Kittens, Pizza and Social Media

The Internet is a sea of trouble and I am a very old salt. I am fortunate to have a wide circle of friends, some on their first cruises, some who consider themselves seasoned travellers — but really, most people are simply along for the ride. I also know many seasoned captains. When I am asked about how to manage these stormy seas, I give out the same advice: make sure you take some shore leave on the regular. Get off the Internet and take a walk in the park. Surround yourself with green if you can. You’ll get even more benefits if you take a best friend or two with you, even if your best friend is a dog. We can manage our feeds a bit better, too. That’s what learning how to “sail” well is all about.

Social media can make us very sick. I sometimes compare myself to Madame Curie: the thing I study can cure or kill, depending on how much exposure we get. The new word is “stochastic terrorism” — but I prefer Molly McKew’s term, “information terrorism” — referring to the groups of trolls who are loosely organized into gangs to bully people, spread hate and vitriol.

We all know about trolls: mean-spirited, hate-mongering people who spread disinformation, bait people, ridicule others, and generally behave in anti-social, even sociopathic manner on the Internet. But today, I’m introducing a new term: social network vandalism. I’m going to explain how social network vandalism works, and how it can ruin lives. I’ll be talking about two different people, one mythical, like Little Red Riding Hood — my friend Ethel. The other is very real, a twenty-nine year old father whom we now all refer to as the Pizzagate guy.

We all know what trolls are: but what are vandals?

I very much like Molly McKew’s discussion of information terrorism in Wired magazine from a year or so back. She describes the history of Gamergate, the role of Reddit, and the automated and semi-automated social media accounts that exist to distribute disinformation and manipulate public opinion. She points out that these “bot armies” exist to do one thing: attack.

Information terrorism is not a term I apply lightly. But if you accept the core definition of terrorism as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims,” then there are few terms more apt to describe what this group has unleashed against their fellow Americans. (Molly McKew, Wired, 10 October 2018).

However, in our feeds, we have “our friends.” And though they are not (usually) organized into cadres of extremist revolutionaries, there are moments when we all begin to wonder a little bit about Ethel… Is she alright? Is she okay?

We all have friends like Ethel. She is passionate about the condition of humanity and has a definite sense of Right and Wrong with capital letters. She is aggrieved by the state of the world as she sees it, from her particular position onboard the great spaceship, Earth. As she sets sail on the narrative landscape of cyberspace, she definitely has goals in mind.

Or perhaps, she didn’t. Perhaps she got online in order to look at cat pictures and trade knitting tips.

In any case, somewhere along the way, Ethel stumbled on to a community of people who seemed to be sympathetic, helpful and understanding. Perhaps they began liking all her tweets, sharing all her Facebook posts. They made supportive replies and followed her on Instagram.

Little by little, Ethel becomes well, a bit seduced. This is the “super-friend” experience. There are now legions of false and deceptive accounts who use just this strategy to insinuate themselves into our social networks. They attempt to become trusted, leveraging our very human tendency to reciprocate kindness for kindness. We, in turn, “follow-back” — usually without much in the way of examining the particulars of those accounts who follow us. We are a bit flattered, after all. We want to thank them somehow. And so we follow-back — and this, if we are not careful — can draw us into a world of polarized discourses.

Vandalism is defined as the deliberate destruction or damage to public or private property.

In this case, “social network vandalism” is the deliberate attempt to damage people’s understanding of the world through techniques of crowd manipulation, rumor mongering, and social hysteria propagation.

Social network vandalism is different from trolling. This kind of vandalism sets people up to become the vectors of the worst toxins on the Internet. These vandals are strategically becoming our friends by being so very nice to us. Wow. All those likes! And he said such nice things! We definitely want more of that.

And once we follow them back, we have helped them to get access to the other friends in our networks. This is even easier on Facebook, where the moment you accept a new friend, you get a two-way tie to them: they can see ALL of your friends. They can pick and choose among them to figure out who is going to be most receptive to their messaging — and ask THEM to become their friends.

