Futherleft chat room history as bird_rima recalls itOperation "Shut Down Furtherleft Until November 3, 2004"
I started coming to furtherleft in June of 2004 on a regular basis. I found many funny and smart people to talk with there. We talked about politics, how the a world of peace might be envisioned, the latest news, our favorites movies. Sometimes is was just plain silly and wonderful.
I also found a group of chatters who came in on a regular basis to disrupt whatever discussion was occurring at the time. It took a while to figure out what they were doing. I began to call them trolls. The first one I noticed was slasher14. He was always ready with a sarcastic comment, but he was unwilling to click on links that might give him some information that his position might have no factual basis.
Essentially, the trolls would make an inflammatory comment that disagreed with another chatter's premise. When that chatter tried to engage them in discussion about the premise, the troll would heap terms of scorn upon them. For example, calling them liberals or communists or whores.
When the chatter tried to back up his/her premise with documentation, eg a weblink. the troll would refuse to read it on some bogus ground, like the website was "too far left." This made it really convenient for them, since they did not have to engage with the material and refute the sources.
Another troll tactic is to introduce a new topic for which they had primed themselves with platitudes, but no substantiation. Then when someone would argue with them they would roll out that platitudes. When that didn't work, they resorted to adhominems or other logical fallacies.
If this were just the occasional random intrusion, one would think nothing of it. However, the same trolls return day after day, week after week, and now going on year after year. They may change their names, but they are here on a daily basis.
They also go to White Power and other fascist chatrooms and bring those people to attack us.
The OperationAll Yahoo user chatrooms, like Furtherleft, disappear or close when no one is in them. When the room became vacant and disappeared, a user would just start it up again. All of that Yah-freedom ended in late summer of 2004. Furtherleft became vacant. When chatters returned, they found that it had been taken over by another group, or hijacked. We couldn't think of a better word, and I think it fits. Instead of the website that pocho, the founder of furtherleft, made, there was a fake site that was a slanderous imitation of pochos site. The members of furtherleft were described as Marxists or communists to any newcomers.
Well, we thought, we would just go make our own room. And we were able to make knockoffs like ..furtherleft and our regulars would find us for about two months. Sometimes we could reclaim our own name. No big deal really.
Except to the trolls who made the fake site, it seems. Somehow, enraged by our failure to disappear, they got to a programmer inside Yahoo. This programmer disabled public user site creation for about two months beginning in late August of 2004.
Many of us called and emailed Yahoo about the problem with no response. Finally a friend who works for Yahoo came over and I showed him what was going on. He said he would look into it, and it was fixed within the week.
Before they were engaged in the shutdown they spent a great deal of time collecting a dossier of the ridiculous on room members. From personal information they actively agitated for, they twisted the facts and developed slandarous counterpersonalities. During the hijacking, the trolls made up what we came to call "clones" of room members. These were degrading and slanderous profiles established with Yahoo IDs very close to the regular chatter's name.
They also prepared a website called Communists for Kerry and established that as the Furtherleft room header.
We have records of them plotting against us in other chat rooms. Its hysterical! But is does reveal the depth of their commitment to wrecking a dinky butt Yahoo user chatroom with about 10 regulars. I find that quite disturbing, don't you?
A regular room member ran across an interview on one of the rightwing sites. It was a College Republican boasting about how he had shut down Furtherleft.
Before they were engaged in the shutdown they spent a great deal of time collecting a dossier of the ridiculous on room members. From personal information they actively agitated for, they twisted the facts and developed slanderous counterpersonalities.
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