating story that nobody was covering. Sorry it wasn't to your liking, but it's a story I think people should hear.
- kazinator 5y ago
  Fact is, your article spends disproportionate quantity of words disparaging the behavior of the cynical satirists, compared to the aproximately zero words used to rebuke the Texas law which prompted that particular gambol of theirs. It might appear as if you support Texas' stance on abortion, and want to defend it from some trouble-making Internet miscreants who dare to mock it. You do not know every single one of these people or their motivations. Maybe for some, everything is "LOLZ", but maybe some are serious. This sort of community looks like something anyone could join, for any number of reasons. (I'm aware that there are some groups out there who perpetrate real harm, like stalking and harassing individuals ("lolcows") who are selected by the group as a target.)
andybak 5y ago
Can't more than one thing be important at any one time?
- kazinator 5y ago
  Undoubtedly. But, generally speaking, an unimportant thing and an important thing cannot be important at the same time. I don't think that the "Internet troublemakers" did anything wrong, on the face of it. Making a joke forum where you pretend that you're a Texan who is seriously bounty hunting women for the crime of abortion is no worse than, oh, Jonathan Swift writing an essay about how poor people could improve their situation by their children to be eaten by the rich. If some people believed it, that's their problem.

ethbr0 5y ago

Someone taken in by the ruse, on being told it was a ruse... > “It may be a lie, but the fact I believed it speaks volumes about my enemies, and not me” ... that's pretty much the zeitgeist of our times. (By which I mean, people who are on Twitter and Facebook) facepalm

floren 5y ago
I believe that tweet was intended as comedy.
- vmception 5y ago
  Many people believe the caricatures Ask any politically independent or moderate person, and they can tell you everyone else only sees caricatures of the other side
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Is "most people with X politics only sees caricatures" not a caricature? Generalizing about one's political enemies is the pastime of all people, including "moderates".
    - vmception 5y ago
      I would more greatly weigh the learned experiences of people who actually talk to the other side
    - kongin 5y ago
      To go full Godwin: I don't care that the majority of Germans have fulfilling spiritual lives and don't believe everything the Nazi party says. I care that enough of them have decided to invade Poland and kill every one there.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    The notion that there are sides and not a web of gradients is built on caricatures. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people believe the color painted over a state on the news tells you anything about an individual there.

jancsika 5y ago

I mean honestly, MSM: what are the odds an actual group of bona fide Texans takes the time to create a forum to help each other collect their $10,000 abortion bounties over the next few months? Seriously, what are the goddamned odds? I'm completely illiterate when it comes to statistics. Irregardless, I do know I'd bet anything the odds are infinitesimally low given the poor track record of the MSM.

grapist420 5y ago
Iirc there was an actual tip line, so nonzero. The content was very obvious satire though
- quantified 5y ago
  Sometimes hard to tell, especially after all these years of Trump. Is “the election was stolen” satire? The difference between satire and reality is in the intent of the author, harder and harder to detect as people read less and less of it
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    I completely agree -- hell, I still can't work out if "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election" was satire or if people actually believed it.
    - tadfisher 5y ago
      You do recall the months-long investigation into this question ? One that resulted in 37 indictments and 5 prison sentences? Even if it exonerated the Trump campaign, which it didn't, I don't think you're very accepting of alternate viewpoints.
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        No, I don't recall that. I recall a years long investigation into it that conceded that no evidence was ever found that implicated Trump or his campaign of colluding with Russians. I kind of have to wonder why people like Adam Schiff are still hiding all that "ample evidence" of collusion they insisted existed -- is he also in Putin's pocket and covering up for Trump? I can guess how accepting you are of alternate viewpoints.

TraceWoodgrains 5y ago

Oh hey, cool to see my article here. If anyone has questions or wants further details on anything, I'm happy to stick around this thread for a bit. I've paid altogether too much attention to this saga; glad it's going to some use.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
Definitely an interesting article. Have a clap or two. (I have no idea what that's worth on Medium anymore.) I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  Did you leave a word out here: > I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") Should read and not immediately?
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    You are correct! I am ___ always the best proofreader. :)
- redleggedfrog 5y ago
  I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos. One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less. I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.

lr4444lr 5y ago

Groups like this are very important to have around for the rest of us to periodically recalibrate our bull@#$% detectors against. That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this, is leagues more dangerous than these jokesters themselves. Sad!

tyingq 5y ago
They should amp it up into an automated gullibility meter for news outlets and journalists.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- refenestrator 5y ago
  They can go meta, and have all the links to justify their ratings be fake bs. Maybe the occasional rickroll.
deelowe 5y ago
Same sort of bs is happening with the horse paste stuff now. The story about hospitals being overrun due to people oding were wildly inaccurate at best. Whatever fits the narrative I guess…
- msrenee 5y ago
  Horse paste? It's not you specifically, but you're not the first person I've seen recently who has referred to it and didn't appear to understand what the substance is. Someone I know called it a "horse tranquilizer" in a conversation the other day. It's Ivermectin. It's a dewormer. It shows some promise, but more research is needed into its efficacy. Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer. It's pretty much the standard one. I feel like the fact that so many people don't have a mental compartment for a basic medical term like that nowadays really has a lot to do with how much trouble we've had controlling this virus. Of course an mRNA vaccine is scary to someone who doesn't know what mRNA is. We're never going to escape this cycle without better science education.

vmception 5y ago

This takes me back to my /b/ trollarmy days Any stickam and gaia trolls here? That was so funny lol It is so funny to read this, tempting not to jump in, roflcopter

scythe 5y ago

You can also see some more rdrama handiwork in the fatuous "/r/transpets", where they pretend to perform gender reassignment surgery on their animal companions.

prvc 5y ago
Which seems to have been banned. Were the admins fooled by the satire, as well?

r00fus 5y ago

Is it me or does this sounds like early 4chan?

