If not get rid of it, how to decrease it?
“How to remove humans from the internet?”
Actually we might be well on our way
Get rid of them entirely? Not happening.
Severely reduce them? Ban advertising. As it stands, you can spin up hundreds or even thousands of free accounts on any given site for not much investment, which means banning a troll account doesn’t do much. Without advertising, the web would require you to pay for access. If people have to pay real cash for every BS bot account and trolling shitpost, they would be less inclined to spam or harass people.
What would stop advertised from buying accounts?
As far as the whole web, you can’t, and if you care about free speech you shouldn’t try to. Everybody talks about getting rid of these people, but the unspoken assumption is that the person making the statement or people in their in-group will be deciding who gets a voice. A rule of thumb I use when thinking about laws or administrative controls is to consider whether they could be used against me should someone who doesn’t like me gain power.
As far as individual sites, have clear guidelines and enforce them. Be open with people why they’re being banned (looking at you, YouTube). On the Fediverse, block and defederate.
Destroy capitalism
Bots seem to be the biggest problem though
Kakapoo
Only by mass culling of humans as a whole. There’s no other way because humans inherently want to make things worse and have to be taught empathy and respect.
For starters we need someone to set what is a good or a bad actor, what is misinformation and what is Truth.
that’s easy, it’s who/what agrees with me and my beliefs.
that’s all it means to people.
if you think that’s wrong, well, you’re probably an academic. but in the real world nobody cares about anything other than whether something makes them feel good, or feel bad. including academics outside of an academic context.
some of the most petty dumb and vile people i ever met were academics.
For starters we need someone to set what is a good or a bad actor, what is misinformation and what is Truth.
Common sense really isn’t that difficult, nor is being a decent person without being ingratiating.
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Good actors go into dialogue*, they address the idea: “Hey. I don’t agree with your argument X because Y. What do you think about compromise Z?”
Bad actors rant, they attack the person, and deliberately use fallacies: “Only idiots believe X. Two plus two equals fish so only Z is true. If anything else, the world explodes.” -
Disinformation is when a bad actor maliciously spreads information they know is false to further their or someone’s agenda. Misinformation is when an unsuspecting benign reader absorbs that information and spreads it. The latter happens more than the former.
What is true or false can be discerned with the scientific method: experiments, statistical analysis, et cetera, and most importantly reproducibility of said results because mistakes obviously do occur.
What are valid or invalid arguments can be discerned with logic—mathematical reasoning basically. Unfortunately most people suck at or dislike math because the archaic education system does it a disservice by subtracting from it all the fascination.
To answer your question, because I think your phrasing implies the verity of most information is “arbitrary”, subjective, it’s not. “Drop a feather and it’s gonna fall.” Truth. “Dogs are plants.” False. The majority of politics isn’t much different, but due to the amount of misinformation/misunderstanding, it creates the illusion as if it is. Politics is about policy making on things based in physical reality which can be objectively studied. That is, in an ideal society, where politicians aren’t corrupted by greed and don’t succumb to lobbying from the ultrarich parasites on top. Find out who has the most money and one will see who has the most manipulative power.
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There is one way, but we don’t want that.
By creating upright societies, I guess.
“Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear… but it was never the streets that were evil.”
Damn the writing in SMAC was so good. How do they get you nodding along to a Christian theocrat thinking “Well I dont like her, but she makes some good points”
first you have to stop the bots. you do this by requiring a phone number to MFA to. by doing this, you also stop people from making multiple accounts. you also stop (most) extremely young children from interacting.
second, you send out random validations to the phone number between 2-4 weeks. they have 24 hours to verify they are active. if they fail to activate more than twice in a row, their account is disabled and the phone number is greylisted.
if your phone number becomes greylisted, you can whitelist it after further validations, maybe calling into an automated hotline to validate post history, etc.
if you are banned for some reason, your phone number is blacklisted for as long as the ban is in effect.
at no point do we track a users identity outside of a unique number that is never shared or sold. the phone number is simply held as collateral to ensure the social contract is maintained by the user.
third, you have an oopsy daisy little databreach
as long as you comply with PCI regulations and do regular audits this drastically reduces the risk for breaches.
