25 Methods of Disinformation

Source: Washington’s Blog

Preface: This handy set of rules covers most of the games which disinformation artists play on the Internet (and offline). When you know the tricks, you’ll be able to spot the games. Even if you’ve read this list before, you might be surprised at how useful it is to brush up on these tricks.

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don’t discuss it — especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it’s not reported, it didn’t happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the “How dare you!” gambit.

3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such “arguable rumors”. If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a “wild rumor” which can have no basis in fact.

4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent’s argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.

5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary attack the messenger ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as “kooks”, “right-wing”, “liberal”, “left-wing”, “terrorists”, “conspiracy buffs”, “radicals”, “militia”, “racists”, “religious fanatics”, “sexual deviates”, and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.

6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism reasoning — simply make an accusation or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent’s viewpoint.

7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could so taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.

8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough “jargon” and “minutiae” to illustrate you are “one who knows”, and simply say it isn’t so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.

9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues with denial they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect.

10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility, someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with. Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can usually them be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues — so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.

11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the “high road” and “confess” with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made — but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, “just isn’t so.” Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later. Done properly, this can garner sympathy and respect for “coming clean” and “owning up” to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.

12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to loose interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.

13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards with an apparent deductive logic in a way that forbears any actual material fact.

14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which works best for items qualifying for rule 10.

15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions in place.

16. Vanishing evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won’t have to address the issue.

17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well with companions who can “argue” with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more key issues.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can’t do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how “sensitive they are to criticism”.

19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the “play dumb” rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon). In order to completely avoid discussing issues may require you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.

20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.

21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful evidence and that the evidence is sealed an unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict (usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim) is achieved, the matter can be considered officially closed.

22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.

23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.

 

24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of their character by release of blackmail information, or merely by proper intimidation with blackmail or other threats.

 

25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen.

(How to) Tell if Someone’s Lying (for Dummies)

By Ali Wentworth

Trust takes a long time to establish but it takes very little to lose.

Did you know the average person engages in some type of deception up to 30 times per week? Steve Van Aperen has worked on more than 50 serial-killer investigations as a behavioral interviewer, and trains people across the globe in detecting deception.

The first thing to look for is, “Are they answering the question, or are they deliberately being evasive or dismissive?” Steve says, “A truthful person will give a clear-cut direct answer,” while a deceptive person will object, saying something like “Why would I do that?”

The second red flag: Deceptive people will talk in different tenses. “Deceptive people jump between past tense and present tense,” Steve explains, using the case of Susan Smith, who was convicted of murder. “She said ‘I loved my children,’” Steve points out. “Loved is past tense. It’s very uncharacteristic for a mother to give up hope so soon after a disappearance.”

Finally, “Look for conflict or contradiction between what a person says and their body language, in fact, shows.” Some people might involuntarily shake their heads or put a hand near their mouth, which some scientists believe is a subconscious attempt to block false words.

(How to) Be a Revolutionary (for Dummies) Part I

Above all, Adams was a publicist: the first American since Roger Williams to appreciate the power of public opinion and to wield it -and organize it. He used all the instruments at hand to promote his crusade. He was an indefatigable letter writer, article writer, and speaker. "Every dig of his pen stings like a horned snake," complained Governor Francis Bernard. He mingled with merchants, statesmen, fishermen, mechanics and farmers.

One of his chief bases of operation was the Cactus Club, an early discussion group set up by his father, which admitted not merely the elite, but also merchants and mechanics. The younger Adams utilized it as a training school for leaders and to lay out such programs of attack on British rule as the Non-importation Agreements, which wrought havoc with British trade, disturbing England and the colonies profoundly.  It was at the Cactus Club that he planned his committees of Correspondence, which set up a continent-wide grass-roots network of action and information.

These gave him a leverage in every community. Adams was not only propagating ideas, he was building up popular instruments for the Revolution.

