Digital Platform Insurgency
Years back, I had some ideas about failures of online moderation on massive platforms borrowing from counter-insurgency doctrine, especially General Trinquier’s classic Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (pdf link).
Basically, despite the absolute power platform administrators have over their systems, they have very low levels of legitimacy with their user bases. Borrowing from COIN, platform admins could build legitimacy by providing security to their userbase, banning trolls and bad actors, and fostering positive cultural communities.
This project never went beyond a few talks for the usual academic reasons, but mostly because pragmatically platforms don’t give a flying fuck about legitimacy in the eyes of their users. If user communities are full of scams, conspiracy theories, propaganda, harassment, doxxing, and generally just crap, well, that’s a problem for the cyberpeasants. As long as growth, engagement, and advertising dollars are up, admins are fine operating from their super-user Green Zones and letting communities do their own thing.
But let’s say that a platform has new management, and you think the new management is a utter twit and could benefit from losing a whole lot of money. From a bigger perspective, social media was fun at first, but on even modest consideration, the whole thing has proven to be a tech disaster on par with leaded gasoline and it’s time to shut it down. What if you wanted to stop being a cyberpeasant, and start being a cyberpunk?
Be Prepared to Get Banned
None of these actions are illegal, but they’re extremely annoying, and Terms of Service and EULAs mean that extremely annoying might just cop a ban, free speech absolutism be damned. And your real friends and followers might not like that you’ve become a screeching fountain of shit. Use an alt, set up secondary accounts, and minimize reputational splashback.
Target Infrastructure
Servers and webhosting are cheap these days, but cheap isn’t the same thing as free, especially for a company which wants to cut costs and massively reduce staff. DDOS is illegal, but it’s fine to stress test features. Like video, video is costly. Find stuff to watch. Upload your own stuff. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s 512 MB. 2 minutes of the inside of your pocket while you wash dishes sounds fun. New features are brittle, so flick them on and off as much as you can.
Target Civilians
Again, without doing anything illegal, make everything worse. If someone has a blue check and posts something you don’t care for, tell them to eat shit. Be mean creatively. Make random accusations. Any public figure that leaves for greener pastures is a victory. Join mobs against whoever is the main character of the day. If you have a big following, retweet people you disagree with and start your own mobs. Whatever norms there are around culture, violate them.
Target the Money
Report and block every advertisement you see, until the only ads you’re shown are for sketchy post-Soviet dick enhancement pills. If something you do requires even a minute of an actual human being’s time, that’s a win. The ultimate target is a delisting from the app stores, but that’ll take a dedicated drive to make the site about porn.
Automate the Fight
Your time is valuable too. When you’re shitposting, you’re not taking care of yourself or your family. This requires a fair bit of technical skill, but Selenium automates browser actions in a way that’s difficult to distinguish from a genuine human being with a mouse. I assume that the API will be locked down rapidly in the event of any sort of digital insurgency, but the browser can’t be blocked without effectively shutting down the whole site. Set your uploads and other actions to run at random intervals through the night, and use your laptop as an impromptu space heater.
Good luck, and remember
