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from the Garbage-in-garbage-in-garbage-in-and-more-garbage-in dept.
At the The Verge:
Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong's The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.
After a year on The Verge's staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah's old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.
[...] The Internet of Garbage provides an immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it. Sarah has long planned to publish an updated and expanded second edition, but in this particular moment, I am pleased that she's allowed us to publish this interim edition with a new preface.
In that new preface, Sarah stresses that her original text was written from a place of optimism. But the years since have not been kind to internet culture. She writes that the tactics of Gamergate, so clearly on display during the harassment campaign waged against her over the last few weeks, have "overtaken our national political and cultural conversations." That new culture is driven by the shape of the internet and the interactions it fosters. "We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas," she writes.
I hope everyone with a true and sincere interest in improving our online communities reads The Internet of Garbage and contends with the scope of the problem Sarah lays out in its pages. We are making the entire text of The Internet of Garbage 1.5 available for free as a PDF, ePub, and .mobi ebook file, and for the minimum allowed price of $.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Below, we have excerpted Chapter 3, "Lessons from Copyright Law."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @07:08PM (2 children)
Ironically, I left slashdot because of the racist libertarians, and I figured a smaller community would have less room for them to hide.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:13PM
True, there is less room for them to hide which makes them even more visible! They've driven off a lot of other users by brigading heavily. If they can't win on merit they'll "win" by spamming and shitposting until the dissenting voices are gone.
I don't want to see this site die as I believe in the original goals, but until the more moderate libertarians / conservatives push back against the trolls then those trolls will feel comfortable here. Clean up your house SN conservatives, just ACCEPT that you have a serious infestation of TERRIBLE people and start standing against them. The rest of us are just tired of the same old garbage defending propaganda and ignorance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @11:09PM
You honestly think Libertarians are racist? After our to and fro, I think you're racist! [youtube.com] Progressive outlets like Vox (who own the verge) are undeniably racist. [youtube.com] You doth protest too much, I think that you ikanreed are a racist!