Begin at the beginning

When did I first encounter inauthentic internet comments?

I was aware of trolling and had seen comment threads in action enough through general surfing and occasional participation, I had never been a big Usenet person and it was already dying off by the time I started having a regular internet connection. So I knew what I was looking at to some extent but had never felt particularly inspired by involving myself in the internet. I had been an occasional LTE writer to my local paper even as a child and teenager however.

I used to occasionally screw around on message boards, mostly focused on humoring myself over having legitimate interactions. Often times I used the (now long-gone) IMDB message boards for this, making small jokes about movies I had seen or related topics, occasionally professing my lonely love for an actress of the moment, only occasionally serious in that context, despite living a life of relative seriousness in other senses, regularly demonstrating and volunteering for political causes and passionately caring about the state of the world.

As quaint as it sounds, once upon a time during the 2nd Bush’s presidency, watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC felt almost indie enough to be transgressive. It always seemed like he was about to bang a particular reporter he used to interview frequently, and I remember for whatever (I think lonely) reason this dynamic had become a part of my life, and I was regularly checking the Keith Olbermann IMDB comments, along with a few others by about 2004.

I remember seeing that board get trolled a few times over those years and pushing back against it, feeling like I was being helpful and applying myself by defending MSNBC from the already louder and more hostile Fox crowd. I remember thinking I might be good at it too, noticing immediately that my comments did not often see the same responses that many other people’s did. I assumed this difference in behavior from others, was due to my unique skills and stylistic decisions when I commented.

The fated moment I approximate as occurring around 2006, when I started checking other accounts comment histories and seeing what else they were writing. It often times provided great background and tools for winning debates, or at least impeaching credibility. Eventually, a Keith Olbermann troll’s bread crumbs led red handed back to the comment section for the Nicholas Cage movie “World Trade Center.”

I was a truther back then and it felt pretty real during the nadir of our racial-economic War on Terror. I at least was in favor of more research and analysis even if I wasn’t qualified by myself to explain the events of that day that was so clearly anticipated by generations of both spy thriller novels and CIA briefings, before somehow drawing living blood instead.

I was taken aback to find the WTC a riot of constant traffic at all hours, interrelated accounts having interrelated arguments, deleting and moving their activity around as fast as they could, coexisting with a large volume of pastiche attempts at humor and cultural relevance than tended to feel fake the moment you saw it. All of this occurring well before the advent or perceived need for internet commenting moderation, so that rhetorical success was exemplified in many ways by self-declared winners attempting to write their own histories. The closest similarity to anything else I ever saw on the internet was 4chan years later, but thankfully IMDB commenting was less scatological and creepy, as was the entire internet back then.

The WTC board was the first place I spent long enough with a serious enough mindset, to see and analyze the purpose of the other comments I was reading. From the outset I noticed that the volume of traffic was not matched by an equally diverse volume of opinion, and despite all the bubbling action and clearly telegraphed inside jokes, most of the actual informational debating about 9/11 was completely lopsided and sycophantically reflective of Bush’s talking points, which counterintuitively increased my interest as an opponent instead of pushing me away.

That’s where I first saw so many of the phenomenon I, along with many others, still identify in modern social media engagement. Fake traffic, fake jokes, fake arguments, fake user names, fake data, fake strawmen- not only did it feel reminiscent of an echo chamber even before that term was in wide use, but I also quickly got the impression that the goal of so many comments was not convince others but to silence and stifle them, to make the cost of expressing oneself adequately, too expensive in both time and mental health for open minded humans to afford.

The clear dichotomy between authentic attempts at debate success, and inauthentic messy petty division, is one of the timeless lessons of the modern internet I have been very thankful to understand early and thoroughly, and it dovetails cleanly with later revelations from both the Russian/Bannonite attempts to disrupt American civil society beginning around 2016, and the lessons I learned as a low level political organizer throughout the post-Bush era, as I was again and again reminded that best-case negative campaigning as a rule, does not win you votes but simply drives down turnout for your opponents.

Once the pieces fell into place it became impossible to not see it everywhere, omnipresent on social media just like in national and global political discourses- certain groups pushing for non-workable solutions, portraying compromise as weakness, attempting to incite and divide moderate inclusive voices. There is no need to win a debate if you eliminate the involvement of the other debaters first, and as the human activity drops off replacing it with structured and artificial activity allows the scourge of echo chamber mindsets to hide in the background instead of being front and center like they unfortunately should be.

From the WTC boards I moved on to become the #1 commenter on my town’s NBC affiliate news website throughout the Obama years, where as you might expect, the more things changed the more they stayed the same…

I even started a tiny free-hosted website as an attempt to begin tracking and communicating about inauthentic commenting behavior on these small town websites. Even though a huge % of the inauthentic activity was attacking moderation and engineering staff of the sites, when I attempted to defend the staffers and educate by linking to my project and explaining it to a wider audience using existing commenting infrastructure, I was universally deleted. Moderation, especially in the pre-Trump era, bristled at the implication that any commenting traffic was inauthentic and worked hard to maintain the charade that all users were unique and not organized by external actors.

Similarly, when I would attempt to respond to bigoted sarcasm and attacks regarding sexual and racial politics while never posting obscene or threatening content, I would often times be the one whose comments were deleted while leaving the OPs up. Moderation apparently did not have an interest in protecting civil society, or perhaps the moderation process had been hacked or co-opted to protect and maybe prioritize inauthentic use.