Why I don't delete mobys in the comments section to this blog.

First, I love free expression, and one way to express a viewpoint is to say the opposite. It's sarcasm. It can be comedy. Look at Stephen Colbert. It's a good — even light-hearted — way to expose the bad side of your opponent's arguments.

Second, we all need to become as competent as possible as consumers of communication. Don't be naive. You need to detect these literary devices. Understand that writers/speakers have ulterior motives. I'm not going to clear out material that requires you to exercise your mental muscles. If you can't tell a moby when you see one, I'm not going to delete him: You need practice. If I see you responding to him as if he were sincere, it makes me sad. Where's your mental toughness? How will you be a competent citizen in the political arena where everyone's always more or less bullshitting?

What is a moby? It's surprisingly hard to Google for your answer. Perhaps the singer Moby — after whom the particular sort of trolling is named — has had more success petitioning Google for reputation help than has Rick "frothy mix" Santorum. So here's Urban Dictionary's most popular definition of Moby:

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

But you don't get banned on my blog for doing that, even though my comments policy, as stated above the compose window, says "we delete... bad faith comments," defining bad faith as "comments that we believe have the ulterior motive of destroying the conversation and driving people away from this forum." A moby can cross the line into bad faith, but mobyism per se is not what I'm talking about. What I want is for readers and commenters not to get suckered by comments that come in this insincere form. I want you to raise your game!

On to the specific incident. This morning, I posted for the first time about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The point of my post was, as I put it in the comments, to demand that everyone pay attention to and value the actual facts of the case and not to fall prey to more prejudice and stereotypes as they snap up a seemingly useful incident for the purpose of saying something they already want to say about — ironically — prejudices and stereotypes.

A commenter called Dane County Taxpayer posted:

Why was this hoodie black boy walking around this neighborhood? He was out looking to provoke a reaction. He definitely deserves a Darwin award for getting himself killed. Let face it, it is reasonable to assume the worst when you see a hoodie black youth in your gated community. This boy should have known that. The gun grabbers are now using this to push their agenda.

Now, that's obviously a moby. Anyone who took DCT seriously and argued with him on the merits was duped. Please don't be duped. Others, like Palladian, called him out:

"Dane County Taxpayer" is what's called a "moby" troll; it posts deliberately inflammatory, racially-charged comments in order to provoke others to make such comments and therefore have "proof" that the commenters here are "racist".

This particular troll has a very long and ugly history here. Ignore it.

And I said:

Yes, if you didn't recognize Dane County Taxpayer as a moby... you need to up your game. Be a savvy commenter. There are mobys afoot.

Meade wanted us to delete DCT's comment, but I argued with him about the proper meaning of our key policy term "bad faith," and I was adamant that what we will delete is only the commenter who we believe hates this blog and is out to wreck it by undermining the conversation and driving people away. I'm not about saving readers from having to be smart about detecting insincerity and sarcasm. Admittedly, I don't know when someone has crossed my "bad faith" line, but that is the line.

I realize that by drawing the line there, it is possible that someone on some other blog might quote that comment and say Aha! Proof that those terrible right-wing commenters at Althouse are a bunch of disgusting racists! And if I believe the commenter is trying to make that happen, with the purpose of wrecking my blog, I will see him as crossing the bad faith line. And, actually, now that I think about it, I'm inclined to view Dane County Taxpayer as having crossed the line. I think anti-Althousians of the web will see his comment as a delicious tidbit. DCT himself could even start another blog, under a different name and use his own quote to attack me and my commenters.

Having written all this, and given all the pointing out of the mobying that appears in the context of the original comments thread, I'm going to leave the comment up, as a lesson in free speech and reading comprehension.

"A challenge to our commenters: Just try to out-racist your counterparts over at Ann Althouse’s blog."

See? This is the kind of thing I have to contend with. Web writers who don't like me or don't like whatever side of politics they think I represent will comb through the comments to find whatever sounds worst and then smear me and the entire comments community here. As the discussion turns to affirmative action today, people who would like to discredit or silence me are going to be especially active looking for comments. What can be done? 1. Think about what you are writing and how it will look to outsiders, 2. Don't feed the troll, 3. Perceive the Moby.

Who are the Mobys?

I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:

Dear Ann,

I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.

I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:

Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.

The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.

Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:

You Althouse people really aren’t very bright.  To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field.  I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?  

Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?

I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.  

So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me.  If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog.  She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat.  So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to.  If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.

This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

Thanks to all my readers who gave immediate and overnight pushback to a vile new commenter...

... who I assume was pro-Obama and writing under a pseudonym here with the object of making this blog — and more generally, criticism of Obama — look racist. This coward put up his comment on my 9:50 p.m. post — "Should the President be insulting pop stars?" — at 11:52, presumably to maximize the time that it would be up on the blog and that it would sit here as long as possible before I would take it down, which I did as soon as I got on the blog this morning at around 9 (Central Time).

The commenter, Metlife, had never posted here before and had a profile showing that he'd joined Blogger just this month. He wrote — and the asterisks are mine: "can someone murder that f***ing n***** fast? It will be a good day when Hussein is murdered by one of our southern patriots."

The pushback was immediate. Joe wrote at 11:59: "Could the previous comment be stricken and the poster banned?" Just Lurking said: "Is that you moby?" (suggesting, as I am doing now, that Metlife was against not Obama but this blog community). John Stodder said: "Althouse is probably asleep, but if you have her phone number, wake her up and tell her to delete it." (No one did that.)

Seven Machos said: "Okay, first, get Metlife out of here. At least Cedarford is subtle and occasionally witty.... All racist ass clowns and pretend-racist-agent-provocateur ass clowns should take note of Cedarford's work. This is how it's done." (Cedarford is a longtime commenter who writes well but often expresses extreme ideas of the sort that I do not censor).

Peter Hoh said:

I'm guessing that nolife is a plant. A true Southerner always capitalizes the S.

And wouldn't a full-blown racist southerner consider that "southern" is an unnecessary modifier for "patriot"?

Plus he knew how to spell "Hussein."

Good ole boys spell it "Hoo-sane."

Former law student said...

Speak of laying a turd and someone does. Probably an agent provocateur, because he created a fresh identity for the occasion.

Blake said:

Ugh. The Mobys are getting disgusting in here.

Urban Dictionary defines "Moby":

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

Lucid said:

Actually, Metlife, with his registration [email] and ip address, should be reported to the secret service. Threatening the president is a serious crime, as it should be.

I also wonder if Metlife is actually a lefty troll pulling an Alinsky.

Hey, Alinsky isn't defined yet over at Urban Dictionary. But I know what you mean, and I certainly think he is.

Jack said:

God, what a festering stinkhole of a web site this is. I don't know how you wingnut loons can stand stewing in your own shit like this, presided over by the shit mistress, Ann Althouse.

Of course she's too dishonest to tell you dumb motherfuckers that Obama's remark was made off the record, thus rendering her posed questions ("should the president be insulting pop stars?" and "what business is it of the presidents?") inoperative. And of course you stupid shit-for-brains don't follow the link to find out for yourselves. Maybe the ever-dull Althouse didn't bother reading enough of the story to find out that the comment was off the record, or maybe she's just dishonest.

You're stewing in a cesspool. And you like it!

And that's an example of the sort of comment I don't delete. I'm that into free speech. But Metlife deserves deletion and, as Lucid said, investigation by the Secret Service. I like to think the Secret Service is good enough that they are already on it.