
I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook - jseliger
http://observer.com/2017/02/i-helped-create-the-milo-trolling-playbook-you-should-stop-playing-right-into-it/
======
notatoad
>There is absolutely nothing that Milo has said (and more importantly, done)
that ought to revoke his First Amendment right to give a speech on a college
campus.

Woah, slow down there. Neither Milo or anybody else has a first amendment
right to give a speech on a college campus. The right to free speech does not
equal a right to a podium, the university or their students telling Milo to go
away is not a first amendment issue. Cancelling his speech does not give him
any sort of moral high ground. (lighting things on fire, on the other hand...)

The only potential free speech argument here is if somebody were to tell
Berkeley that they _had to_ allow certain speakers, then the university's free
speech would be impinged. The right to tell somebody else to shut the hell up
is an important part of free speech. The only entity that _doesn 't_ have that
right under the first amendment is the government.

~~~
aaron695
I really detest this straw person argument "First Amendment right doesn't
equate to having to allow certain speakers".

No one is talking about taking Twitter or Berkeley etc to court, we get it,
they would win (Assuming Berkeley doesn't get public funding though?)

What we are taking about is big business who control speech effectively
censoring the population.

This goes against the spirit of the First Amendment and the Left are the first
to be outraged when right wing news media doesn't give them a voice.

They then use this legal loophole, businesses can do what they want, argument
when it suits them.

~~~
wpietri
It's not a loophole.

Freedom of speech and freedom of association are key rights in a democracy,
and they apply everywhere. I get to talk, but you get to walk away. I get to
say what I want, but you are not compelled to help circulate my views. I have
the right to say what I think; you have right to say that makes me an asshole.

In this age, nobody in the US is "effectively" censored. At basically no cost,
anybody can set up a web server and share their views across the globe. Today,
everybody's a publisher, but nobody has to listen.

Nobody caring what I have to say isn't censorship for me; it's freedom for
everybody else.

~~~
aaron695
> I get to talk, but you get to walk away.

Except the argument here is person X doesn't get to talk.

The argument is Berkeley can stop people talking they politically don't like
(Or any other reason) because as a business they have every right to
discriminate on political views.

And sure that's legally true perhaps, we all understand that, but it's not
right and against the idea of the first amendment.

To argue it's ok for universities to censor speakers is a very scary point of
view, and this is what you are doing by bringing in the straw person 'it's
legally allowed'

~~~
wpietri
UC Berkeley is not a business. It's a public university. The "UC" being short
for "University of California".

I was addressing your notion about businesses, "this legal loophole,
businesses can do what they want". And I presumed you were actually talking
about businesses, because a) you mentioned Twitter, a business, and b) UC
Berkeley is not a business.

> sure that's legally true perhaps [...] it's not right and against the idea
> of the first amendment

No. No, no, no. The idea of the First Amendment is not that you are owed a
platform. It's just that the government cannot stop you from saying what you
want in public or with your own platform. It starts out with "Congress shall
make no law" for a reason.

That is not _the_ idea of the First Amendment. It is _your_ idea of the First
Amendment. It's a common one, but that doesn't make it the right one, or the
only one.

------
neotek
The author of this article, Ryan Holiday, is the author of _Trust Me, I 'm
Lying_[1], a fascinating book which goes into detail about the Tucker Max
marketing campaign mentioned in the article, plus a lot of other scummy growth
hacking stuff.

It's not something to admire, per se, but it's extremely interesting to see
just how easy the average person (and the media, for that matter) is to
manipulate when anger is the biggest tool at your disposal.

[1] [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-
lyi...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lying)

~~~
bemmu
It was a fascinating read, but if he is willing to mislead everyone, doesn't
it make you wonder how much of the book is true?

~~~
tomhoward
His latest book, _Ego Is the Enemy_ , and his more recent blog posts and
interviews, all indicate that he's of very sound character.