Very few people realize that when you accept a friend on Facebook that you instantly provide them with access and information that vandals can readily use. Once they are in our networks, they can begin exposing us to dismaying and upsetting content. They can provide links to distorted materials and light propaganda. Once they are in a position of strong trust, they can then begin to offer up shockingly upsetting material — to put us into a situation of amygdala hijack.

From Google: An amygdala hijack is a person’s emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. The term was coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

Do you recall the ISIS beheading videos? Those spread like wildfire for a very short time. When people saw them, they were so shocked, so emotionally energized that the only immediate way to discharge the energy was to share them. There wasn’t any thinking involved — because when we are in amygdala hijack, we are physiologically DISCONNECTED from our cerebral cortexes.

ISIS videos didn’t work for very long, because they caused an immediate cleansing action. The platforms took them all offline, wherever they could find them.

Amygdala hijack causes us to lose connection to our reasoning capabilities and puts us in a situation of “fight or flight.” It creates a situation of heightened stress. Prolonged stress has been demonstrated to be very bad for our health — and this is how the Internet can make us sick.

The advertising world has long known about the riches that can be theirs by frightening their marks (us) so that we’ll buy their shoddy products. They also know many other techniques of how to influence us, how to set us up so that we are easily swayed — and no longer thinking critically.

Social network vandalism is the art of putting these kinds of techniques to use in social media in order to weaken and destroy critical thinking and social relationships. They are out to make us crazy, unable to think for ourselves, unable to be ourselves. They want to isolate us from our non-crazy friends so that they can better manipulate our perspective on the world, our attitude and our everyday thinking.

Let’s take our friend Ethel. She gets on several social networks and begins to get a very steady diet of images, stories, and discussions about her favorite topic. Let’s say it’s kittens. Let’s say that there is a hashtag she likes to follow, #FriendsOfKittens, with all sorts of nice stories about rescued kittens (and occasional appeals to adopt kittens and support animal shelters.) She follows people and makes posts. She shares posts. She’s having fun.

Then she begins seeing some sad pictures about abused kittens. And bad animal shelters. And animal shelter SCANDALS. Ethel becomes inflamed. She becomes, little by little, obsessed with the subject. All of us friends of Ethel are getting nothing from her but a steady stream of sad and terrible stories. It’s almost kitty slasher porn. Some of us have to put her posts on “mute.”

Ethel becomes moved to the opinion that ALL animal shelters are corrupt — in fact now, in her book, you cannot be a #Friendof Kittens and SUPPORT animal shelters in any way. Bombarded with information, she gets a very tiny hit of dopamine whenever she hits that SHARE button. This feeds the addiction. The #FriendsofKittens campaign makes her feel better about the world. Sure, she’s angry all the time, but she also feels so important, engaged in this critical cause!

Ethel begins to lose contact with friends who do not vigorously agree with her on this one issue. Even when this obsession begins to isolate her, she still persists. She is living in a particular bubble now.

The problem of Ethel and the Pizzagate Guy

The story of 29-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, the Pizzagate guy, exemplifies the problem of this social media vandalism and what it can do to people who only want to do the right thing. On December 4, 2017, Edgar Maddison Welch, from Salisbury, North Carolina, walked into Comet Pizza in Alexandria, with a gun, folding knife, and an assault rifle. A young father himself, Welch was inevitably in total amygdala hijack owing to stories he read that trace back to Qanon, a group of trolls who spread crazy conspiracy theories and rumors on message boards like Reddit, on Youtube and other social media platforms.

Welch went into the restaurant, heavily armed, trying to find children he believed were being hidden in the basement of the restaurants, enslaved in a pedophilia ring alleged run by Hilary Clinton. The campaign of wild messages and stories were part of the Russian effort to promote conspiracy theories derived from thee Wikileaks publication of her stolen email messages. No one was hurt, thankfully. The restaurant, funnily enough, had no basement. Welch, confused, looked everywhere. He was certain he was going to die but determined to save those children. When he found no basement, he gave himself up to the police. He was given a four-year sentence.