FunkyDuffy 5y ago
rDrama commonly refers to itself as a "4chan retirement home"
segfaultbuserr 5y ago
Not just "early" 4chan. It's still a thing on current 4chan, but in an even more strange and twisted form. But yeah, it definitely means the early 4chan trolling has fully entered the mainstream world.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

This whole shitstorm was based on false interpretations of Texas law that were incredibly easy to debunk. When I saw these fake stories pop up (and they did pop up on HN) I wasn't fooled for a second. Yet, people were saying things like "In Texas you can get paid 10 grand for every woman you rape!!" and they even got GoDaddy to take down a law-abiding pro-life website that was involved.

MMS21 5y ago

I love marsey!

Aevann 5y ago
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jimt1234 5y ago

The ease at which misinformation flows these days reminds me of a scene in "The Big Short", where Steve Carell's character says to a group of Wall Street investors, expressing his discontent for the profession, "I thought we were better than this. I really did." I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed; I bought into all the "Blair Witch" hype twenty years ago. LOL

rejectedandsad 5y ago

I feel like Reddit drama is a few pegs less important than actual abortion bounties being ostensibly legal by a 5-4 SCOTUS decision in Texas?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wutbrodo 5y ago
I understand your concern that discussing this incident will prevent anyone from talking or thinking about the abortion ban. But you'll be thrilled to hear that HN actually supports sharing and discussing more than one link! In fact, at any one time there are dozens and dozens of links being shared. On top of that, there are new ones everyday. I hope that puts your concern to rest. Unless there's some other reason that you think discussing this topic binds everyone into a magical compact forbidding them from discussing the ban itself?

burlesona 5y ago

>Reading responses like this, more than anything, I am reminded of C.S. Lewis: > Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. > Increasingly, that’s where the culture war is headed, I think. Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents while truths inconvenient to their allies should be minimized, salivating over any opportunity to rage at the outrage du jour.

rendaw 5y ago
It's anger at the paper for not checking their stories and wasting my time/emotion.
draw_down 5y ago
“Do not give too much to the devil” People want the other side to be as evil as possible. Not a commendable tendency.
angelzen 5y ago
Human nature never changes. In that passage CS Lewis is literally a prophet foreseeing the major role partisan media will play in unleashing hell during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Also Rwanda and Radio des Mille Collines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
5y ago

shephardjhon 5y ago

so what exactly should have tipped off the journalists or commentators? and yes, I mean not just the bounty hunters but also the trans one. If the idea was that this was some elaborate puzzle to solve, what EXACTLY was the solution and how should they have come to it? This is not a cleaver joke, the people supporting this aren't Sacha Baron Cohen. In Borat, there were many things that would tip people off beyond just the absurdity of what he was saying or doing. So what EXACTLY were journalists on either side supposed to pick up on?

esyir 5y ago
The fundamental rule imo should be that the more absurd the claim, the more it deserves a double check. That hospitals are prioritising gunshots below ivermectin is absurd to what I hope is most people.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  The fundamental rule is to double check everything. Otherwise you end up letting false stories through that confirm your preexisting biases, since they don't sound "absurd" to you. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Yup, and the common excuse that you don't have time to check everything out is nonsense too. You're not required to have an opinion on everything, and you shouldn't have an opinion on anything you haven't bothered to inform yourself about.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I feel like trolls are a bit too self-congratulatory. They're always talking about how many people they've fooled and the numbers, objectively are not very high. "I fooled the underpaid person who writes clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs to adverts by doing their job for them" isn't really the great triumph it is often made out to be. It's like 'revealing' the mermaid you donated to PT Barnum's museum was a fish and a monkey sewed together. He knows and doesn't care. If people come to see it, he profits, if they don't, well it was worth a go.

cemkum 5y ago
The people they fool write articles for places that have institutional prestige. They might just be fooling some clickbait farmer which is not super interesting, but when you see outcomes of your work in "real and trusted™" news sites, it's something a lot more interesting. Also, it strips away the institutional trust and prestige layer by layer.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  This comes back to my comment on objectively low impact. The media outlets cited are Vice and Business insider, the Twitter feed of a science journalist and several subreddits. This is not convincing anyone of anything they don't want to be convinced of. It would be like someone thinking they'd struck a blow against academic fraud with the Barnum stunt. I'm not saying that academic fraud isn't a real problem, but this 'attack' on it is simply pathetic by any objective measure.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

All of this talk about doing it for the lulz leading to extremism may have some merit to it, since it can normalize extremist positions, even behind humour. However, let’s not ignore that there are actual extremists right now on the knee jerk side that escalated literal bullshit to national media before discovering the ruse. People are more worried about the potential of new extremists vs handling the ones we already have.