Abstract
Does the social web permit the spread of rumours and propaganda or the creation of collective critical spaces where they are rapidly tested and disarmed? By looking at what happens when moderation fails and online discussion is ‘colonised’ by professional political communicators, Smith demonstrates how the publicness of comments spaces renders them both vulnerable and self-regulating. Drawing on pragmatism and ANT, the chapter recounts a successful collective investigation to weed out political trolls with fake profiles along two parallel lines, mapping the semantic history of an item of discussion slang alongside the evolution of routines for controlling online discussion from zonation to traceability. It suggests some preconditions for activating the social web’s affordances as a facilitator and not a simulator of critical testing and proving.
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Notes
- 1.
Recall that alerters are not obliged to add a written justification and usually only tick one of the four standard categories – vulgarism, personal attack, racism/xenophobia or advertising/spam.
- 2.
In the sense of turning an activity into paid employment.
- 3.
Personal attacks are one of the four categories of practices banned by the SME codex.
- 4.
The timeline also places three key events, whose significance will be explained in the following sections.
- 5.
In most cases they came from the target, and administrators might therefore give some weight to subjective perceptions of harm.
- 6.
The blog section has a strict real name policy.
- 7.
The job changed hands in January 2015.
- 8.
For a more detailed account of the brigádnik controversy as a series of ‘alerts’ and ‘affairs’ in the media and the blogosphere see Smith (2014).
- 9.
- 10.
Following Beblavý’s first rule they started to scrutinise the discussion below articles about leading personalities in Smer-SD.
- 11.
http://branik.blog.sme.sk/c/341131/Zachrante-blogera-Mareka-Albrechta.html [accessed 8.7.16].
- 12.
Digital identities often come equipped with the kind of ‘external memory’ (Torny 1998: 57), or metadata, that public health specialists have to arduously construct, for example by getting victims to fill out questionnaires about their movements and contacts.
- 13.
Such a crowd may not be a community, but it is ‘assembled in the interests of community’ (Proulx and Heaton 2011).
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Smith, S. (2017). Defending the Authenticity of Online Public Spheres. In: Discussing the News. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52965-3_6
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