Government statement as propaganda, news article as propaganda, police leak as propaganda, opinion poll as propaganda….and comment thread trolling as propaganda
I have just taken great pleasure in expunging a professional troll from The Slog. The bloke’s history is as follows:
1. He first of all hijacked the ID of another innocent threader.
2. He then threaded 18 negative comments about exposés I’d posted.
3. When challenged, he launched an obscenely abusive response.
4. On investigation, he turned out to have used 17 different IP addresses while threading 18 comments. No genuine threader needs 17 different IP addresses.
This was what he posted at The Slog this morning when I asked him why he’d referred to me as ‘Pure Evil’:
Over the last two years, my experience of organised trolling has been as follows:
* All but one of them was America based; the one exception was from Belgium.
* All of them used abuse of fellow threaders to wreak maximum havoc on the site.
In the end of course, one cannot be entirely certain who’s paying them – or exactly why.
But what’s increasingly obvious is this: the media – and I mean all media – have become little more than receptacles for deliberate obfuscation and insidious ambiguity.
24/7 vigilance is required.
The Slog 