He took discussions to town meetings in Boston's Faneuil Hall, where he swayed men like trees in the wind.  Every "transient person", he declared, had a right to "animadvert" publicly on anything under the sun.  He intended to exercise that right whenever he chose "without asking any man's leave."

"In these times of light and liberty, every man chooses to see and judge for himself."

New England Governor Thomas Hutchinson called him a " Master of Puppets."  Adams laughed scornfully. He did not conceive of his followers as puppets, but as free men.

Adams maintained that he was not a "Leveler", referring to the faction in Parliament of about 1647 that wished to abolish all rank.  He instead insisted that extensive equality was the design of government at its best. He scoffed at fears that the people might abuse liberty, and adamantly questioned if this should be a valid argument for denying liberty to them. He was of the opinion that denial was a worse abuse of liberty, and that nothing was less desirable for mankind then slavery.

From the start, he realized the necessity of breaking down subservience to English officialdom and the ruling class in England, which had extended to the colonies.  He laid bare the selfishness and corruption of the existing autocracy.
 

He aroused fury in privileged quarters, and was highly pleased when Hutchinson accused him of "robbing men of their characters." He intended, he flung back , to show them up for what they really were underneath their robes of authority.  In the end, Hutchinson had to take refuge in England to escape the wrath of the New Englanders.

Adams most persistent and telling attacks were against servile judges and the system of justice. He brought judicial decisions under public scrutiny, showed how the jurists prostituted their profession.

He sought to demoralize New England law and denounced Blackstone for reinforcing unjust English law. The only proper test of law should be whether it was "consonant to natural reason." Law had to meet the needs of the people.  

 

He well knew that to shake faith in law and the courts and to promote defiance of the law were basic prerequisites of revolution.

Every harsh sentence or twisted decision, which tended to mount up in hours of stress, reinforced his arguments. He clipped the claws of judges and courts , exposed their graft, and kicked them out of dual jobs in the courts and the legislature. Little by little, popular respect for the judiciary turned to derision.

Judges and leaders were forced to choose between accepting royal money or answering to the people- and sometimes the angry mob. These judicial leaders were forced to serve revolutionary purpose, or get out.

The sovereign people had a right to not withstand the abusive exercise of legal and institutionalized crown prerogatives, and Adams told both the governor and the judiciary that the people had a right to change the fundamental law and not merely the administration and interpretation of it. Anything injurious to the people could not be considered binding. And the people were not the wealthy cultured minority, but all the workers, yeomen and merchants: "All the homespun people hitherto treated as pawns".

Adams prepared the way for the Sons of Liberty to strike out against royal authority, against the recalcitrant legislatures, and to close down the courts. Overt civil disobedience, willingness to defy police power, to utilize violence, was the beginning of the end, though it would require ten years of such violence to awaken the people to a realization that the only solution was independence.

Other leaders were equally courageous: Isaac Sears in New York, Charles Thompson of Philadelphia, Patrick Henry of Virginia.

By the time Thomas Paine published his "Common Sense" in January 1776, the Revolution was well underway: Lexington, Bunker Hill, George Washington in command.

Paine's pamphlet, read by everybody in the colonies, swept away the last doubts about the need for full independence, which in turn meant republicanism and government by the people. The words were clear, simple, hard-hitting for every person.  Paine's epigrammatic arguments appealed particularly to the free people of the frontier, to artisans and yeomanry, and particularly merchants and shippers.

"The best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.  When we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.... the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise."

 

Source-T. Paine

Guinness Stout Goes Vegan After 256 Years

By Whitney Filloon

The Irish stout currently uses fish bladders as part of the brewing process.

Iconic Irish beer Guinness is going vegan. The company has announced it will stop utilizing fish bladders during the brewing process, reports The Independent, making it fully animal product-free.

Guinness currently uses isinglass, "a by-product of the fishing industry," to clarify the beer by helping the yeast settle faster, but plans to switch to a a new, vegan-friendly filtering system in 2016. The Independent writes that " while large quantities of the agent are filtered out during the brewing process, there are still traces of fish bladders in the finished product" — something that didn't sit too well with vegan beer lovers, who petitioned the brand to discontinue its use of isinglass.

