[TraceWoodgrains]

Oh hey, cool to see my article here. If anyone has questions or wants further details on anything, I'm happy to stick around this thread for a bit. I've paid altogether too much attention to this saga; glad it's going to some use.

[redleggedfrog]

I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos.

One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.

I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.

[shephardjhon]

yes, my question is, WHAT should have tipped the journalists off? If this was some elaborate puzzle what were the actual clues? or are they just supposed to dismiss anything that "sounds" unusual. And that goes for both cases, the bounty hunters and the trans one. Your article claims it was "obvious" but you NEVER mention WHY it was obvious

[TraceWoodgrains]

Dismiss anything that sounds unusual outright? No. Apply extra scrutiny to things that sound unusual? Absolutely. If they had even googled /r/txbountyhunters, they would have found a rDrama thread early in the results talking about it. If they had looked through the accounts at all, they would have found indications that they weren't conservative pro-life Christians from Texas. Same with the trans one. A number of the pictures were re-used from random sources. Commenters in both often had absurdist/troll-ish usernames, they would make extreme and erratic comments - the signs were all over the place.

More to the point, the satire is obvious because the posts are absurd, over-the-top, and deeply implausible. Spray-painting your baby's mouth and crushing hormone pills to put in your teenager's food, then bragging about it on reddit, are not things people do. Writing a meandering post in southern vernacular about bounty hunting your sex partner is not a thing people do. Do people do insane things sometimes? Yes. But when you want to use a genuinely insane thing as evidence for any sort of political message, you should put more work into it than just assuming whatever outlandish story someone's spinning online that happens to be perfect culture war fuel is truth.

A minimal level of fact-checking and scrutiny would have been enough in this case.

[shitlord]

The funniest part about this is that reddit censors all posts/comments linking to rdrama.net, aiding the trolls. Even if someone wanted to expose the trolling, they couldn't.

[shephardjhon]

The only tangible clue you mentioned that didn't rely on "it sounds absurd" was the fact that it was initially cross posted with r/Drama and I agree with you on that point. If journalists could easily see that, they should have looked into what it was.

If the "joke" is supposed to be similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does, this isn't enough. Like his Erran Moorad stuff, a reasonable person would look up his claims before sitting in for an interview or "training" with him and asking for 3 year olds to be given guns. In Borat 2, the disguises seemed to be intentionally bad.

Most importantly, at the end of the joke he came out to the world and said it WAS a joke and publicized that it was a joke. What r/Drama is doing is less like a joke and more just ways to basically start a civil war. If they were genuine clowns and cultural critics like Cohen(who is literally a classical clown according to Wisecrack) they would come out and proudly declare it in public.

[jjk166]

> WHAT should have tipped the journalists off? If this was some elaborate puzzle what were the actual clues? or are they just supposed to dismiss anything that "sounds" unusual.

Their inability to verify the claims. The proper approach to journalism is to neither dismiss nor accept claims, but to investigate them. If the investigation yields a story, you publish the evidence collected; if it's a dead end then nothing gets published. In this case, the journalists clearly never did any actual investigation.

[shephardjhon]

>Their inability to verify the claims This is circular logic.

[chipotle_coyote]

Definitely an interesting article. Have a clap or two. (I have no idea what that's worth on Medium anymore.)

I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.

[redleggedfrog]

I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos.

One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.

I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Did you leave a word out here:

> I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke")

Should read and not immediately?

[chipotle_coyote]

You are correct! I am ___ always the best proofreader. :)

[mzs]

FWIW I didn't see any of the journalists I follow amplify this, nor did I see any articles in credible outlets fall for this.

[RheingoldRiver]

Hi! Not at all related to the content at all, but here's an article about accessibility and link display text that I send to anyone and everyone I see not following the standards: https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/links

tl;dr: don't have display texts like "here" or "this" or "this comment" etc, it's bad for people who use screenreaders, and super easy to fix, but almost no one knows about this issue, which is why I go around spamming people about it.

I also encourage everyone reading this to start spamming this advice to everyone you encounter!

[TraceWoodgrains]

Reasonable advice; I'll see about applying it in the future. Cheers!