Slashdot Mirror
Trolling Al Qaeda... For Peace?
The Mister Purple writes "There is a small initiative underway to combat Islamic militant recruiting on the Internet... by trolling them. Quoting the article: 'The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace's creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use "logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them." Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.' So, does this mean that I'm promoting peace when I post YouTube comments?"
Because pissing people off is an effective way to get them to leave you alone.
it never worked on [Republicans, Democrats] (delete as per preference) so why should it work on fundies?
and do the obvious thing: stop bombing random countries in the middle east every four to eight years. Anyone whos read Osama Bin Ladens demand list knows that most of his argument is structured around the fact that we bomb indiscriminately most of the middle east, topple their governments, kill their nationals and foreign nationals with drones, prop up malevolent dictators and generally leave the countries we've "touched" a complete wreck. trolling for peace will be nearly as effective as the like button was for Kony2012.
the state department understands quite well we need al quaeda in some form, hence a plan thats effectively designed to bolster recruitment. Without a boogeyman we have no pretext to assert regional dominance, and that would mean we would have to double down on our iran rhetoric and face whats largely believed to be a capable opponent in a war no one would support. Everything since the carter foreign policy doctrine has completely screwed this country into ensuring we pound the snot out of some unsuspecting foreign nation in the gulf once a presidency, its just that we're running out of little guys to fight that dont have big teeth, or allies that simply wont tolerate the action.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think people reading too much into the description of the effort as "trolling".
Trolling on Usenet and sites like Slashdot is about provoking people who are otherwise engaged in reasoned, rational, discussions into flaming.
The Al Qaeda elements are presumably using weakly supported but not obviously wrong statements written to appeal to the emotions of would-be recruits and convince them that the irrational is reasonable. In other words, these elements are themselves trolling.
The counter would be to either reveal the trolls as nut jobs or provoke them to revealing that themselves. Posting fictitious but not obviously wrong arguments yourself is probably not the way to go about this.