This is a short rant about Putinbots. They are every damn place online, especially my places. I was a middling-to-early Internet adopter (Compuserve) and for the past twenty-five years have been pretty prolific reading and posting online. Of course the first toehold was 4chan. I never lurked there, not my kind of place, but I know the 4chan ethos. Can’t fault 4chan too much because it also spawned Anonymous. Probably at this point Anonymous is the only organization that can fight this cancer.
Then I noticed the next place was comments of news articles and youtube. That wasn’t a huge loss, because those places are generally home to one-off comments, no community. It was obvious to me at the time that people were getting paid and that people were managing multiple accounts with technological help. I noticed within several minutes of a news article being posted, the comments section would be flooded with GOP talking points, heavily laced with racism and misogyny.
I was a member of a lot of forums, but I was particularly fascinated by places with outside-the-box thinking and men’s places. As a cis woman I found it interesting to read what men said to each other when the group was primarily men—anonymous locker room talk. And as a witch I was drawn to woo-woo stuff, like the whole Mayan 2012 thing, pagan esoterica, New age taoist retention practice, UFOlogy...yes, I know, I’m gullible. I didn’t buy everything, but once in a while a new idea would come up, a different way of looking at the world or a new discovery, and I liked being open-minded.
I noticed a gradual, simultaneous change in all those places. Clearly single men and the gullible were targeted. Sure, a pick-up artist forum would be by its very nature misogynistic, but over time the misogyny became weaponized, and alt-right political views were pushed more and more. (I use alt-right not to distinguish it from Nazism, merely to denote Nazism hiding under a 4chan veneer—a particular closeted brand of Nazism). Norse paganism was the worst. I’m certainly not saying that all Norse pagans are tools, but the Putinbots minority hid under the banner of Thor to put forth the worst genocidal thoughts.
Slowly but surely I’ve been driven off all the forums I used to frequent—could not stomach all the alt-right trollage. And it was sad and disturbing to see long-time regulars at the forums slowly turn to embrace the new groupthink.
Of course GamerGate brought it out in the open—a hidden army of nofap angry trolls suddenly went on the offensive. Still, I thought it was an organic thing, until that PUA forum moderator who turned out to be a Republican state congressmen. Then I realized it was orchestrated. But it’s only now, after learning about the tens of thousands of people hired to administer Putinbot accounts, that I’m realizing that Putin and the GOP have played the Internet, to the point where Putinbot propaganda and targeted voter suppression (using hacked data) were enough to throw the damn Presidential election!
The last straw was seeing Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan) taken in by PrisonPlanet—home of Putinbots. I liked reading his twitter feed because he was definitely out of my news silo and a very smart man. But if one of the smartest men I know could be taken in by such psychological tricks, what man was safe?
The only safe places I’ve found are here and tumblr, and I’m sure that tumblr is safe only because it caters to teenage girls too young to vote and is strictly siloed. Hard for Putinbots to gain traction there with the tumblr infrastructure. And here, I’d be naive to think that they haven’t tried burrowing in from the left (Jill Stein et al), but so far the moderation does seem to be working.
Is there anything to be done? Facebook seemed to be the answer, requiring real people to use real names, but now it comes out that Facebook was ground zero in the propaganda game. I suppose there are worst things than being driven off the Internet into IRL. But I don’t like surrender. Even Anonymous—they can’t help by censoring and I wouldn’t want them to violate their Prime Directive. But maybe they could shine a light on these cockroaches.