The brewer’s use of fish bladders may seem gross, but it’s not at all uncommon: According to Stephen Beaumont, author of The Beer & Food Companion , "Isinglass has been used to clarify beer and wine for decades and perhaps centuries, but its use has declined precipitously in recent years with the advent of new filtration and centrifugal techniques."

Adam Callaghan, beer writer and editor of Eater Maine, says consumers shouldn't notice any difference on their end. "Plenty of breweries already use a vegan-friendly alternative [for clarifying] like BioFine," he says, noting that more natural ingredients like Irish moss can also be used. " It's the kind of move where you go, it's probably cynical — but if it's a good result, does the intention matter?"
   
Beer industry expert and author of the upcoming book The Year of Drinking Adventurously Jeff Cioletti agrees that the brewer's move toward veganism won't have much of an effect on consumers, saying, "It might be good PR for Guinness for a few days, but that's about it."

Plenty of big brands are making moves to cater to the vegan demographic lately: Hippie-leaning ice cream purveyor Ben & Jerry's is planning to launch a vegan ice cream in 2016, and even Swedish furniture emporium Ikea has begun selling a vegan version of its famed Swedish meatballs (they're made with kale). Last year Chipotle started serving sofritas, a vegan protein option made from braised, shredded tofu, and it's now available in all of the burrito chain's American stores.

Chris's Sweet Halloween Pie Recipe

By Saveur

Navy Bean Pie

Andre Baranowski
 

The silky, custardlike base of this autumnal pie is made from sweetened navy bean purée spiced with nutmeg, vanilla, and cinnamon. Pies made in this way have their roots in dietary guidelines set forth by religious leader Elijah Muhammad. In his 1967 treatise How to Eat to Live, he wrote that beans were a blessed food—but that sweet potatoes weren't fit for man to eat. His daughter developed a sweet potato pie–like recipe using navy beans that was so delicious, it became the most popular way to raise money for the Nation of Islam. Its members hawked them on street corners from the early 1970s onward.

Makes one 9" pie  

For the Crust

1 ¹⁄₂ cups flour, plus more

7 tbsp. unsalted butter, cubed and chilled

1 tsp. kosher salt

¹⁄₄ cup ice-cold water

 

For the Filling

1 cup evaporated milk

1 cup canned navy beans, rinsed and drained

1 cup sugar

4 tbsp. unsalted butter

1 ¹⁄₂ tbsp. flour

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

¹⁄₂ tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

3 eggs

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

 

Instructions

Make the crust: Pulse flour, butter, and salt in a food processor into pea-size crumbles. Add water; pulse until dough forms. Flatten dough into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap; chill 1 hour.
 

Make the filling: Heat oven to 350°. Purée evaporated milk, beans, sugar, butter, flour, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and eggs in a blender until smooth. On a lightly floured surface, roll dough into a 12″ round. Fit into a 9″ pie plate; trim edges and crimp. Pour filling over dough; bake until golden brown on top and filling is set, about 1 hour. Let pie cool completely before serving.

 

who is Eric Holder

General Holder received bipartisan acclamations, and the press loved it when he vowed to “clean up” the Justice Department.

Holder championed President Obama's power to assassinate people outside the United States — including Americans — based solely on the president's secret decrees. On March 6, 2012, Holder defended presidentially-ordered killings: "Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process." TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder: "Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do." For Holder and the Obama administration, reciting certain legal phrases in secret memos was all it took to justify executions.

Though Holder had criticized the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps before he took office, he became the key defender of National Security Agency's email dragnet. Even after Edward Snowden had revealed that the NSA was illegally vacuuming up millions of Americans' email and other communications, Holder falsely proclaimed in June 2013 that, "The Government cannot target anyone... unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation..." But confidential documents revealed that the NSA's definition of terrorist suspect is so ludicrously broad that it includes "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff."

