I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook

http://observer.com/2017/02/i-helped-create-the-milo-trolling-playbook-you-should-stop-playing-right-into-it/

by jseliger • 9 years ago

42 31 9 years ago

neotek2• 9 years ago

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...

bemmu• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

neotek2• 9 years ago

I didn't ever get the impression he was full of shit or bending the truth too far, but you're right, that could just be his skill at work! Either way, the book is engaging and funny and worth reading even if it's slightly apocryphal.

praptak• 9 years ago

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.

studentrob2• 9 years ago

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.

notatoad• 9 years ago

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.

PhantomGremlin• 9 years ago

Neither Milo or anybody else has a first amendment right to give a speech on a college campus.

UC Berkeley is a public University. It isn't as unfettered as a private school when it comes to restrictions on "speech".

daodedickinson2• 9 years ago

And I might expand this to consider any university accepting federal funds to be public for this particular purpose because the government shouldn't be funding universities that, for example, only allow one religion on campus.

flootch• 9 years ago

That's not true.

Berkeley allows student organizations to invite speakers. Berkeley is not allowed to discriminate against those speakers based on viewpoint.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/everyon...

The problem with this argument is that it was not Berkeley itself that invited Yiannopoulos. It was the Berkeley College Republicans, who are legally a separate entity. And as Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks explained, “long-standing campus policy permits registered student organizations to invite speakers to campus and to make free use of meeting space in the Student Union for that purpose.” So the issue is not whether Berkeley should have given Yiannopoulos a platform. It is whether Berkeley should have denied some of its students the ability to give him a platform. And “consistent with the dictates of the First Amendment as uniformly and decisively interpreted by the courts,” Dirks argued, “the university cannot censor or prohibit events, or charge differential fees.”
somebody were to tell Berkeley that they had to allow certain speakers,

Somebody has told Berkeley just that, the people speaking through the courts.

Here is more of the same from various Law Professors and Chancellors of UC

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/berkeley-milo-yiannopoulos-...

Campus officials at Berkeley recognized that Yiannopoulos had a First Amendment right to speak. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks rightly resisted demands, including from Berkeley faculty, to ban Yiannopoulos’ appearance.Even the expression of hate is constitutionally protected; court cases have addressed this very issue on college campuses in the past. Although hate speech unquestionably causes harms, it nonetheless is expression that is covered by the First Amendment. We therefore strongly disagree with those who say that campus officials at Berkeley could keep Yiannopoulos from speaking because of his hateful and offensive message.
Second, campuses must do all they can to ensure that audience reactions against a speaker are not allowed to silence the speaker. Free speech can be undermined, not only by official censorship and punishment, but also by individuals who seek to disrupt or shut down others when they attempt to exercise their rights. If officials do not work to prevent or punish disruption then there will be a “heckler’s veto” of all unpopular or controversial speakers, and this is not consistent with free speech principles. Campus officials have a duty to protect the free speech rights of protesters, but they must also protect speakers and prevent heckling. Apparently, this, too, occurred at Berkeley. Staff members spent weeks planning extensive security arrangements, including bringing in dozens of police officers from nine other UC campuses.
Third, there may be situations where controlling the audience proves impossible and there is no choice but to prevent a speaker’s presence to ensure public safety. This should be a last resort taken only if there is no other way to prevent a serious imminent threat to public safety. This appears to be exactly what occurred at Berkeley, where the riotous demonstrators could not be controlled. In such cases, authorities should do all they can, after the fact, to identify and punish those who used violence and violated the law, and should assess how different security arrangements might be more effective in preventing future disruptions. Campus officials should also do what they can to reschedule the speaker for another time.
By Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law, University of California, Irvine and Howard Gillman, Chancellor, University of California, Irvine

I encourage you to level up on your knowledge of and defense of free speech rights. Your repeating your mistruths may be part of the problem.

aaron6952• 9 years ago

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.

Exofunctor3• 9 years ago

Assuming Berkeley doesn't get public funding though?

Last year Berkeley got $370M in federal funding and $108M in state funding.

http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/berkeley-research-numbers

wpietri2• 9 years ago

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.

Exofunctor3• 9 years ago

Public universities do not have the right to restrict student activities based on politics. If a student organization is able to host one kind of political speaker, they should be able to host any kind of political speaker. Private universities can do whatever they want for all I care, but it's certainly against the spirit of free thought and scholasticism to intentionally discriminate based on politics.

There's also a distinction between the legal notion of free speech and the moral notion of free speech. The moral notion of free speech is that A) you shouldn't use violence to suppress people's ideas and B) if your ideas are so hot, you should be able to defend them instead of trying to deplatform competing ideas.

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.

Government agencies and organizations which choose to receive tax funding give up certain rights, among those the ability to discriminate in any capacity based on politics, religion, etc. If a Berkeley student group wanted to host a Satanist Nazi who endorsed eating babies, Berkeley would have no grounds to prevent them from doing so.

h4nkoslo• 9 years ago

The expression "bake my cake" comes to mind.

Somehow one faction has an inalienable right to compel speech from its ideological opponents out of pure spite, because sacred principles of antidiscrimination or whatever, but when it comes to giving a speech by express invitation, having raised the necessary funds for security etc, we are maximally minimalist about what a government institution has to allow.

studentrob2• 9 years ago

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...)

If one group invites a speaker to a public place, another group does not have the right to shut down the speech.

This is exactly the sort of misconception Milo is looking to expose in order to acquire defense on his behalf.

It is the only thing that gives him moral high ground. The rest of his arguments are hateful. His right to speak is protected.

Students' right to protest are also protected. Violence is not protected.

The right to tell somebody else to shut the hell up is an important part of free speech

False. You can ask them to shut up. You cannot force them.

Trump and his confederates would like to undo free speech and turn America into a de facto Christian state in order to fight against other religions. Today, it's Muslims. The proliferation of your argument will only help them dismantle free speech.

badwulf• 9 years ago

The right to tell somebody else to shut the hell up is an important part of free speech.

Woah, you better be careful with that double edged sword, because you might cut yourself.

So according to you: any angry mob that is large enough is allowed to shut down any speech they disagree with?

I find it amusing that so called liberals are so keen to silence people they disagree with them, yet they accuse the other side of being fascist, ohhh the irony.

imh• 9 years ago

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

Exofunctor3• 9 years ago

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.

gukov• 9 years ago

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156850873521/a-thought-experime...

probably_wrong• 9 years ago

Could you please explain what that link is about and why it's relevant to the discussion?

strainer2• 9 years ago

"they will probably be shot"

Im hopeful that is not really the case. Seems the general international experience is that shooting into riots is at least counter productive if not outright slaughter.

daodedickinson2• 9 years ago

Someone was shot when Milo came to U of Washington.

hackuser• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

"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...

MK999• 9 years ago

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

I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook

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