Jones vs Milo. Online abuse, social networks, and solutions.

By now you will have read a number of articles about Milo Yiannopoulous being banned from Twitter due to misogynistic and racist abuse of the actor Leslie Jones.

Jones was being attacked by a handful of people on 4chan’s /pol/ forum. Here is the attack after it had been going some time, and they continue to orchestrate it in real time.

Be warned, some of your will have never experienced the open racism and misogyny that’s behind this link, some of you might not even have witnessed the items for sale in the banners at the top. It’s not a nice place.

So, that’s a proper warning right? : https://archive.is/uIiGf

The attack included use of fake tweets, which Jones did not realise were just faked from a website and thought were from a fake Twitter account, like this one, from tweetfake.com

Something to note. 4chan is an anonymous. All you just reply to posts or start threads. In each thread each poster is assigned a unique ID so you can identify them through the thread. Like 4+ft1XxP here, an American.

There’s not that many of them, probably a dozen actually sending anything to Jones.

Anyway, at some point Milo was pointed to what was going on, and being a professional dickhead, acted like a dickhead to Leslie. He also retweeted some of the fake tweets. Hundreds of his followers joined in.

The world noticed, Twitter had to do something, Milo was caught fair and square, he was retweeting fake tweets, and he was dropping a large mob of followers on to someone, known as either brigading or a dogpile is against the Acceptable Use Policy, they banned him, and in certain circles, and there was much rejoicing, especially on /pol/ where it originated, they dont like Milo either.

None of this is really premediated, in 4chan a couple of racists decided to troll Jones and it escalated simply as a means of cruel amusement. Milo joined in because Ghostbusters is a focus point in the culture war, he wanted clicks and views, and popularity is revenue, and his followers joined in unbidden. This event went from a few racist kids to a few hundred trolls to global news and caused a major social media company to announce a shift in policy. This was a significant event.

This type of social media attack is common, happening as you read this. Although sometimes a few miscreants might actually try and whip up a mob by planning for it, social media mobs operate on the basis of memes, ideas and trends, and flash in and out of existence, they can be formed by a single tweet or Facebook post, or a particular event. They are often unacceptably brutal for the victim, who is unable or unwilling to log off, and people do suffer.

So, on to the solution bit.

Do you want to use Twitter, Facebook and your favourite social networks to stay as they are, but without any abuse?

Well you can’t.

To stop abuse you need to stop the person behind the account from using your social network, and in most social networks, this is almost impossible at a technical level.

Social media companies like Twitter base their revenue on high volume and ease of access. It is simple to create a new account. Twitter does not verify the identities. I create an email address, I create a Twitter account, I am ready.

I can use Twitter immediately, and even though I can be blocked, most people are unaware of services like Blocktogether which can block accounts less than 7 days old and accounts with less than 15 followers. There are also pre-made blocklists available for people to use.

but if I’m blocked I repeat the account creation process. It’s not hard.

I can’t be easily filtered. Do you know how many ways you can spell fuck?

Here’s just one way Ƒʊ ¢Ƙ. If I put some variation I change what needs to be filtered. I can add some spaces Ƒʊ ¢ Ƙ, or punctuation. Ƒ..ʊ .¢ …Ƙ. I can vary the size of spaces or numbers of punctuation. Ƒ…ʊ ..¢ …..Ƙ

If you build a really good filter I send you an image.

If you have a really intelligent image to text filter on images, I send you a captcha text.

If you filter words perfectly, I send or acronyms, or words that sound similar. You can’t filter for context without a really sophisticated artificial intelligence, so perfectly innocuous words can be sinister.

I think this sums up the difficulties of filtering.

“I will Jimmy Savile your family”

How about I change “Jimmy Savile” to the name of the most recent event/murderer/victim in the news?

“A Nice truck for you and your family”

The point is, if your userbase is anonymous you have lost control. Anyone can do what ever they please on your network. As the Jones issue shows, a few people can impact millions.