Holder has continued the tradition of previous attorney generals of exonerating government officials who commit politically-approved crimes. Though President Obama admitted that U.S. government officials were guilty of torture, the only CIA official that Holder prosecuted was John Kirakou, a courageous whistleblower who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding. Holder is also complicit in the Obama administration's decision to suppress a massive amount of information about illegal interrogation practices that occurred during the prior administration.

Holder was lavishly praised last month after he announced that the Justice Department will cease sharing loot seized from Americans with state and local police. But in 2009, shortly after he took office, Holder bragged at the Asset Forfeiture National Leadership Conference about his role in championing forfeiture in congressional testimony ten years earlier and proclaimed that "the Asset Forfeiture Program provides vitally important funding for law enforcement." Holder reversed course last month only after a Washington Post expose proved that his favored program created an incentive for lawmen to wrongfully confiscate property from thousands of innocent Americans. Holder has proposed no compensation to the victims of the seizure frenzy he helped unleash.

Reported by Breitbart.com: “In FY 2012, DOJ spent more than $58 million on conferences…despite an amendment to FY 2008 appropriations to stop DOJ conference spending beyond $15 [million]…In 2010, the department spent a whopping $90 million on conferences.

One DOJ conference during 2012 included 30 employees traveling to Indonesia, costing $500,000; another cost $200,000 for 4 employees to head to Senegal; a third cost $100,000 for a conference in the Northern Mariana Islands that was not attended by anyone from the DOJ.”

Newspapers also heaped accolades on Holder for his declaration last month on Martin Luther King Day about "the troubling reality...that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track" police shootings across the nation. But there was a law on the books that Congress enacted in 1994 to require the Attorney General to collect and publish annual data on "the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers." Holder, like prior attorney generals, ignored the mandate. And the Justice Department continues covering up killings by federal agents, including a rash of fatal shootings by Border Patrol agents and the FBI killing of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev during questioning at his Florida apartment in 2013 regarding the Boston Marathon bombing.

Since Obama was lawfully elected, Holder's Justice Department has acted as if anything that Obama's appointees chose to do is automatically legal. Thus, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concocted a new rule to punish businesses that refuses to hire ex-convicts. Thus, the Department of Housing and Urban Development devised an arbitrary new standard to punish businesses that fail to give preferential treatment to minorities (a policy that the Supreme Court will likely strike down later this year). Nor has Holder had any complaints about the White House's frenetic rewriting of the Affordable Care Act to protect Democratic candidates from an anti-ObamaCare backlash.

Instead of seeking justice, as he is constitutionally and ethically required to do, Holder has politicized the Department beyond recognition. Instead of enforcing the rule of law and following legal precedent, he has ignored and twisted the law to suit his president. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial appropriately named “The Department of Injustice.”

Rightly called Obama’s Enforcer, Eric Holder sets the tone and makes the decisions for the Department. Aside from his own contempt of Congress, the “Fast and Furious” debacle, illegally seizing reporters’ phone records, Mr. Holder is deliberately protecting prosecutors who have violated the law, the constitution, fundamental principles of fairness, and longstanding rules of ethics in hundreds of criminal prosecutions.

A recent report from the non-partisan, non-profit Project on Government Oversight reveals more than 400 instances of intentional or reckless misconduct by Justice Department prosecutors in the last decade. A significant number of those have been confirmed by the Department itself during Mr. Holder’s tenure.

After Obama himself, Holder bears primary blame for leaving the 2008 campaign promise of "hope and change" in ruins. Almost a century ago, H.L. Mencken quipped that the "ironically so-called" Justice Department was in fact "a fecund source of oppression and corruption..." Unfortunately, Holder did little in office to refute Baltimore's best-known cynic.

How The Internet is like a toilet

By Arthur Chu


(Credit: designbydx via Shutterstock)

Last week I wrote a TechCrunch article about Section 230 of the Communications Disclosure Act, the U.S. law that many argue is responsible for the existence of “Web 2.0” in its current form.

 

Simply put: I don’t like it.

