One of the easiest ways to strengthen a community against attacks is to shine a spotlight on the behaviors shown by people attempting to sabotage it. This is done by labor organizers in real life to strengthen a group of workers against union busting, for instance.

The term often used for this is “inoculation”. Similar to being vaccinated once you are aware of an attacker, the effectiveness of their behavior decreases.

So Hexbear comrades, what patterns have you noticed in wreckers, trolls, and feds? Comment in the thread and I’ll update this post to include your feedback.

Terminology

Troll

:troll:

Standard internet bog person. Not particularly clever or inventive. 4chan-tier. Nothing in their brain but slurs.

Wrecker

:silver-legion:

Typically fixated on the site, repeat and/or sustained activity. (Eg Pumpkin Spice Flintstone guy). Might be a reference to an old USSR term for saboteurs in the party?

Fed

:fedposting:

Rare (?). Tries to encourage illegal behavior. Bad at it. Often doing it just to see who corrects them and in what ways.

Patterns I’ve noticed

General

:cissues:

  • new account with slightly “off takes” that gradually becomes increasingly aggressive

  • “just asking questions”

  • “innocently” brings up incredibly specific past struggle sessions

  • tries to position obvious shitposts as sincerely held opinions that somehow reflect poorly on the site (eg “everyone loves hunter biden”)

  • attempts to take other user’s sentences out of context and spin it into an argument

Wrecker Types

Fresh Accounts without History (FAWH)

:amogus:

These are accounts created in the last few weeks with little to no activity FAWHs indicate ban avoidance, shell propaganda accounts, and/or a desire to hide a pointed agenda. Identify and counter this by checking post histories.

Defrosted FAWHs

:corporate-art:

These accounts behave similarly to FAWHs but show a much older registration date combined with long periods of low activity, reflecting history editing or dormancy. They will occasionally only have comments at or around the time of struggle sessions. Identify and counter this behavior by checking post histories.

Drive-by Accounts

:stupidpol:

These accounts post bigoted or inflammatory comments in active threads then delete/edit their comments a day or two after the submission dies to obscure the pattern of their activity.

This is hard to spot unless you check back in with your suspected trolls or seek them out by reviewing. If you catch them in the act it's hugely indicative of subversive intent.

Identify and negate this by monitoring suspected trolls for post deletion and reporting before they are deleted. Also quoting especially aggressive replies so they can’t edit it away.

I’ll update this based on other’s comments. Viva la Hexbear!

:hexbear-retro:

  • Kanna [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    You didn't. You're trying to downplay what you said and divert attention away from it as "a difference of opinions." Bodily autonomy is not a difference of opinions. It's clever to say my comment was bait in the hopes of shifting the conversation away from what you said, but I'm not gonna let go of that.

    • DumpsterDive [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I called it bait as a way of directly saying that I don't want to address it. I have no interest in lying and I also don't want to be banned. At the same time, I'm petty, so congrats I've taken the bait:

      There is no way the existing US government should not have federal protection on abortion, preferably one outside of the power of the Supreme Court, but otherwise on similar grounds (i.e. blanket protection). Looking at the nature of the government and the cultural lines that have been drawn, it is unlikely that anything other than blanket protections on abortion are a viable way of protecting abortion rights for women in the US, as anything else is vulnerable to chipping. On similar grounds, I have never seen a protection on abortion that any country has even proposed, much less enacted, as a bad thing, at least that I can remember offhand. I was overjoyed when it was passed in Ireland a few years ago, for instance (and I don't remember it making the US news in other countries since, though I could be forgetting).

      There's debate I guess about situations where eugenicist tried to give minorities abortion access in hopes of "population control" but, as far as I know in situations where it really was nothing but abortion access, the racists in question were accidentally helpful to the people they were trying to surpress. Obviously, such initiatives more often are paired with things like forced sterilizations, and that practice is bad and therefore we would need to take those campaigns as being bad, but abortion access is not the cause of that badness.

      My support for abortion protection being law is not grounded in liberal ideas about natural rights, but my best crack at socialist reasoning about women's liberation, which can be advanced with legal rights but which should not be mistaken for axioms about rights bestowed by God or "nature" or a priori or by any other means.

      Is that clear enough?