The Twitter Block-Experiment

Disclaimer: no bots were used on actual Twitter accounts. All research was conducted using automated emails sent to Dark Gadget staff accounts from Twitter. This is a series of rough drafts for feature articles related to the topic of stalking and trolls to be published in various issues of Dark Gadget. Please excuse any typos, run-ons, grammatical errors, etc — as this article has not yet been properly edited.

Update: Friday November 13th 2015:
Look for an update on this article which includes a feature on gang-stalking, how social media can be used to suppress dissidents, stalking victims, and targets of 7-stage-hater smear campaigns, plus what we at DG think social media platforms can do to help prevent/mitigate damages associated with this sort of behavior.

Let’s get started
So as some of you know, I tasked Weebles with analyzing Twitter followers, traffic, and conversations several weeks ago, and so far things are working out really well.

Why I did it?
There are certain people who make building communities, accomplishing research, or even something as simple as having meaningful discussions on Twitter — difficult as hell.

I could write an essay about this, but there’s really no need. The tl;dr version is simply — some people are toxic and identifying and removing them from your life sooner rather than later is always the best option.

In this case, I tasked Weebles with flagging passive-aggressives and SJ-Nazis because both cause way more damage to people, as well as social systems, than they are worth. I should also note that stalkers and trolls often like to use these sorts of people to harass, defame, and otherwise torment their victims, so if you have a stalker and you’re dealing with a sudden wave of abuse, weed out the stalker’s supporters and reclaim peace in your life.

Disclaimer: SJ-Nazi, as used here at DG, refers to MBTI “the guardian” personality traits at their most toxic and extreme, not “social justice warriors”

a.) the passive-aggressives
are the people who gossip and start rumor mills, ignore, talk over, and engage in other passive-aggressive behavior towards their targets with the goal of discrediting. These people will do anything and everything other than confront the person they dislike directly. Occasionally, and if it will serve a purpose, they are capable of outwardly bullying their targets. But, their goto weapon is passive-aggressive behavior. It can take Weebles a while to accurately identify passive-aggressives, but weeding them out of our list of followed/followers is worth the effort and the wait.

b.) The SJ-Nazis
Who have never had an original thought in their minds spend their days waiting for other people to tell them what to think and making sure that they enforce those world views (handed down by authority figures) onto everyone around them because that’s what “good” little sheeple are suppose to do. These guys get recommended for blocking with prejudice by Weebles unless they’re currently being studied.

The Seven Stage Hate Model
People with the aforementioned personality traits typically participate in the seven stage hate model either as puppet-masters or mindless trolls.

“The Seven-Stage Hate Model has a wider application.
For example, when a coworker, for various reasons, becomes a hate target, the hater immediately seeks out others in the office who dislike, or can be persuaded to dislike, the hated coworker (Stage 1).

The group establishes an identity using symbols and behaviors. They use a lifted eyebrow, a code word to exclude the hated coworker from a lunch invitation, or any number of other actions to demean and isolate. The haters may even adopt a name for their group (Stage 2).

At this point, the haters only disparage the hated coworker within their group (Stage 3).

As time passes, the haters openly insult the hated coworker either directly or indirectly by allowing disparaging remarks to be overheard from afar (Stage 4).

One morning, the hated coworker discovers his desk rearranged and offensive images pasted over a picture depicting his wife and children (Stage 5).

Both sophomoric and more malicious acts of hate have the same effect. Eventually, the haters sabotage the hated coworker’s projects and attempt to ruin the individual’s reputation through rumors and innuendoes (Stage 6).

In so doing, the haters make the work environment intolerable for the hate target (Stage 7).

Scenarios like this occur every day across America and, indeed, around the world. The targets of hate may change, but the hate process remains constant.” —

Our Twitter Conversations Have Improved
It’s so much nicer having conversations on Twitter since I’ve implemented this system. Passive-aggressives and SJ-Nazis derail conversations and break group cohesion just as badly — if not more so — than your run of the mill racist/sexist/whatever-troll.

Why?
Because passive-aggressives like to gossip and start rumors about the people that they don’t like rather than take their grievances directly to the person with whom the passive-aggressive has the problem. If you leave these silent trolls in your midst for too long, they will eventually start poisoning the waters.

This poison manifests in many ways — the most popular based on what we’ve seen thus far, are things like —
Targets/victims of the passsive-aggressives will notice people around them behaving strangely, factions forming, and disconnections in otherwise interesting conversations that arise whenever the victim/target tries to participate. Since passive-aggressives never contact their targets/victims directly the person who is being excluded never knows why. This will create an environment where the target/victim either stops participating (and thus is effectively silenced) or where the target/victim becomes angry and leaves (thus impacting your group and opening them up to speculation and even more abuse caused by the passive-aggressive).

This kind of shit is really annoying for introverts like me
If you aren’t privy to the gossip — and introverts like me rarely are — you will never understand why this or that person is suddenly being excluded, but you will pick up on the patterns, and if you pay attention to those conversations, you’ll see that whenever the newly minted pariah/blacksheep attempts to engage the conversation navigates around them. If you follow this for long enough you will eventually find the source of the rumors (at least within the faction) — because every faction that forms has a puppet master of sorts.

