What if Twitter and its collaborators created a “Dark Disneyland”?

Within Twitter, your world is what Twitter presents. There’s no guarantee that your streams are the same as anyone else even if they have the same settings. There are no hidden direct messages — they all go through Twitter. You can copy something and send it directly to a collaborator through external means but you can’t interact with a victim except publicly.

So, what if the victims weren’t real?

What if Twitter humans or AI ran an entirely parallel set of victims that only the trolls could see with believable flame wars, reactions and apparently enlisting defenders.

This would be the psychological equivalent of virtual porn with some of the same moral debates — if only wholly digital means are being used to satisfy someone’s dark desires, is it wrong? (This is not about mainstream porn but I’ve seen arguments that simulated child porn may not be crime.)

It might be easier for collaborating services to turn the firehose of fake content on to the trolls than to ensure their removal from the real Twitter.

I started writing this response as a long-form comment about using StackOverflow-style rankings to validate the worthiness of taking someone off Twitter but my fingers took my ideas in a completely different direction.

I think the Dark Disneyland idea has as much technical feasibility as Jason’s concerns — both are about broad-scale deception across multiple services.

I went looking for some quotes about deception. According to Chomsky, that level of deception is already happening in the real world of media — Americans are already living in Disneyland. Maybe Twitter is just catching up?