The Internet has breathed new life into the Free Marketplace of Ideas, creating a new battleground for both the left and the right, but beware brave conservative! Trolls are living under the bridge and are trying to ambush you!
I have enjoyed the discussions I’ve been seeing on all my favorite conservative, libertarian websites that I’ve been visiting. Writing for the Conservative Daily News, reading the other postings and listening to my favorite hosts, Mitchell and Ray, Married to the Game and Kira Davis’s The Dark Side, has given me new enthusiasm. But with every bright light in life there is a shadow and I feel it is my duty to point it out for the good of the rest of the readership.
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that I feel I need to bring to your attention. I’ve noticed it on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze as well as Conservative Daily News and in the chat room at The Dark Side. Anonymous Trolls are popping up and posting off color comments, many of them racist and anti-Semitic. They post the most vile comments imaginable and try to stir up controversy. For many it’s a distraction for the listener/reader who is trying to follow a story either in print or live blog talk on the Internet. They are insulting and should be ignored.
Now I like to make off color comments in the chat rooms too, as anyone can tell. I have a droll sense of humor and I’ve been shushed by fellow readers and hosts, (playfully I’m sure, CreoleRightGirl told me to go lay down by my dish last week!) But these trolls aren’t playing games, they’re in earnest and they are more dangerous than one might realize.
For a long time the Progressive Left has been far outpacing the Conservative Right in their use of the technology. With the BlogCons and RightOnline and other right wing blogging conferences, we’ve become better at this game. But beware, the enemy is smart and adaptive. Cowardly, but smart.
I can’t prove anything, but I think I know what they are doing. By appearing in the chat rooms and posting comments to conservative websites they are attempting to discredit those sites as being racist or out of the mainstream. After they post their rude comments, anonymously of course, they can use their page photo capture tools to record their comments to their own websites. Then they can tout to their friends and mindless minions how ‘racist’ and ‘out of touch’ we are.
It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, they just do it to create their ‘narrative’. Andrew Breitbart, rest his soul, was onto this game and we should be too. Remember when Tea Party members confronted members of congress at the Capitol and it was said that they said racist things, when it was proven they did not. If it wasn’t for all the video evidence, and Andrew Breitbart, the left would have lied all day long and damaged the Tea Party beyond repair. We’ve seen how they attack conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. We’ve seen how conservative gatherings attract the wackos carrying racist signs and wearing swastikas. They’re plants of the left whose sole aim is to get their picture in the paper or on TV as an attempt to smear us. They aren’t with us, but they pretend to be. They need to be called out and confronted.
We should do with them what we did last night on The Dark Side, confront their lies with the truth. We keep a civil tongue but we confront them and tell them where they are wrong, just like Andrew always did. Kira was talking to a guy called Molotov Mitchell and having a great discussion Sunday night on his new prolife political thriller movie The Gates of Hell. I was really enjoying the back and forth when low and behold, a troll showed up in the chat room. It doesn’t really matter what his “Handle” was, it was anonymous and untraceable, but we knew almost immediately what he was doing. The fact that Kira has trolls popping up on her blogs and her Radio Internet show is proof that she is being successful in her attack on the Lefty lunacy out there.
As soon as this troll started spouting froth about “the evil Jews” the chat room went crazy and just about everyone had a few choice words for this person. He was eventually overwhelmed or got bored and the chat room was ours again. Kira carried on like the champion she is, taking no heed of the battle waging on her chat room. I’m sure she was aware of it, but was too classy to address the moron outloud and she let us take care of it. At one point she threatened to block the offensive person. I was happy to see the response from my fellow listeners. It was classy.
Rich Mitchell, Michelle Ray and everyone of Conservative Daily News have created a platform here for all of us to enjoy, vent, stay informed and be connected to one another, at great expense of time and effort. (They even allow my silly columns to be published once in a while, which just serves to inflate my ego!) As popularity grows, more attacks will no doubt come. The attacks in the chat room of The Dark Side are the equivalent of a glitter bombing in my view and we need to rally around these leaders of ours and give them our support. Then we need to go out and preach our conservative message in the face of their vile hatred, and we need to push back against the mainstream media’s endless attack of lies and half truths.