You can legislate against abuse, but this is also easily overcome.

From a personal point of view, this is where my interest lies. I maintain a guide for ex-Muslims to stay anonymous on the internet, and engage in some activism to get the message out there. This involves advising adult and children ex-Muslims in Muslim lands to stay anonymous, as leaving Islam can result in the death penalty. At a basic level this involves never using your real name, address or any identifiers that can link you to a real person. At an advanced level it involves obscuring yourself from a technical point of view.

The easiest way to identify me is through the legal system, and the use of certain technological unique identifiers. A MAC address is a unique code relating to your devices network code. Mobile phones have unique identifiers and each internet connection has a unique address called a IP address. When I use Twitter my IP address is available to Twitter. The authorities will obtain my IP address from Twitter, use tools to identify the internet service provider and contact the service provider for my real name and address.

Go to whatismyipaddress click “Lookup IP address.” What do you see? Your ISP name, and probably your country, and maybe even your town. It’s that easy.

Twitter apps also record mobile identifiers and many can record MAC addresses.

To hide myself on the internet I can do a number of things.

• Use a proxy (you connect to a computer elsewhere in the world, it is the IP address that Twitter sees)
• Use a VPN (you connect via encrypted network to a computer elsewhere in the world, it is the IP address that Twitter sees)
• Use an onion router such as Tor (you connect to an encrypted network, and exit it from an unknown point which will be the IP address Twitter sees)
• I can also use apps to change MAC addresses, and browse without giving away mobile identifiers.

Once I am using these techniques I am nearly impossible to locate. My proxies and Tor exit points might be in Moldova or Russia, where Western police are powerless. To overcome this level of anonymity you need the investigative powers and abilities if the intelligence agencies or specialised police units, and you need time, money and manpower.

You might be able to overcome these means if you are police state, and have a particularly harsh totalitarian regime, and limit access to the internet but this isn’t a solution for the West.

Anyway, on to the point. If someone wants to be anonymous they can. There is no technological wand that can be waved. The existing networks rely on high volume and ease of use, their revenue stream is based around this, ultimately, they are not to provide what the victims of abuse and the various campaigns around really want, which is full safety and a controlled environment. If they did this they lose the huge volumes that advertisers want, cannot generate money, and the companies will go bust. This is their dilemma, how can they maintain revenue in the midst of this evolution of vast swathes of their networks into an openly abusive and out of control space? I’m not sure they can.

How to control an environment? We can create a new social media network.

• Verify using ID and real names.
• Moderation.
• Subscription fees

You lose volume, you lose a large audience, essentially wont get Twitter, but it safer. You filter all out bar the richest of trolls. ID verification expensive for the companies, you have to maintain many staff, adequate controls and data protection. Facebook does this for some users already.

Manual message by message moderation of large social networks like Facebook and Twitter is impossible, the volumes involved are almost beyond comprehension, millions of messages a minute, but you can maintain overwatch on a smaller network.

Subscription fees can tie someone to a bank account or credit card. Especially if you lock down payment methods. It is very effective.

How to provide safety without ID verification?

• Anonymity for users. No real names, no photos, no dates of birth, no addresses, and a user base that understand anonymity. Personal abuse around identity is severely restricted. You are essentially left with Twitter for discussions only, not selfies and self-promotion.
• Write only accounts for public figures. No means for the public to interact with them.

No, they can’t “engage the public” using large anonymous social networks.

That didn’t work. You’ll have to market in a new way.

The great social media experiment was a failure. Social media is a perfect environment for abuse, and society breeds abusers. We cannot modify the unobserved behaviours of a billion human beings. We will never all be nice to each other, we will never stop online trolling and abuse, we can only mitigate it.

The leap forward to living public lives will need to be curtailed, and we can step back a decade to how we existed online before the current generation of social networks, existing online as a virtual character.

Just like me, Freddy Bin Yusuf. A construct to safely promote my causes. Anonymity is not harmful for all.