It’s the law that states that no one who runs a website or online service of any kind counts as a “publisher” in the old-school sense of the term–no one who hosts content online is responsible for content other people create, even if the content is libelous, even if it’s harassment, even if it contains threats.

If you want to sue someone for something they say on the Internet, you have to find the original creator. Facebook, Twitter, Yik Yak, or whoever owns the site and profits from the content bears no responsibility–not even for helping you find the person. Court cases have decided over and over again that websites are free to host anonymously contributed content and bear no responsibility for making the anonymous contributors difficult to find.

That was a problem in 2007 when the first big modern Internet case about widespread harassment on an anonymous forum broke, the AutoAdmit case, where women who had vile rumors and smears spread about them couldn’t do anything against the site that spread them and had to laboriously track down each individual poster hiding behind pseudonyms.

It’s worse today, with the proliferation of imageboard-style services designed to maximize the anonymity and minimize the accountability of their users, hosting communities for the express purpose of spreading personal information, organizing targeted harassment and in some cases trying to get people killed.

Many people besides me have expressed concern about how Section 230 enables crime on a massive scale. 47 State Attorneys General in 2013 talked about the rampant spread of child pornography and advertisement of child sex services on sites like Backpage and Craigslist. More recently, we’re seeing the Jane Doe No. 14 v. Internet Brands, Inc. case work through the system, in which current case law seems to state the website ModelMayhem bears no responsibility at all for hosting a ring of criminals pretending to be casting agents plotting to drug and rape models on the site.

On the other side you have all the tech advocates saying that the legal system is a quagmire, that opening up the door to more lawsuits will have a “chilling effect” on speech, and that Facebook and Twitter and many other blue-chip companies simply couldn’t exist if they had to vet all their user-generated content for liability.

Among the people who came out to yell at me on this issue were EFF, Techdirt and the Popehat legal blog. And I admit, putting an article about increasing the scope of legal liability for people who run tech companies on an Internet run by tech companies was, as they say, asking for it. It’s like going into Vatican City and setting fire to an icon of the Virgin Mary, or venturing into rural Ohio and blowing your nose on the Second Amendment.

Let’s clarify a few things. It’s totally possible to be in favor of limiting liability for platforms without shielding them from liability completely. This is the standard held by most countries that aren’t the United States, which is why Section 230 is to Internet speech as the Second Amendment is to gun rights–it’s us taking as an immutable freedom something most other countries see as a negotiable one, and therefore turns us into a liability haven.

As for whether my article poses an immediate threat to free speech online, well. The financial incentives to keep Section 230 exactly the way it is are enormous, and are incentives held by some of the biggest, best-connected companies with the best track record of getting special treatment from the government. So much like repealing the Second Amendment, I have to accept the depressing truth that repealing Section 230 isn’t going to happen anytime soon, while still doing the best I can to move the Overton Window.

I don’t particularly advocate the immediate and total destruction of all Web 2.0 sites, although I do stand by my irritated response to Twitter critics that most of Web 2.0 is garbage anyway. (A sentiment that in other contexts many of my critics agree with.)

What I mostly ask for is moderation. In both senses of the term.

The problem is Section 230 is defended primarily by people who truly believe in the dream of Web 2.0 (which by necessity includes everyone who works at a Web 2.0 startup). It’s a dream of a kind of alchemy, that if you just make code that makes it “effortless” and “addictive” for users to churn out content, and you sit back and let the market decide which content rises to the top of the heap, you will eventually get the equivalent of a well-edited, well-curated, intelligent and thoughtful Web 1.0 publication without having to actually read or write a damn thing yourself.

It’s an intoxicating image, one that’s deeply attractive to investors who want to make huge amounts of money for very little work. It’s one that, I’ve argued, is mostly false, especially for the companies who’ve been most deeply invested in a pure free-speech model.

You can only push your users to perform the unpaid labor of content creation, curation and propagation so far based on the imaginary rewards of “karma” or “+1”s. When this leads to your content mostly being stupid memes or repetitive magic spells to protect your copyright or low-quality clickbait, that’s annoying and depressing but not a matter for the law.

