Who's Behind the Past Few Years' Campaigns of Character Assassination Anyway?
Siccing clinically crazy people at you while mandating you don't even use words that might remotely allude to the diagnosis
THE world is an increasingly complex place with perplexing species that roam the land and troll/abuse/harass/defame productive members of society. In recent months we saw personal attacks on Professor Eben Moglen - truly ridiculous attacks that we cannot say have stopped. It's less ample than before, but it is not over. It can easily be linked (professionally) to IBM, GAFAM etc.
Some of these attacks can be definitively traced back through the chain of money and roles, including employment history and sponsorships.
2024 will be a year of transparency. We now realise that our series exploring the matter might 'spill over' to 2025 (as well as 2026) because we have plenty of relevant material. We cover that stuff only after meticulous verification and sometimes we check with relevant parties if it's ready to publish. We need to expose the cult and its antics/tactics.
With strong and emotions-provoking words like "racist" or "sexist" getting thrown around (to trigger reflexes) one must verify for oneself all sorts of libellous hearsay spread mostly in social control media. That's what such pseudo 'media' is good at relaying very fast without any corrections post hoc. It's about destroying reputations using sockpuppets.
The concept of tearing down high-profile people or crushing activists using crazy people (who sometimes attempt to infiltrate) is hardly novel. It's not even a "Western" thing. Many books - and extensive literature in general - exists. Then there's also this aspect: (more to that effect in the context of Richard Stallman)
Social media has been blamed for breeding narcissists, but the fact of the matter is, narcissists have always existed. Social media has just given them an extra tool to terrorize people. Here are five ways malignant narcissists – those without empathy and with an excessive sense of entitlement – use social media to exploit, manipulate and destroy their victims:1. To triangulate.
Social media is a veritable playground for malignant narcissists. It gives them easy access to multiple victims and the ability to manufacture love triangles in covert, insidious ways. In order to understand how and exactly why narcissists use these platforms for such petty power plays, it’s essential that we remember that they tend to be insatiable in their attention-seeking and their desire to create harems of people who adore them. They will, of course, deny that they are doing this – and it’s easy to convince anyone who is suspicious of their behavior that such a focus on their online behavior is “crazy.”
There are some examples there which I can relate to personally because I had a defamation campaign set up against me in social control media. Fabricated accounts bearing my name and photo, even a fictional person claiming to be my ex. This defamatory material was disseminated using sites like Hacker News and people I know were approached by imposter accounts bearing my name, doing crazy stuff like hailing terrorists.
Anyway, we'll have plenty more to say about it throughout the year and, if this year isn't enough, next year as well. █