Weekly Scroll: Humans are the Problem
Wikipedia bias, Miami Vice drama, blackmail scandals and a good colonizer tweet
The Human Failings of Wikipedia
One of the most interesting things I read in the last week was this extremely thorough account of a Wikipedia dispute on the Tracing Woodgrains blog.
The essay is quite long, so while you should definitely check it out I’ll summarize it as briefly as I can. The post details the history of a Wikipedia administrator named David Gerard, who used his administrator status to distort and manipulate the pages of his internet enemies. In particular, Gerard despises rationalists, Eliezer Yudkowsky, cryptocurrencies, right-leaning politics, Effective Altruism, and related communities and personalities. Over the course of more than a decade Gerard used his knowledge of Wikipedia procedures, standards, and rules to influence how Wikipedia covered those communities.
What’s striking to me is that he didn’t do so in the way we typically think of Wikipedia vandalism. Instead, he spent countless hours in the guts of Wikipedia arguing that certain sources should be listed as ‘Reliable’ sources while others should be blacklisted. He would go behind the scenes to help a writer publish something he wanted in an article, just so he could cite it as a source in said article. He would get into never-ending edit wars to change the phrasing of certain articles, slowly expanding ‘Controversy’ sections while diminishing other sections. If someone disagree with his changes, he would throw a dense pile of jargon and policies at them like WP:NPOV or WP:COI until they gave up. If they didn’t give up, he would allow them to win for a while, then come back and redo his changes a month later.
All of this is to say that he generally followed the rules - and that’s the most interesting part of the entire situation. He wasn’t cheating or rule-breaking, per se. He just had an unlimited amount of enthusiasm for working the system. He would argue, and argue, and argue, and keep editing, keep making minor changes, keep reverting any change he didn’t like, nitpicking and debating for days. For months. For years. And in the end, he’d get his way. The articles on topics he obsessed over began to reflect his biases.
The real world equivalent of Gerard’s behavior is the legal strategy of filing lots of lawsuits, filing lots of motions, arguing over every technical point and delaying and obfuscating… until the other side just gives in. This is a well known and well practiced legal strategy that often works in the real world. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or not - if you have more money and can be a giant legal pain in the ass, people will just give up. And if you’re enough of a pedantic obsessive on Wikipedia, it doesn’t matter if your edits are biased - you can just outlast the other guy because he’s not willing to argue with you forever.
Do you have the energy to argue through several of these kinds of posts every single day for years?
The truth is that you too can insert your personal biases into Wikipedia. There’s nothing stopping you. The only catch is that it requires insane dedication. You have to be willing to edit and post and comment tens of thousands of times per year. You have to memorize a bunch of dense Wikipedia policy so you can rules lawyer anyone who tries to mess with your plans. Very few of us have that level of dedication. But the people who do will largely get their way. Remember that most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.
Wikipedia is a marvel. Despite its problems, I really do think it’s a breathtaking accomplishment. It’s usually quite reliable, useful, and free. Wikipedia’s democratic and crowd-sourced nature is a testament to everything good and wholesome and pure about the Internet.
But like all institutions, it has flaws. And like most flaws, Wikipedia’s flaws come down to the flaws in people. People are the weak point. I’m reminded of the embarrassing story about how one American teenager who does not speak Scots faked the vast majority of the Scots language Wikipedia. Because it wasn’t obvious vandalism and because the teen knew how to exist inside of Wikipedia’s peculiar systems, it wasn’t caught for years.
There is no set of rules so strong that they can’t be gamed by someone with enough energy and passion to game them. Usually it doesn’t even take that much cleverness - just persistence. Wikipedia is made of people. People are fallible. And that’s always going to be Wikipedia’s primary struggle - how to remain true to ideals like Neutral Point of View and Use Reliable Sources when the enforcers of those ideals might have their own agendas.
Mr. Beast Runs for President
Mr. Beast announced on Twitter that if they lower the age requirement1 he would run for President. He then followed up with this statement of policy:
As someone who just posted about how Mr. Beast is actually great, I have to step in and say this is all deeply stupid. “I will unite instead of divide!” Wow, what an earth-shattering idea. “I will do things in the middle ground! I would just make the American people my #1 priority!” How come nobody ever thought of that before???
This is very Baby’s First Politics-brained and I hate it. Can’t wait for the 2048 election to be decided by a rap battle between Logan Paul (R) vs Mr. Beast (D).
Miami Vice Rage Bait
The most unnecessarily dramatic thing that happened on Twitter this week was art curator Chaédria LaBouvier single-handedly waging a war against the movie Miami Vice. Like most internet drama, it’s deeply stupid - but this consumed so much of my feed in the past week that I feel almost obligated to write about it. It all started with this:
A guy posted about introducing his girlfriend to his favorite movie, Miami Vice. Chaédria somehow found the post and responded Straight men live on a completely different planet than the rest of us, WHOT is this. Some people thought she was being rude to this guy, she got mad at those people, and it somehow turned into four days of discourse. What’s impressive is that essentially 100% of the drama came from one woman, but she posted with such ferocity and frequency that many observers thought it was an entire camp vs. camp discourse with dozens of people. Nope. Just her.
