Are you the target of a #RedHerringTroll?

You might be, if an account - particularly one that that doesn't follow you - does any of these:

• They reply to a non-hashtagged tweet of yours

• They reply to a non-hashtagged conversation between only people they don't follow

• They reply to month-old (or more) tweets

to argue in any of the following ways:

• They mainly speak in talking points.

• Everything they say seems designed to be more inflammatory than informative.

• They engage in nitpicking minutia to make the conversation into arguments over that, instead. 

• They attack only in fallacies; Strawman everything you say, use Ad Hominem attacks & Genetic Fallacies, they appeal to authority or popularity, etc.
  
  A subset of this is the hyperbolic strawman - replying to a comment that does not contain absolutist words like "all," "always," "only," "never," as if it did, or replying to a statement containing "can be" as if in instead contained "is" or "are."
  
  Example: You say "Women can also be violent." They reply "There are many women who are nonviolent! What are you talking about?" You didn't say "All women are violent." The person is using a hyperbolic strawman.

• They respond to you discrediting one of their assertions by simply abandoning that one and making another assertion, often seeming to move down a list of the aforementioned fallacies.

• They get mad if you make your position too clear and specific for them to spin it into a strawman. This will often be demonstrated by a use of loaded questions to try to redirect you to the strawman they want to confront, followed by a temper tantrum if you refuse to deviate from your actual position in response to their loaded questions.

• They demand explanations for the obvious & proof of long-established facts, but refuse to explain or provide evidence for anything they say, regardless of how outlandish their assertions are.
  
  Example; it's on you to prove getting stabbed can be painful or a well-known documented historical stabbing happened, but it's not on them to prove that stabbing is a gendered behavior or that the effects of being stabbed are different for people of different ethnic backgrounds. This behavior often gets defended by articulating the fallacious belief that if some perceived truths turn out to be false, nothing can ever be genuinely known to be true. A simple look at physical representations of elementary-level math equations demonstrates why that is a stupid belief. 

• They seem bent on steering the conversation away from its original topic/point or on steering you into defense of a point that is beyond the claim you have made. Any response you make will be twisted into evidence of your position on the new topic, and the game continues from there.
  
  Example: You cite evidence that an assertion about person A, who also happens to be black, is untrue. Troll tries to steer you into defending the unstated argument that the assertion is never true about any black person. Your response is "evidence" that you concede, that you hate black people, or that you think they are above any & all criticism.

• They respond to a topic using a counterargument against an off-topic assertion you did not make, usually based on presuming your political perspective based on the current discussion. This is to drag you into a debate over the new topic in the apparent hope that you'll defend the off-topic strawman. They'll usually treat pointing this out as an act of dodging that topic.
  
  Example: You tweet opposition to an unethical action. Troll takes your tweet as endorsement of the political opponent of the person who engaged in that behavior and from there, presumes you to be politically aligned with that opponent. Troll then replies to your tweet with a counterargument against an item from said opponent's political party's platform.

If the first condition is met and the individual seems to be doing at least some of the above, you may be dealing with a red herring troll. The more of these behaviors you see, the more likely you're dealing with one. If they combine them with responses that ignore points you've made & evidence you've provided that comes from sources which give full information (example, articles that link to studies or have video of incidents, proving a person made a social media post by linking to the actual post or an archive of it, etc.,) that's another clue.

Other things to watch for in combination with the above behaviors:

• They run in packs. While you are engaged in discussion with Troll A, Troll B (who often doesn't follow either of you) will begin replying to your replies to Troll A using some of the methods described above.
  
  Another telltale sign is if you get two or more accounts that never respond to you at the same time & all talk the same way, same vernacular, same vocabulary. Watch for the same spelling errors. When this happens you're dealing with one person piloting several sock puppets. 

• The Churlish Shuffle: engaging in deliberate obfuscation. Example, treating counterargument against point A in a thread about point A as if it is an assertion about point B which is not part of that thread, or treating your argument as if it is self-contradiction based on an acceptance you did not make of an assertion of theirs. 