so many data breaches happen because companies are so far out of compliance because there’s no regulatory administration in place to enforce best practices or rules.
your bank, by law, has to follow these regulatory requirements as set by financial regulatory administrations. your account on pimpdaddy.com isn’t required to do so.
only way these breaches stop happening so often is if by law they are required to follow PCI.
imagine wanting a neofascist data collection web instead of just having to block 1 or 2 people daily
what did trolls do to you?
the breaches will never stop
you can only reduce the risk
1% is too high 0.1% is too high
all data will eventually be breached, Id rather hope its not personal data
and what are the chances of insiders using this for all types of reasins?
do you like the phone numbers of ANTIFA and immigrants being handed to ICE?
data collection is death collecting everyones phone numbers will lead to breaches here and there and a fascist government here and there and thennn it spirals into “phone number has to be from XXXX country”
Corporations and ANYONE cannot be trusted with that amount of data
Don’t feed the trolls.
It’s a rule almost as old as the intranet. It doesn’t work, but there isn’t anything better.Trolls are a dying breed now. It’s all automated bots that don’t care whether you “feed” them or not.
I do t agree with “block them”
Actively bully them. Call out misinformation.
On my Nextdoor a guy was constantly posting stuff that was just false. They would occasionally get a response from other neighbors. After the 3rd “I don’t think this is legit info” responses I finally called them out with “stop posting things that are factually incorrect. Take this post down. I’m reporting you.”
Holy shit did the neighbors unload on him. 30 responses later, which is likely the most active post of the month, he took it down and apologized.
People just needed one person to get the ball rolling.
all that does is further solidify them in their delusional beliefs.
and on fediverse, they just label you a nazi/facist/zionist and tell you that you are brainwashed by nazi/facist/zionist ‘propaganda’.
im not trying to give out redemption arcs i wanna reduce the quantity of bad guys’ political activity and reduce the effectiveness of their remaining political activity
There’s no reaching these people but they can get booted off their platforms so others don’t get sucked into their nonsense.
Actively bully them. Call out misinformation.
I strongly disagree with the former, I agree with the latter. Imagine you’re your neighbor and you read the same advice you just wrote. You’ve now justified him bullying other people despite him likely being in the wrong. Moreover, one rarely knows the mental stability of strangers met online and offline, and some people really, really cannot handle criticism and will resort to unhinged behavior.
That mostly worked because you’re talking about neighbours, they knew where the troll lived and he was aware of that.
I love that you did this, and that it was successful, but TBH I don’t have the time and energy in my life for doing the lord’s work this way. I just block and move the fuck on. I assume if they don’t get attention they will go away, but either way I’ll have made it not my problem and others can make the same decision or not.
I had a friend I used to argue with all the time. He would post blatantly false shit on Facebook and I’d call him out. And we’d go back and forth until ultimately he would concede that he “didn’t really know that much about it.” And then the next day he would post the exact same lies like we’d never even danced that dance.
I can’t confront that level of willful idiocy. It cost him nothing to post lies, while I’d spend an hour or so researching facts, providing links, and explaining that oil industry insiders might not be a great source for climate science (for example).
I’m not arguing with the poster, I’m speaking g up so others aren’t afraid.
Bad news, 1. It’s impossible 2. They aren’t just on the web.
right, has OP ever not had a noisy neighbor? or like been in public outside?
barely a week goes by I don’t meet some horrible person who goes off on a service worker and at least once a month someone goes off on me. periodically i have neighbors who harass me for not good reason if I spend too much time outside in porch or my garden, to come and ‘helpfully’ tell me what is ‘wrong’ with my property. even though i live in a condo building, as if I am solely responsible for the entire building…
last week i was returning my shopping cart and this lady like came running at me and started screaming at me that i was ‘being too slow’ and grabbed my cart and ran off with it. it was BIZARRE. there was an entire row of them by the entrance to the market, but she zeroed in on me in the middle of the parking lot and decided to harass me because my walking was too leisurely for her or something.
How to rid the Web of trolls, bad actors, misinformation, et cetera?
M U R D E R
