White hat or critical grey hat trolling? Trolling as art? Trolling as hybrid warfare? Trolling as propaganda? In this Fireside Hax, we will challenge your assumptions about trolling. Trolls are attention hackers, using social and technical means to bait journalists, set agendas, game media gatekeepers, and direct audiences. Sometimes they also have fun. We will discuss a range of trolling techniques like sockpuppeting, dogpiling, doxing, attention honeypots, and cognitive denial of service attacks that we have not seen concisely catalogued elsewhere. We will also discuss high-profile examples of trolling such as"training" the Microsoft Tay chatbot, fake Antifa accounts, Russian sockpuppet accounts, and Phineas Fisher's use of Hacking Team's twitter account--and ask attendees to consider each as black hat attacks or grey hat attempts to point out critical societal vulnerabilities that should be"patched." We will also talk about"troll the troll" accounts like ImposterBuster and YesYoureRacist and the role"white hat trolls" might play in auditing platforms or proposing platform-based controls. Time permitting, we will discuss art projects that trollishly critiqued the European Commission, Google AdSense, and the NSA. This will not be a lecture and it will not shy away from controversy. Join two members of the Media Manipulation Team at Data & Society to collectively consider the role trolling can play in pointing out the flaws in our attention/media landscape.
Matt Goerzen studies trolling techniques and cultures as part of the Media Manipulation team at Data & Society. He's also applied many of the techniques in the art world, for example by once developing an absurdist AdSense campaign ostensibly designed to sell a hideous sculpture to art collector Shaquille O'Neal, but more accurately designed to piggyback off of free clickbait media attention to inform readers about psychometric ad tech practices. He has written an academic study of contemporary artists who function as what he calls"critical trolls," arguing that trolling can be seen as an extension of the politicized attentional strategies used by the 20th-century avant-garde. His current work at Data & Society focuses on mapping the way white supremacists and state actors have appropriated trolling techniques for use in influence operations as a form of"bottom-up agenda setting.
Jeanna Matthews is an associate professor of Computer Science at Clarkson University and a 2017-18 fellow at Data and Society where she has been collaborating with the Media Manipulation team. She was a speaker and DEF CON 23 and 24, both times on the topic of vulnerabilities in virtual networks. Her broader research interests include virtualization, cloud computing, computer security, computer networks, operating systems and algorithmic accountability and transparency. Jeanna received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. @jeanna_matthews
Joan Donovan is the Media Manipulation/Platform Accountability Research Lead at Data and Society in Manhattan. After completing her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, where she researched white supremacists' use of DNA ancestry tests, social movements, and technology. For several years, Joan has conducted action research with different networked social movements in order to map and improve the communication infrastructures built by protesters. In her role as a participant, she identifies information bottlenecks, decodes algorithmic behavior, and connects organizations with other like-minded networks.