• I Love Egg Salad: The troll has a contingent of accounts with almost no followers, no avatar, and little to no history who do nothing but "heart" or "like" and retweet the troll's tweets. Even more interesting, sometimes several of these will revolve around one troll, and their retweets & likes of that account's tweets seem timed to drag you back to the discussion after it's over. It's particularly telling when the troll account also has very few followers and the discussion isn't highly visible yet a few dozen "egg" accounts come out of the woodwork to like and retweet the troll's tweets, one at a time, at regular intervals, all over the course of a day or two.

• "Shift change" syndrome: At some point in the discussion, the person you're arguing with appears to have no memory of earlier parts of the conversation. This manifests in anything from repeating previously debunked arguments as if they're new arguments to asking repeatedly for information you have already provided to outright denying that earlier parts of the discussion happened. This is an almost certain indication, one that either means you're arguing with multiple people using one account, or a professional troll trained to assume you've forgotten what you were talking to him/her about several hours ago.

• The debate that never ends: After reaching a dead end with you, or in the midst of a heated exchange on a particular topic, they make a vague reply to earlier parts of the conversation several tweets up the thread, which they've already replied to (and you've already answered their replies.)
  Doing so from a dead end is a way to keep a finished conversation going.
  Doing so in the midst of a heated exchange is an attempt at confusing you or getting you to respond to a reply to tweet A as if it is a reply to tweet B, which says something different. It's a direct attempt at tripping you up by getting you to reply to what it appears was being argued instead of what actually was.

• Replying to you only in "retweet with comment" tweets rather than direct replies when the "comment" is not a comment to others about your tweet, but a direct response to it. This breaks up the discussion and makes it harder to trace back through earlier parts of the argument to prove what what already has been said & who said it. This alone isn't a RHT behavior. Some people do it because they don't know the speech balloon icon is for replies. Some do it to draw their followers' attention to the conversation. But if it's in combination with the other behaviors, and it results in a bunch of similarly trollish accounts joining in, especially accounts that are new or have no profile image, it's probably a RHT.

The overall point of these trolls is to redirect you away from conversation about concepts, ideas, news, or other topics that challenge a narrative the troll wishes to protect. I've found that these tend to be most active whenever certain news topics begin to trend, such as conservative political events, news stories which expose information about the Oligarchy within the U.S. government, men's rights or antifeminist topics, and evidence against the narrative used to attack #Gamergate.

While the temptation to engage them simply because "OMG, someone on the internet is wrong!" the most effective way to deal with these trolls is to point out that's what they are, and move on. Being targeted by a Red Herring Troll should indicate to you that you were doing something important, and doing it effectively enough that someone, even if it was just the troll himself (no need for this to be a conspiracy for it to be happening,) wanted you stopped.

How do you win? By not letting them make that happen.
Kick the troll aside, and stay on target. Let them rant and rail, call you names, accuse you of bad faith and ill will... and keep talking about whatever it was you were talking about when they began their attempt to derail.

A request for Twitter

In the last few months I've seen some discussion on the exploitation of vulnerable aspects of twitter's rules by social justice warriors to silence political dissent by using bots to mass block or mass report so dissenters' accounts would be suspended. On October 29, I emailed press@twitter.com with questions, explaining my intent behind the request. I wanted to be up-front about the fact that this was for an article to ensure that their reply would consist of information they wanted known. 

Recent trends in some groups' tweets have included referencing the option included in the "block or report" menu to report another user for content that is "Generally offensive, disrespectful or in disagreement with my opinion." Some users are touting that option as a means to silence political dissent. This sounded unlike a social site policy, and led me to look further into the reporting options.

Further investigation has only led to more questions, including questions about other options for reporting. The help bubble for that option says "Twitter does not screen content and does not remove potentially offensive content unless such content is in violation of the Twitter Rules and Terms of Service," so I have read those.

Some of the twitter rules have wording which could be subject to broad interpretation and potential abuse. I'm writing to request clarification, as I am considering an article. My current focus is communication, harassment, censorship, and how twitter's rules affect engagement between users in relation to political and other potentially controversial discussions. Any information I receive in response to these questions will contribute to that article.

