J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
Troll
Good morning. It’s Monday morning, February 20, 2017, and this is J. Neil Schulman with commentary.
Today the Internet Movie Data Base — IMDb — deleted all its discussion boards. These were message boards for starting topics and posting replies on movies, television, and individuals who were credited in movies and television.
In 1999, seven years before I listed Lady Magdalene’s, my first movie, on IMDb, I started and replied to comments in the IMDb message boards. I found the discussions collegial and enjoyable.
IMDb.com is a division of Amazon.com, as is Withoutabox.com, a service for submitting independent films for festival play. IMDb encouraged indie filmmakers such as myself to make as much use of IMDb as possible to promote our films, including posting background info in the IMDb message boards.
So I did, and that’s when the message boards turned into a nightmare for me.
Withoutabox asked first-time directors to fill out a survey and encouraged us to share it to the IMDb message boards. One of the questions was obvious: what movie directors did we consider influences? I answered with my favorites: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Preminger.
The next thing I knew was a spate of messages: “Schulman thinks he’s the next Kubrick, Hitchcock, Preminger!”
Anything I replied after that was a Chinese finger trap: the harder I tried to pull away the tighter it held me.
From that day in 2006 through the shut down of the IMDb message boards today I was followed by what I soon learned were “trolls” — anonymous writers using multiple “sock puppet” accounts — who worked to destroy the lives and works of anyone working in the film or television business that they could.
Did it require any actual reasons? I don’t know. I think it might be that it was the use of power for the sake of power. They did it because they could and it felt good to feel empowered, even if it was only the power to destroy. I don’t think any personal animus was even required.
I was a prime target. I was accused of making up the film-festival awards Lady Magdalene’s won. I was accused of writing the positive reviews my movie received, or having my friends write them. When I announced Kevin Sorbo would be starring in Alongside Night I was accused of lying about it.
IMDb has user ratings for movies that have started play, ratings from one to ten. The trolls used their multiple accounts so that overnight hundreds of “1” ratings appeared for both my movies on days the movie had played nowhere for months, and from countries where the movie had never been seen. These ratings are quoted all over the Internet, including on Amazon’s own catalog pages.
Positive user reviews were called “fake” and downvoted while negative user reviews were lauded by dozens of accounts.
Complaints on “Help” boards just increased the trolling exponentially. Asking for help from IMDb staff did too, convincing me that some of the trolls worked inside IMDb, and that IMDb was encouraging trolls to increase the site’s traffic — likely as a statistic IMDb management could show the parent company, Amazon.
It didn’t stop at IMDb. The trolls went to Amazon when Lady Magdalene’s first appeared as a streaming video and a DVD, and dozens of killer one-star reviews appeared, many with the exact same paragraphs, word for word. The trolls found my books and started trashing them, too. I pulled Lady Magdalene’s off sale from Amazon for several years in an attempt to mitigate the damage to my overall reputation.
I was accused of writing my own Wikipedia article and that was stripped of almost all true bio info posted by my fan base, replaced by vicious falsehoods put there by my detractors.
I’ve written about most of this before. Why am I bringing it up again now? To gloat that the IMDb trolls have to find another swamp to infest?
No.
I’m here to point out that trolling has become mainstream. The issue is no longer destruction of indie filmmakers on a now-defunct entertainment media message board. It’s that IMDb was a Potemkin Village to train an army of mainstream pundits who are now using the same strategy and tactics to destroy political opponents.
Milo Yiannopoulos has made a meal out of outrageous behavior, trolling liberals on college campuses and in the media by pretending to dark positions only because doing so triggers them. It became unfunny when it resulted in rioting, vandalism, and arson.
Richard Spencer giving a Nazi salute to Donald Trump was similarly performance art designed to gain attention by feeding into the Never-Trump narrative that Trump was surrounding himself with bigots. Spencer is a low-grade tribalist whose nationalism is so wimpy no actual historical Nazi — or even neo-Nazi — would be as broad-minded and inclusive. He’s a poseur.
So we get from the little fish to the whale.
Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, is now reduced to being me, with his hand stuck in the Chinese finger trap.
TV comics — Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher, John Oliver, even the “nice guys” Jimmy Fallon and James Corden — have turned their shows into non-stop Trump Trolling. Saturday Night Live has become Trump Trolling Central.
The mainstream news media do to Trump exactly what the IMDb trolls did to me: find nothing good and spin everything bad, even when you’re saying something the trolls had previously stated as their own position.
Trump trolls the trolls back like I tried to do, only he has an immensely bigger fan base than I ever had. But Trump has counter-trolling skill sets I never had.
When Kellyanne Conway misspoke and made a reference to a non-existent Bowling Green Massacre, the news, commentary and comedy media obssessed on it for days.
