An amusing read, but the overbearing narcissism (I did this; something happened; that something is therefore caused by my action) makes it hard to read as a rational argument and not a psychoanalysis case study.
This is where I saw the author being a blackhatter parading as a greyhatter. Or maybe even worse, a blackhatter who doesn't know he's a blackhatter.
The idea that increasing the noise/signal ratio (ie: "make them eat more butterflies") is going to cause Facebook and their ilk to see the flaw in reasoning is not only malicious (Milo's 20,000 fake followers + residuals did not go away), but it also betrays a profoundly scary naivete over the subject matter.
It makes it worse when you write off your body of work as "for research" but fail to set up a methodology more complex than "provoke social justice people into attacking each other, algorithmically."
The entire piece neglects to consider the "rm monkey" ie: the trolls that don't have such motives but chaos. Some of us, growing up, just liked to see systems implode. He surrounds himself with them on 4chan but fails to recognize the complexity of their brigading.
The author, a self-perceived "arbiter of truth" waving his scepter (an infantile of scripts), finds himself far more intelligent than both his merry band of trolls on 4chan, Google/Facebook, and protected groups all at the same time - but he may be wrong on all 3 accounts.
Dunning Krueger is not understanding that many on 4chan prefer the butterfly war.
The author performed all of this during a three year period, I believe.
If ego was the only driving focus, wouldn't he have revealed himself earlier? Especially during the rise of alt-right micro-celebrities? How can you be a mere narcissist with a Hollywood background and completely avoid intentionally giving yourself the limelight?
Are you implying this was part of some cyber-phrenological attack to poison the "predator"? Or something? Pardon my ignorance, as my attempts to understand just what the hell cyber phrenology is all about is a bit stymied by the fact that this theory reads like a William Gibson novel...
The Butterfly War describes a theory of meta data warfare that forces a predator to change its behavior and target people it's been trained not to target.
In this case, the connection between Silicon Valley and national security apparatuses are so hypervigilant, everyone in the anaylsis pipeline accepted the meta data that arrested this guy to be sufficient.
The Butterfly War teaches you how to put anyone you want into that pipeline.
I'm with you so far. What I'm wondering is if you're saying this Palestinian guy was "put into the pipeline" by someone performing such a metadata attack, since he seems at first glance to fit the profile of someone the security apparatus would target anyway.
I think the correlation is that if the metadata-to-securiry response pipeline is incorrectly targeting people it is already biased against, then this is proof that the pipeline can also incorrectly target the people it is biased to ignore.
A single blackhatter posing as a greyhatter (read: "I did it for 'research purposes'" shortsightedly) can cause massive social disruption - and Facebook holds no culpability.