Social media is inherently asymmetric. That observation shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, most of us have a very small number of followers, but some people command the attention of hundreds of thousands or even millions.
But the asymmetry of social media cuts both ways. Ask anyone who has ever been the target of a harassment mob, and they'll tell you all about it.
A popular technique used by Internet trolls and mob-harassers is called Sea-Lioning, which involves (often multiple) throwaway accounts demanding answers to a tired line of loaded questions, usually while maintaining the veneer of civility.
Even when a victim is successful dealing with sea-lioning, it can be very exhausting and draining for them to do so.
Which brings us to FAQ Off, an open source toolkit for undermining the tactics of trolls and harassment mobs.
FAQ Off Aims to Invert the Exploitable Asymmetry of Social Media
It used to be the case that you had two options:
- Engaging with a (potentially large) number of boring Internet trolls who are not acting in good faith.
- Say nothing and let their replies pollute your community with their toxicity, thereby tacitly endorsing the radicalization of your friends.
With FAQ Off, you're given a third choice: Take control of the narrative by writing responses to their questions, and the obvious follow-ups to those questions, and so on recursively. And then, all current and future iterations of the same tired line of questioning can be answered by a simple hyperlink instead of wasting your time again.
If this sounds confusing, how about a demonstration? Here's a URL you can link people in response to them saying, "I hate furries.": https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/i-hate-furries
FAQ Off is the cross-product of Q&A sessions with text adventure games.
Here's another demo. This one deals with common misconceptions about VPN services: https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/cryptography/which-vpn-service-will-protect-me-from-hackers
Of course, if you'd prefer the dog-fooded explanation for this project, read here instead.
Write once, link ad nauseum
If you're in touch with the news and recent events, you may be concerned by the trend of anti-intellectualism that's taken hold for the past decade or so.
If nothing else, FAQ Off may provide a platform for experts to automate the uninteresting conversations debunking common myths and falsehoods that perpetuate the 24-hour breaking news cycle and tabloid journalism so they can focus instead on providing actual insight into their area of expertise.
The sky is the limit.
What Are FAQ Off's Features?
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Interactive Question and Answer Website:
- Guide your readers to the answers to their question.
- Short-circuit common lines of disruptive discourse. Write once, answer ad nauseum!
- HTML and Markdown Support
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Troll and Spam Defense:
- Administrators can enable "invite only" mode, which requires an invitation code from an existing user to sign up.
- The invitation tree: Administrators can see who invited who, to identify common entry points of misbehaving users to curate their own community.
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Collaboration:
- Users can share an Author profile with colleagues and publish as a group.
- Users can belong to an unlimited number of Authors.
- Authors can share access to an unlimited number of users, or just one.
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Security:
- Entries are written in HTML / Markdown and processed by HTML Purifier to protect against cross-site scripting attacks.
- Passwords are stored securely, or you can use Twitter.
- Your username or Twitter handle is only knowable by administrators.
A randomly generated
Public IDis provided to keep your login handle and/or Twitter handle anonymous to everyone else.
Where Can I Find It?
FAQ Off is on Github: https://github.com/soatok/faq-off
Top comments (13)
Saving this! Your project looks awesome.
Huh. "Sea lioning." So THAT is what it's called! One of my regular answers to sea-lioning is "I am not obligated to put my important tasks on hold to do the research you are too lazy to do yourself. If you care so much about the counterpoint, look it up yourself. You clearly have the time I don't." (That reverses the psychological tactic: at that point, most trolls will back off, lest they label themselves as lazy by their own flawed heuristic.)
I will sometimes ask people for sources, too, but I handle it quite differently. "I've seen X and Y (counterpoints). Do you happen to have a link/source on that? I'm curious." Sometimes also, "You should look into that a bit more for yourself. I think you may have overlooked X and Y." But I try to let it go beyond that! Life ain't Wikipedia.
I just thought of one more doozy of a shutdown re: sea-lions.
Maybe even just upload the sea lion graphic posted and say, "arf arf, goes the sea lion!"
But only if it's clear they're arguing in bad faith.
But then, there's FAQ Off now!
What an innovative project. I love the thought that went into making it!
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