When it leads to people abusing, harassing, stalking, doxing and swatting each other, though, it’s another matter. Tech companies love to brag about the absurd ratio between the size of their userbase and the size of their staff like that’s a good thing–but when it leads to Facebook’s anti-abuse police for over a billion users being a tiny staff of contractors from Morocco being paid $1/hour, it’s not really a plus.

I always tell people who lose their temper with the futility of reporting abuse on Twitter or Facebook not to take it out on the content managers themselves–those poor 21-year-old kids were hired to do an essentially impossible job. An anti-abuse initiative that was actually effective would require a well-paid, well-trained abuse team that would eat up a lot of the rapid exponential growth tech gurus like to sell to VCs.

Instead, we have “anti-abuse theatre.” We have platforms that treat anti-abuse as, essentially, a marketing/PR expense, since there’s no actual litigation risk they’re offsetting. Their job is to do exactly as much as it takes to make it look like they’re doing something. What’s worse, they have to justify the fact that these companies spend very little on anti-abuse by straight-up gaslighting victims, repeatedly telling them their reports of abuse do not qualify as abuse so that they can go on to tell people that abuse is a minor problem on their platforms that they have well in hand.

I’m not okay with this. I don’t see this improving without a fundamental change to the business model of Web 2.0. The increasing size of the userbase and the increasing effortlessness of publishing and propagating information can only make the problem worse. Twitter is designed to let things go viral much faster than Facebook, which is why it’s so addictive and also why it’s so destructive. The successor to Twitter will be whatever platform they come up with that’s even more frictionless, that reduces the “thought-tweet gap” to an even smaller fraction of a second.

Yes, in the past I’ve defended “outrage culture”; I’ve spoken positively about the changes wrought by Web 2.0, like how Twitter enabled #BlackLivesMatter to emerge as a movement. But even the most positive examples of Internet outrage I can think of were disturbingly casual about collateral damage. I’m still haunted by the time I retweeted a post misidentifying the man who shot Mike Brown and put a family in fear, though in my defense that was less egregious than Spike Lee tweeting full dox (including address) of the wrong George Zimmerman.

Web 2.0 moves incredibly fast, and incredibly recklessly. It does so because it’s allowed to do so, because it’s easy for individual posters to hide behind a mask of anonymity or, even if they’re not anonymous, to get overlooked in a sea of voices.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t create the idea of grassroots protest, as much as some tech VCs like to pretend they did. They enable the kind of “weak-tie activism” that can be and has been built into powerful political movements with effort and leadership – but they also enable grotesque missteps like doxing an old man who shares a killer’s name, that send those movements flying off the rails.

And the same law that enables activism creates ample room for purely destructive applications – using the cloak of anonymity to stalk and bully people physically close to you, publicly “rating” human beings using the same system Yelp uses to enable intimidation and retaliation against businesses, organizing whole forums around clever techniques for being a peeping tom, or just egging on a possible mass killer for the hell of it knowing nothing can happen to you if you do.

This isn’t just “how the Internet works.” This is how we built the Internet.   Had we chosen to do so, we could’ve passed a Section 230 regulating print publishers, and allowed newspapers and magazines to print as many anonymous articles containing salacious, defamatory content as they wanted. It would likely have been quite profitable, despite lacking the “scalability” of online platforms–but we didn’t allow this because no one argued that this increased “freedom of speech” would outweigh the societal harm. Even so, defamation law has hardly succeeded in turning print media into an Orwellian dystopia where no one ever says anything controversial or harmful for fear of being sued.

The ultra-rapid, zero-accountability Web we’ve built–the one responsible for pretty much everything Jon Ronson decries in his book— was created by a legal shift masquerading as a technological shift. It’s not the only time this has happened. The whole tech industry is largely founded on finagling a business model based on brazenly ignoring existing laws or regulations on the grounds that they simply don’t count anymore if you’re using the Internet.