Because of the aforementioned behavior, the passive-aggressives create social cluster-fucks that if allowed to persist will destroy your otherwise cohesive and harmonious team/group.

Then there are the SJ-Nazis
Nothing can derail a conversation (or a project) faster than the SJ-Nazis who argue based on appeals to authority rather than logic or objective observations. They are often easily manipulated into doing the dirty work of passive-aggressive and other trolls (like stalkers) or those who for whatever reason need to launch a smear campaign.

Many SJ-Nazis have titles and prestige, which makes it difficult to reason with them. For them, authority is always right, and they’re always appealing to some form of authority or another. Allow them on your team or in your social group at your own risk… This is especially true if you’ve got a stalker, if you’re an activist, or if you have some other reason why you might be the target of a politically motivated malicious smear campaign.

Why it’s stressful dealing with these people
I hate fucking time-sinks and I remove them from my life whenever possible. Life is way too short to spend it dealing with other people’s drama. Unfortunately there are no block buttons in real life (if there were — I’d use them — often), but on Twitter they exist, so I use mine.

There is definitely going to be collateral damage
Some people that you really like engaging with will be caught up in the middle of the aforementioned sort of drama (some of them might not even realize it) and you can either keep them around and tread lightly, only engage via DM, or block them too. It’s really going to depend on the circumstances and the person. This is one of the issues we’re hoping to address in the design of DGs custom SM platform that you guys will hopefully be able to try out in early 2016.

But why did you delete your/DG’s Tweets to me?
Once Weebles flags an account for blocking (whether selected in this experiment or in general for other reasons not mentioned herein) a human will both block the account and then proceed to delete all the Tweets in which DG or a DG Staff member has @ed the blocked account. We do this to avoid confusion in the future if/when someone else decides to comment on that Tweet and ends up innocently @ing the blocked account in the process. When that happens we either have to ignore the blocked user or publicly “shame” them by informing them and the innocent user that the person has been blocked. This is unnecessary and can be avoided by simply removing instances where we Tweeted at accounts that we’ve later decided to block for the aforementioned or other reasons.

This is not standard practice
I get that other people typically don’t block people for engaging in the aforementioned. For some reason, to other people, blocking users on Twitter and elsewhere is this seriously offensive thing. I honestly think it should be used more commonly.

If you don’t like someone and you either won’t — or for whatever reason, can’t — tell them why and work it out, then why not block them and leave it at that? Gossiping about a person, excluding a person, and engaging in other passive-aggressive tactics just isn’t my style.

If I have a problem with someone I try to work it out with them directly. I don’t gossip behind their back or engage in other character assassination tactics. If I can’t work things out with the person, I will cut them out of my life. On Twitter that means using the block button.

If a tree falls in the woods, bitches…

If you’ve got time for passive-aggressives, SJ-Nazis and all the drama that comes along with them — then you’ve got way more time on your hands than I do…

Previous stories related to this topic…

Disclaimer:
We used the automated emails that we receive from Twitter to conduct this research. No automated bots were used to scrape or otherwise mine data from Twitter…

If you’ve been blocked…
…un-followed, or muted by me or an account associated with Dark Gadget in the past 72 hours, then that probably has something to do with Weebles.

Most likely you ended up on a list of accounts that eventually got blocked, un-followed, or muted by one of our human staff members.

If you’re a Dark Gadget subscriber and you normally engage with us, and that happened to you, Weebles fucked up and we didn’t catch it. Sorry…

Thanks to Twitter’s rules on bots, etc., we had to compile and execute this shit manually, which is annoying and time consuming, and also prone to mistakes.

We tried to do several passes to make sure we didn’t fuck anything up, but since we don’t keep digital lists of our subscribers — for obvious reasons — we had no means of cross-referencing that pile for more diligent screening. So, you’ll have to hit us up via the usual means to request that we fix it. Again, really sorry about that. :(

Why are we doing this?
Twitter is awesome in many ways (especially for breaking news about topics that mainstream society doesn’t care about) but, there are also some frustrating aspects of Twitter that if handled more efficiently by Twitter (i.e. allow the users to build bots that manage their accounts and put the power into their own hands), would make Twitter a much better place to seek out meaningful conversations with diverse groups of people outside of one’s own echo chamber (but I digress).

What are my complaints?
a.) There are definitely paid trolls on Twitter…
…and it’s far easier to spot them with bots. Group blocking lists help, but aren’t perfect. One man’s paid troll is apparently another man’sprophet.
- More about this in the paid troll feature that we’ve been expanding upon off and on in various Dark Gadget issues.

b.) Some people really just aren’t interested in engaging with you…
…even if they’re following you, and it’s just easier for both parties if one of you utilizes the block button.

c.) Some people are SJ-Nazis and thus prone to becoming seven-stage-haters (more on that in a Dark Gadget feature).