Welch never claimed temporary insanity. The prosecution, also, did not feel that Welch was insane. Welch was completely taken in by the mix of stories and the constant bombardment of images and messages that completely took him in. He was just a guy. He considered himself a good guy with the best of intentions. Given all the junk in social media, it’s easy to see how this could happen.

At the time of lots of messages were circulating about Hilary Clinton. She was married, of course, to Bill Clinton. Everyone accepted this as true. Bill, it was said, was a bit of a perv. Well, some people accepted that, because of his past behavior. Anthony Weiner, who showed dick pics to women without their consent, also something of a perv. Weiner was married to a good friend of Hilary at the time that scandal broke. Pieces of the pedophilia story were everywhere.

Rolling Stone has a fascinating account of how this all went down.

“ Welch’s arrest was the culmination of an election cycle dominated by fake news — and by attacks on the legitimate press. Several media outlets quickly traced the contours of what became known as Pizzagate: The claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile started in a Facebook post, spread to Twitter and then went viral with the help of far-right platforms like Breitbart and Info-Wars. But it was unclear whether Pizzagate was mass hysteria or the work of politicos with real resources and agendas. It took the better part of a year (and two teams of researchers) to sift through the digital trail.”

From these facts, come other stories and opinions that some people might accept (for titillation factor or from dislike of the Clintons). But Welch began accepting all of these stories. And eventually, because he put those stories together himself, piling “fact” upon the next believed “fact” — he felt he had no choice but to go save those children. Fortunately, the only person who suffered for this was Welch and his family.

I can easily see my mythical friend Ethel charging into an animal shelter on a similar mission, under similar heady influences.

What can be done? First, help OURSELVES

How can we reach Ethel, before she becomes a version of Pizzagate guy?

Remember how they tell us on the airlines about those oxygen masks? How we need to secure our own oxygen masks first, before we try to help other people?

Before we can help Ethel, we have to help ourselves first. No one can talk anyone down in a crisis situation when they are all het up themselves. Given that we are all exposed to some degree of suasion and manipulation from the social media we imbibe, we must first adjust our own attitudes, beliefs, and ideas to calm ourselves down and engage our own capabilities for critical thinking.

Social media content is a mixture of “junk food” for the brain, and “real food” for the brain. If we are eating nothing but trash, we’re going to get sick. This is why we must check our own feeds.

• Are we receiving an overwhelming amount of dismaying and upsetting material on our feeds? (Probably. Because the news right now? OMG, right?)
• Do we really know these people who are delivering information to us? Are they possibly bots or cyborg actors? A cyborg is someone who is using his or her own personal botnet to spread his material.
• Are we taking in lots of “good food for thought” as well as the junk food? I currently subscribe, yes, pay money for a range of newspapers and magazines. I recommend it. I also read actual books, listen to good radio and podcasts. I curate my own feed so I’m not just getting junk.

A good rule of thumb: if someone has over 100K messages on Twitter, they are either a bot, or they are using bot enhancements. Journalists often have those kinds of numbers. If it’s over 200 or 300K? Lordy, honey. That’s one sign. My friend Ben Nimmo over at the @DFRLab wrote this handy guide: Twelve Ways to Spot a Bot. That was written some time ago, and those automated accounts are even MORE sophisticated.

In closing, we are now in a time when the news cycle is making us all a bit crazy. The revelations about corruption in our government are literally boggling our minds. We need to be careful. We need to take breaks, and take walks. We need to avoid becoming so upset that we become unable to think and to reason — and to make good decisions.

While struggling with this sort of issue, I came across a book by Mark Goulston called, “Talking to Crazy.” Rather than sending you a link here about where to buy it, I’ll put a link right here from a library. It’s a great read.

In my next post, I’m going to talk more about what we can do for Ethel — and also for ourselves. Thanks for dropping by. Don’t forget to take that walk. You deserve to feel better. And we all need to be at our best mentally and emotionally, to weather these stormy seas.