------
Exofunctor
I read an interesting argument related to this recently, which is that people
on the right are _aggressively_ self-policing; if someone tries looting or
setting things on fire or attacking people at a right-leaning demonstration in
the US, they will probably be shot. On the other hand, the US left has no such
self-policing culture, and therefore more readily admits the kind of violence
(both against people and property) that we've seen repeated multiple times in
multiple locations for these Milo events. And let's not pretend it's some
fringe group of subversives who sneak into these events and act violent; the
majority of the politically active left-leaning people in my Facebook network
explicitly discussed why they thought it was acceptable to "punch a nazi", as
people are referring to the attack on Spencer. At some point over the last
couple decades, the American left, to a large degree, gave up on the notion of
peaceful politics, and it's reflected in the sort of stuff mentioned in the
OP.

~~~
hackuser
Is there any basis to this? Any data about violence at protests to back it up?
It reads like it's a creation of someone's imagination about what the 'other'
side must be like (not the commenter's imagination, but whomever they read) -
people so dehumanized to the person imagining it that they lose sight of the
fact that they are people, human beings, not objects of political opposition
in someone's drama.

In particular, this sounds very unlikely:

> if someone tries looting or setting things on fire or attacking people at a
> right-leaning demonstration in the US, they will probably be shot.

When has that happened?

I'm pretty doubtful of anything that paints the 'other' side as one big
stereotype. Also, my personal experience and observations of such things don't
match these claims.

------
crdb
"Create"? From defected KGB general Oleg Kalugin's autobiography [1]:

> Our station also became deeply involved in what we called “active measures,”
> which essentially involved dirty tricks and disinformation campaigns. One of
> the most aggressive campaigns was related to the emerging postcolonial
> nations of Africa, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked
> in a struggle for influence. We in the KGB station in New York did
> everything we could to stir up trouble for the American side.

> One of our dirty tricks involved a nasty letter-writing campaign against
> African diplomats at the United Nations—an idea cooked up by KGB
> headquarters in Moscow and approved by the Communist Party Central
> Committee. Our KGB staff, using new typewriters and wearing gloves so as not
> to leave fingerprints, typed up hundreds of anonymous hate letters and sent
> them to dozens of African missions. The letters, purportedly from white
> supremacists as well as average Americans, were filled with virulent racist
> diatribes. The African diplomats publicized some of the letters as examples
> of the racism still rampant in America, and members of the American and
> foreign press corps quoted from them. I and other KGB officers working as
> correspondents in the United States reported extensively on this rabidly
> antiblack letter-writing campaign. I lost no sleep over such dirty tricks,
> figuring they were just another weapon in the cold war.

> Our active measures campaign did not discriminate on the basis of race,
> creed, or color: we went after everybody. Attempting to show that America
> was inhospitable to Jews, we wrote anti-Semitic letters to American Jewish
> leaders. My fellow officers paid American agents to paint swastikas on
> synagogues in New York and Washington. Our New York station even hired
> people to desecrate Jewish cemeteries. I, of course, beamed back reports of
> these misdeeds to my listeners in Moscow, who—tuning in to my broadcasts—no
> doubt thanked the Lord or Comrade Lenin that they had been born in a
> socialist paradise, and not in a hotbed of racial tension like the United
> States of America. [...] I knew our propaganda was exaggerating the extent
> of racism in America, yet I also saw firsthand the blatant discrimination
> against blacks. Again, I had no qualms about stirring up as much trouble as
> possible for the U.S. government. It was all part of the job.

[1] "Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the
West" \- Oleg Kalugin - [https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-
Intelligence-Esp...](https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-
Espionage-Against/dp/0465014453)

------
imh
Here's a much longer look at some of the same concepts
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-
rage/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) Ideas
which spread because of their divisiveness.

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praptak
Let me propose a technical solution for a social problem: use AdBlock,
subscribe to your fave newspaper. The sooner the paid-by-ads clickbait model
of the media dies, the less effective the trolling will be.

~~~
studentrob
Speed, quality, cost. Choose any two.

Right now the favorite media, digitally crowd sourced, reports news quickly
and is cheaper (free) than what you propose.

If someone demonstrates an ability to make use of this world-wide army of
reporters and make quality news out of it, with links to actual sources
including context, relevant sections of video on the same page, etc., I would
pay for that.

Right now, online publishers are still caught up in earning money from
advertising, so they won't link externally.

Getting back quality will require both substantial talent and investment.

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MK999
i heard someone describe trolling as a last resort when your opponents refuse
to debate you