As a Conservative African-American (Canadian?) woman, Kira herself is bound to be a target of the left, now and in the future. She’s smart and effective and popular with her fans. The enemy will try to take her down a peg, as they attempted last week with Rush Limbaugh.They will try to trap us and trick us into saying or writing something stupid. We can’t let them take or hold one inch of ground. We need to be as brave as Kira is and defend her against the trolls. They’re mean, ugly and they smell funny, so they should be easy to identify.
Go, do battle.
If you want more information on this phenomenon, look up the word “Moby”.
A moby is a type of blog troll, one with the very purpose and behavior you described, named after the guy who first proposed it, the recording artist named “Moby”.
And you are correct, it is indeed insidious. And getting more widespread by the day.
Entire psychology departments of colleges have brought us this phenomenon. They know what works when deceiving people — they’ve advanced their study of psychology for this very reason. “How can we deceive people more effectively? Well, first we need to better know their minds.”
Now they do. Just as every other field of human study has grown and evolved and gotten better, like music, oncology, engineering, and horticulture — so has propaganda and its hundredfold fields of study in every college in the world.
These people will make Mao’s Great Leap Forward seem like a “tiny half-crawl in a general forward direction”, if they get their way. And they sure have been studying ways to do this, these last few decades.
Good post Jeremy. And you can just use “Black”…I’ve never been to Africa.
It is time to dust off my primer on dealing with trolls.
Trolls are those individuals who invade chat rooms and comment threads to post off-topic and the most vile of remarks in order to interfere with a free exchange of ideas and information..
Perhaps most important thing to know about most trolls is they are as insecure in their own lives as they are insignificant yours. Their inane rants are the products of weak minds attempting to draw attention to themselves and away from the main topic. Many trolls post their despicable remarks in hopes someone will respond in like prose. That is exactly the recognition they seek, as it fulfills some warped sense of gratification because they have succeeded in hijacking the discussion.
Consider their unwelcome input a form of mental masturbation. So, how does one deal with trolls?
1) NEVER respond to direct personal attacks. Engaging them only feeds into their sick desires.
2) Do not acknowledge them directly. Instead, talk about and around them, but not TO them. Hold them and their posts up for ridicule, but only referenced in the third person. e.g. “Can you folks believe the tripe ‘TimmyTroll’ is spouting? I wish he/she/it would stop the copy and paste of Mother Jones editorials to try and prove his/her/its idiotic point.”
3) Rebuke their assertions with FACTS not opinion. Cite authoritative sources demonstrating the fallacies of their arguments.
4) Stay classy. Remember, you are usually engaging with like minds or those of a differing political philosophy who are truly interested holding intelligent discussion. Using words or phrases that could be construed as misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or otherwise offensive is and intellectually lazy trap you set for yourself, and only invites trolls to attack.
Following these four basic rules marginalises trolls to the point they cease to be a problem.
There is a new kind of troll they have rolled out this election cycle. They go to high visibility and high hit conservative sites and also aggregate linked articles and comment. They are a version of the concern or Moby troll. They kind of act like they are against the Dems but are completely wacked or insane. They have linked sites that if a psychologist read it, a commitment order would be given. They clog up the comments stating that everyone is a government asset and that everyone is being paid to be trolls. Here is a list of avatars of one such troll.
BObamaNotPresidentClick4Proof
SpyPalinClickHere
CIAtookovermediaClick4Proof
TheresNoPresidentClick4Proof
CIAisNowPresidentClick4Proof
SarahsSecretsOutClickHere
UShasNoPresidentClick4Proof
StateRunMediaClick4Proof
MediaBlackoutExposedClickHere
PoliceStateRunsMediaClickHere
Later
…and conservatives don’t troll Left wing sites and blogs? Puh-leeeeaze.