When you express yourself in here, you expose yourself out there to hate. Say your piece on social media and you might incite a war. Make your mark online and you might make yourself a target. Dark Net s1e7: Provoke
Trolls post how-to guides. They praise each other’s work and look to one another for inspiration. ibid.
Sometimes it’s fun to just go wild and rape a hundred girls. The Warwick Uni Rape Chat Scandal, social media, BBC 2019
Which girl at Uni would you like to pin down the most? ibid.
The pure unadulterated misogyny that runs through that I would never class as banter. ibid. Dianne Whitfield, Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre
11 Warwick students temporarily suspended after group chat exposed. ibid. The Boar 8th May 2019, Warwick uni newspaper
14-year-old girl gunned down by teen she had been feuding with on Facebook over a boy. Requiem for the Dead: American Spring 2014, caption, Sky Atlantic 2017, Madame Noire online
In 2009 eighteen-year-old student Gemma Barker invented three fictitious boys. In disguise as these boys Gemma seduced two of her best friends. The Girl Who Became Three Boys, Channel 4 2012
This is a story of sex and deception, a story that made headlines around the world. It’s a story of a crime that begins on social networking sites. The victims were two innocent teenage girls. ibid.
Jessica, Alice and Gemma became close friends. ibid.
Aaron’s Facebook page presented a picture of a fit and attractive young man. ibid.
Gemma decided that Jessica ought to have a boyfriend of her own; one new Facebook account later and she’d created Luke Jones, a friend of Aaron. ibid.
By the end of 2009 Gemma had two alter-egos: Aaron Lampard and Luke Jones complete with Facebook pages and networks of fictional friends. ibid.
Gemma pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault and one of fraud ... Gemma was sent to prison for two and a half years. ibid.
Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, ‘I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!’ Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays
Without us the internet would be a mess. We delete images, videos and texts which violate the rules of the social media. Most of the material that we check here comes from Europe and the US. Storyville: The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners, email extract, BBC 2019
There are smaller units in other countries but Philippines is the biggest one. There are thousands of workers here. ibid.
Our task is to monitor and moderate the user-based content. I help people. I stop the spreading of child exploitation. I have to identify terrorism. Have to step the cyber bullying. Algorithms can’t do what we do. ibid.
‘We have about 10,000 people who are working on safety and security generally and we’re committed to investing more – doubling that number by the end of 2018.’ ibid. Colin Stretch, Facebook
There’s a list of 37 terrorist organizations we have to ban. That list comes from Homeland Security in the US. ibid. email extract
Certainly I’m not going to sit on the internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge. Eminem
November 29th 2009: a quiet town in Cheshire is rocked by the discovery of a woman’s body. Her suspect is on the run, and the clues to the murder are on a social networking site. Social networks have become a twenty-first century global phenomenon, but in wrong hands there is a dark side. In the space of a year five British women were brutally murdered, all of them linked to the sinister misuse of a social network. Murder on the Social Network, 2011
The police discover that Chapman had ten social networking accounts and six thousand young female friends. ibid.
‘We know that what we’re doing matters to a lot of people.’ Horizon: Inside the Social Network: Facebook’s Difficult Year, worker, BBC 2019
For a company called Facebook you rarely get to see the faces behind the app. These are the people in charge of the biggest social media network in the world, and with nearly a third of all humans plugged into their platform it’s an experiment that comes with an enormous risk. ibid.
Data links, fake news and hacks on user security are threatening to destroy everything they’ve built, as Facebook has suffered a year of deepening scandals and intense media scrutiny. ibid.
They’ve grown a business in just fifteen years worth half a trillion dollars. ibid.
Their early mantra: Move Fast and Break Things. ibid.
They are hiring more engineers at a staggering rate. ibid.
Two teenage boys living ordinary lives in an ordinary suburb of Manchester. But beneath the surface their friendship is anything but ordinary. It leads them into a world of intrigue, deception, betrayal, a world of glamorous secret agents and deadly forfeits, a world from which the only escape is that one of the boys murder his best friend. Psycho: Kill Me If You Can, Channel 4 2005
Mark’s explanation: he’s an agent from the British secret service codename 407695: he told them he’d been recruited by a spy-mistress over the internet and instructed to kill his friend. ibid.
Mark was using the chatroom to make new friends in the Manchester area. ibid.
Even though Mark only had Rachel’s words to go on he declared his love for her across the chatroom. ibid.
At first nobody in the chatroom believed that Kevin really was a gay stalker … Kevin emailed Mark saying that he’d kidnapped his virtual girlfriend Rachel … Kevin announced that he’d released Rachel as promised … Rachel stopped communicating altogether. ibid.
16-year-old Mark and 14-year-old John were becoming best friends. ibid.
She [Janet] made him swear an oath [to the Queen] across the chatroom. ibid.
Mark … received his final instructions from Janet … to terminate James Bell – his friend John. ibid.
Mark takes out the knife: he drive it deep into John’s stomach; as he does so he tells John that he loves him. ibid.
Mark only had one – when was Janet going to turn up? ibid.
All the characters were in fact invented by the same person: whoever it was, they had incited John’s murder … The police finally had a suspect – John. ibid.
Amanda Todd, the teenager from BC, whose very name is synonymous with bullying, suicide and loss. Tonight: the never before told story of the man accused of stalking her online. How many more victims would there be? The Fifth Estate: Stalking Amanda Todd: The Man in the Shadows, CBC 2014
The story of Amanda Todd’s torment begins in the Netherlands. The teenager and her tormentor divided by continents but connected by the internet. This is the story of one Dutch man who authorities say would bully and blackmail the BC teen without ever leaving his home in Holland. He lived his life in the shadows. ibid.
They’re a new breed of cyber predators who capture the girls’ images. ibid.
Norway: he was carefully planning to ruin another girl’s life … The police were closing in. ibid.
Amanda’s death would kick that investigation into overdrive. ibid.
The arrival of social media was the next step in this evolution … Governments and militaries were even quicker in recognising the potential to use this new medium to more effectively spread their own propaganda. Their goal: to shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geo-political objectives. Their method: the weaponization of social media. The Corbett Report, The Weaponization of Social Media, James Corbett online 2018
Social media was designed specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and keep you addicted to your screen. ibid.
The social media purge. The crackdown. Obviously the largest name, the big example, that everyone will point to is of course Alex Jones. The Corbett Report, Problem Reaction Solution: Internet Censorship Edition, James Corbett online 19.07
The false dichotomy … underlying assumption … the public’s fear is now Twitter and Facebook … We have got to get government in to regulate … It’s factually wrong. ibid.
He’s actually getting up there and calling for online censorship and suppression of political speech, and de-platforming people he disagrees with … It is laughable. The Corbett Report: Sacha Baron Cohen is Wrong About Everything, James Corbett online 2019
‘We have created tools that are ripping about the social fabric of how society works.’ The Corbett Report: Delete Your Social Media, James Corbett online 2022, Chamath Palihapitiya
Reflect on our time spent in mediated reality and what that really means. ibid.
Why am I on Twitter? … Hatred: it really does amp things up … It creates a lot of drama and these kind of conflicts … The message of Twitter is, I hate you. ibid.
Twitter is a waste of mind-time and is an addictive nonsense. ibid.