For instance, listed under "targeted abuse" are

• if the sole purpose of your account is to send abusive messages to others;

and

• if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats

What factors determine if the sole purpose of an account is to send abusive messages to others?

Is disagreement with others' opinion considered an abusive message, and if so does that mean engaging in debate by replying to publicly made statements of opinion with counterarguments is now considered abuse?
If not, what is the specific reason for including "in disagreement with my opinion" in the harassment reporting options?

I am assuming that tweets without @user mentions are not considered "targeted" because they do not involve intentional contact and users can block feed they do not want to see. Is this correct?

Does "targeted abuse" include @user mentions without abusive language, but which contain a dissenting counterargument to something the user has said? (eg. I disagree with @twitteruser's stated opinion in LinkToPublication because reason #politicalorsocialconcept or @twitteruser I disagree with what you said.) If so, is that a blanket rule or does the behavior have to be repeated or continue after the user engaging in it has received some variation of "stop talking to me" before it is considered to be in violation?

Does the tone of a tweet change whether it is considered abusive, and if so what is the criteria for that? ("I disagree with what you said" vs a similar line containing expletives vs a line containing slurs or the suggestion that the user deserves to suffer violence because of his opinion.)

Under the Spam heading are the following criteria:

• If you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of users in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following or follower churn);

When a political or social movement forms on twitter, users often follow each other so that posts about their specific pet issue will show up in their feed. Is it a goal of twitter to prevent this, or does following require automated means in order to be considered a violation?

• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;

Many users post links to news stories, videos, and memes related to hashtags created for issues and concepts that have meaning to them. Very often these are, to the user, personal updates because they are new information about the issue or concept. Will users whose personal updates usually include links to information be considered spammers?

• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• If a large number of spam complaints have been filed against you;

This looks like it could be used by ideological groups to silence popular or very vocal users whose updates contain statements of opinion to which they are opposed, by banding together to all block and/or report the same person, thereby putting him or her in violation. What is twitter's administration doing to counter potential abuse of these rules?

• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #, trending or popular topic, or promoted trend;

There are Twitter users currently interpreting this to mean that dissenting views to a hashtag's political outlook and criticism of the belief or assertion behind a hashtag can be considered spam if it is posted to the hashtag. For example, posting an opposing viewpoint with a political hashtag can offend the readers of the hashtag, but it's a discussion attempt. Is it considered spam even if it is not belligerent or threatening?

• Randomly or aggressively following, favoriting or Retweeting Tweets;

This line is hard to interpret. Can you please give a more detailed explanation of what it means? How does twitter determine when following, favoriting, and retweeting are random or aggressive, and when doing those things is acceptable?

Finally, do you have a policy in place to deal with habitual, vexatious false flagging (users repeatedly reporting content which does not violate rules or terms of service in an attempt to silence speech they disapprove or people they dislike)? This is a behavior I've seen on other social networking sites where administrators have written and posted broadly interpretable policy without stipulating that false exploitation of it would also lead to discipline. What is Twitter doing to prevent users from banding together to engage in this type of harassment, and how do you differentiate between a user engaging in this and a user who spots or experiences and reports a lot of genuine violations?

If you provide me with a statement on the overall goal of Twitter's rules and guidelines as they relate to discussion on the site, I will include that in the article.

If you have any questions for me, please let me know, and I'll be happy to clarify anything that has not come across clearly. Thank you in advance for taking the time to address these questions. I hope to produce an article that will bring about better understanding of Twitter's rules and their relationship to the many discussions among users of the site.

To date I have not heard back. I cannot be sure if this is simply due to their staff for handling press requests being small and unable to keep up, or if they are avoiding answering the question. Even if it is the latter, it could be because, now that they realize there are holes in their policy they want to fix them before replying. It could also be due to a desire to leave those holes in place without having to answer for them. The only way to know would be to hear back from twitter, and that is out of my control.