I think Trump has a learning curve.
So in a Florida rally when President Trump referred to something horrific in Sweden that also never happened, these same media jumped on the red meat again. I don’t think this second time was accidental. I think it’s a calculated diversionary strategy to move the attention-deficit news cycle away from the false narrative — already refuted by Julian Assange — that Russia put Trump in power.
My friend, writer, filmmaker, publisher Brad Linaweaver, has been warning me for years of the destructive potential of the Internet. I always argued back that without the Internet I would be completely invisible since the major mainstream media — right, left, and even libertarian — tend to downplay me if not marginalize me completely.
But when I see how this destructive creature of the Internet has now spread to all other media — when I see a civil war between a crazy far left and a demented far right — I see Brad’s point.
I see the remaining sane libertarians who haven’t been body-snatched by puppet masters already, drowning in a polluted ocean between them.
Changing metaphors, as I must:
The IMDb troll is now the size of Godzilla, and God save Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, and us all.
February 20, 2017 - 7:49 pm
Agree or not Tucker Carlson did a major segment on crimes including rape being committed by Muslim refugees in Sweden. Tucker Carlson also covered the studied politically correct denial common amongst Swedes (except the infidel victims). There was no misstatement nor cunning strategy by Trump re:Sweden. The major media is simply ignorant and/or naïve about what is going on in Sweden.
February 20, 2017 - 8:03 pm
It’s not mutually exclusive for Trump to be trolled for his comment on an incident in Sweden which really happened weeks earlier, and Trump playing media chess well enough deliberately to refer to the incident as being “yesterday” to throw red-meat in front of the media who will obsess on ridiculing Trump — thus distracting them from their usual lying narrative about Trump having been installed as a Russian puppet,
February 21, 2017 - 4:48 am
There is no “incident” in Sweden recent or otherwise. There are simply the now well known, on-going result of admitting many 1000s of primitive Islamics (as opposed to modern “cultural” Muslims) into a nation.
Trump speaks very imprecisely. I don’t know for sure if he does it purposely or accidentally (it works!), but in this case, I’d suspect he didn’t watch the Tucker segment carefully and only “got the gist.” Thus, he thought a specific incident was mentioned.
February 21, 2017 - 4:52 am
Tucker did a follow-up last night, interviewing a Swedish reporter and the American Ambassador, both comically committed to denying the obvious: Primitive Islamics think it is OK to have sex by force with infidel women. Their views on sex are supported in the Koran in which it is stated that Allah allows such behavior with “captives of the right arm”.
February 21, 2017 - 4:53 am
Oh, Tucker is too politically correct himself to point-out the support for rape of infidels in the Koran. You need to go to Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch for that.
February 21, 2017 - 4:57 am
The “modern” Islamic, I gather, would point-out that it is not up to individual Muslims to decide they are at war with the infidel and may take captives and make concubines. Such war must be authorized by Muslim authorities. On the other hand, it is pretty easy to find “radical Imams” that have authorized war base on the support of the West for Israel or the invasions of Islamic lands.
February 21, 2017 - 5:02 am
It should be noted that based on the Koran and most Islamic tradition, puritanical sexual standards, strict honesty, charity, etc. are reserved for relations with the Muslim faithful, not infidels, especially atheists and polytheists. Christians and Jews are to get a measure of fair treatment ONLY if they submit to Muslim rule and pay the Jizya (special tax on Christians and Jews).
February 21, 2017 - 5:07 am
Re: Milo. It is weird, but I still have not heard from his lips, or repeated, a single outrageous statement he has made. He seems to me to be a standard individualist libertarian. Am I missing something?
February 21, 2017 - 5:10 am
I don’t really disagree with your point in the article, however. It IS almost impossible to have an honest argument any longer with the Left or defenders of the Establishment, either. Opponents seem to argue STRICTLY by lying or mischaracterizing.
February 21, 2017 - 5:16 am
Are these statists self-aware of what they are doing or are they so deep into demonizing their opponents that they believe they know by telepathy what said “opponents” really think and argue only with that?
February 23, 2017 - 3:58 pm
So it’s either ironic, or an indication that Trump had some advance intelligence, or that Trump has psychic foresight or is a time-traveler, that two days after his comments in Florida about an incident in Sweden there were riots in a Muslin neighborhood.
February 23, 2017 - 4:02 pm
Well of course a few days after I published this article a year-old interview with Milo was used by CPAC to revoke his speaker’s slot, by Breitbart to force his resignation as an editor, and by Simon & Schuster to cancel an upcoming book.
Conservatives show themselves as precisely politically correct as the Social Justice Warrior left Milo was opposing.
And the left revels in the destruction of their enemy while libertarians ignore the issue because the only enemy is the State and this was not done by the State.
Sheesh.