Allow me to elaborate on point b…
Differing opinions are great, in fact that is one of the main reasons I enjoy interacting with people on Twitter, but then there are situations where you might share Twitter followers with another account who for one reason or another doesn’t wish to interact with you. This is of course fine (everyone deserves autonomy) but it can also be problematic when you can’t remember who these shared accounts (who aren’t interested in engaging with you) are and you start initiating conversations with them as well as your followers and they end up ignoring you.

I’ve seen this play out several times on Twitter with conversations that I’ve been following and often times I’ve chosen to instead have a private conversation via DM rather than engage in the main conversation because typically you have to either carry out two separate conversations or engage in the passive-aggressive exclusion of someone else. This has also happened to me.

I wish Twitter had private tags/notes for followers…
Why? Because people are complicated and many are passive-aggressive (as I briefly mentioned earlier). What this means is that if you actually care more about engaging with your followers and the people you follow — rather than merely amassing numbers — you have to try to remember who gets offended and triggered by what and tread lightly. There aren’t enough characters available in a Tweet to handle nuance, and as I spelled out before, if you share followers with someone who often gets re-tweeted by your followers, but for one reason or another (perhaps you offended them in some way) doesn’t want to engage with you, your presence, can, and in some cases will, derail conversations.

The solution…
While Weebles can’t fix all of these problems for me and other Dark Gadget staff members, I did task him with analyzing all of our Twitter conversations over the past several months to see who is interested in what we’re saying, who isn’t, and who is easily offended by what we’re saying, and who isn’t.

How it works
a.) For the people who don’t share a lot of followers with Dark Gadget staff members…
…the solution is easy, un-follow them.
A lot of times these are accounts that aren’t really being manned by a human, and so they’re really just on Twitter for marketing/self-promotion. Which is fine, but annoying if you try to engage with something that they say.

b.) For the people who do share a lot of followers with Dark Gadget staff members…
…things get a bit more complicated and it’s best to just block them.
Why? Because your followers will end up re-tweeting them and you might accidentally engage with one of those Tweets, forcing the other person, as well as your followers, to talk over you/ignore your Tweets or begrudgingly engage with you. None of the aforementioned are ideal. In the worst case scenario your followers will end up @ing you on one of their Tweets, forcing you to have to either ignore your follower, talk over the other person, or begrudgingly engage with them as they passive-aggressively talk over, ignore, or begrudgingly engage with you. Also not fun.

Twitter is truly at its best when you’re having interesting conversations with interesting people (who might not always agree with you, but who are typically interested in engaging with you). Humans really haven’t worked out how to properly engage with people that we don’t like.

I typically don’t have problems with most people, but I do have some very judgmental friends (you guys know who you are) who will get angry at people over what I consider to be the dumbest shit (and yes I accept that that’s subjective) and then start avoiding/ignoring them.

This creates chaos in a diverse group where people are trying to have a conversation. Moreover, since you guys won’t ever tell those people that you are upset at them, the problem can never be resolved. The end result is derailed conversations that end up flaming out before they get interesting because some people (who are party to the fact that talking to X or Y person is taboo simply talk over/ignore that other person) while other people get uncomfortable and just bail on the conversation entirely.

I’m an introvert, so you know I try to avoid these sorts of cluster fucks at all costs. It’s hard enough doing social things, I really get annoyed when social things get needlessly complicated. So, I did what I always do when shit in the digital world annoys me — I decided to try to automate all the things, and aside from the obvious setbacks due to Twitter’s bot restrictions, I think (after studying sooo many examples of this on Twitter and elsewhere) I’ve come up with a pretty good classification system that, depending on how this test run goes, will help to eliminate a lot of this from my Twitter life.

I’ve been looking over the list of accounts that Weebles has suggested I block based on the criteria that I’ve trained him on, and for the most part I agree with most of those selections. In some cases I will be sorry to miss out on the insightful Tweets, but blocking those accounts is really the best way to avoid accidentally engaging with one of them (since I tend to forget these things as Twitter does not have private tags — boo — and any social engagement takes effort for me, so why waste that energy?). Since we’ve implemented this for all DG staff accounts I also think this will help us to have more engaged and meaningful conversations.

I’m writing a feature on this in the October (if I get to it) else November issue of Dark Gadget. So please pay attention to the duration, instantaneous velocity, etc. of the conversations we have after this point and let me know if you notice a marked improvement.

If you’ve been blocked, muted, or un-followed…
a.) and you are actually reading this and care
but
b.) you engage in the passive-aggressive behaviors I’ve listed above yet think our decision to block you was a bit extreme…
First of all, whatever action that was taken by the human staff member will not be reversed (even if you’re a current subscriber). If Weebles appropriately tagged you — thanks for playing. We’re only fixing instances where Weebles has made a mistake, and as such the human who took action based on the faulty analysis has also made a mistake.

So, please don’t take it personally. Nobody on the Dark Gadget staff is mad. You simply exhibited behaviors that we believe are making our time on Twitter less enjoyable for all the reasons I’ve outlined above.

And, trust me — you were not blocked, un-followed, etc for having dissenting, unpopular, or whatever opinions (we actually really enjoy those conversations (since pushing boundaries and comfort zones is how we all learn) so long as both sides stay civil).