It really was just one moderately insane woman with remarkable tenacity. Chaédria posting through it against everyone, her against the world, a masterclass of I’m Not Mad, Don’t Write That I Was Mad tweets. She soon started posting about how this was going to be part of her ‘research’ and that she was compiling dossiers on the people criticizing her. That included breathtaking detective work to uncover the fact that the user YoSoyRyanDavis was a man named Ryan Davis:
In case this all seems ridiculous to you, you’re correct. It was. But this single poster’s drama got big enough it started leaking into other platforms and movie theaters in hip neighborhoods announced they were doing special Miami Vice viewing nights to capitalize on the buzz. The idiocy spread further than it had any right to.
What’s interesting here is that it’s not Chaédria’s first time in the spotlight. Years ago she guest curated an exhibit at the Guggenheim, and then accused the museum of racism. An investigation found no basis for the allegations, but the head museum person was fired anyways. It was covered in a 2022 Atlantic piece called The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat.
As best I can tell Chaédria hasn’t really worked much or done much since then… except for posting on social media. Her twitter profile and public statements are still focused around a single job she did years ago. She seems to be constantly out there fishing for drama, looking for incendiary takes that will get her some play in the discourse.
That’s how you should understand the current Miami Vice drama. A person with a history of shit-stirring did some shit-stirring. They use whatever means they can to create attention, controversy, heat. It’s rage bait, and the thing about rage bait is that it works. It’s far too easy to game the algorithms and people’s reactions into infamy, and people will continue to do it as long as it keeps getting them attention.
Student TikTok Attacks
In Malvern Pennsylvania, a group of eighth-grade students created dozens of fake accounts on TikTok to impersonate teachers, posting inappropriate comments under the faux-teacher accounts. A taste of what was being posted:
[Teacher Patrice Motz] found a fake profile for @patrice.motz, which had posted a real photo of her at the beach with her husband and their young children. “Do you like to touch kids?” a text in Spanish over the family vacation photo asked. “Answer: Sí.”
In the days that followed, some 20 educators — about one quarter of the school’s faculty — discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed or commented on the fraudulent accounts.
This is supposedly the first ‘mass impersonation’ event of its kind, and led to several students being suspended. Some students expressed contrition after being caught. Others vowed to keep posting videos, only with more caution so they wouldn’t be caught this time. The school district can only do so much to punish students, because American courts provide strong free speech protections to students when they’re off-campus. It’s somewhat of a nightmare situation in general and I have no idea how I’d react as an administrator or teacher, beyond the obvious step that I keep screaming - getting rid of smartphones in schools.
Chinese Oil Scandals
The dominant story on Chinese social media for the past week has been oil. You might ask “Cooking oil or fossil fuel oil?”, to which I would reply “Yes”. It’s been discovered that cooking oil for human consumption is routinely shipped in containers that are also used to ship kerosene and other industrial oils, and likely has been for years. Some of the best English-language reporting on this comes from Chinese Doomscroll, which I heavily recommend. You can also check out Foreign Policy’s China Brief, which is an excellent source for all things China.
This outrage cycle is a reminder that still-developing and middle-income countries have a whole different standard for scandal than we do. China has notoriously poor food safety standards, particularly around cooking oil. China Brief points out that previous scandals have involved so called ‘gutter oil’ being reused and making people sick.2 It’s hard not to have an appreciation for living in the first world when reading about basic food safety issues like this.
The non-Scandal Scandals
Two stories that caught my eye this week:
First, a Korean YouTuber named Tzuyang was threatened with blackmail. Tzuyang, at the behest of an abusive boyfriend, had been forced to work in an adult ‘hostess bar’. The boyfriend also created sexually explicit videos of her without her knowledge, and a group of male YouTubers threatened to reveal the videos and her past employment publicly unless she paid them. This culminated yesterday with a livestream where Tzuyang revealed the information herself, along with her lawyers who provided evidence of the abuse. (content warning if you click - heavy stuff in that livestream).
Second, it was revealed that a highly popular Madden streamer named Sketch previously had a gay OnlyFans before hitting it big on Twitch. Sketch was essentially outed by this revelation, both as gay/bi3 and as someone who’d briefly done sex work. In an emotional stream, Sketch did some joking around but also apologized for the ‘scandal’.
These two stories struck me as similar in a few ways. They were both incredibly destructive to the people involved. Sketch hinted that he seriously considered suicide when the news of his OnlyFans account leaked, and that streaming friends saved him. Tzuyang’s video is likewise heartbreaking, as she details the abuse she faced and the fear she lived in.
But I also saw some encouraging signs. Tzuyang’s fans unanimously rejected any hint of scandal and seem to be supporting her full-tilt. Her subscriber count is going up, there’s been an outpouring of love, and she’s now pursuing legal action against the people who threatened her.
Likewise, Sketch’s fans rejected any idea there was a controversy and poured out their appreciation for him. Sketch is a member of FaZe Clan, a group of frat-bro streamers than lean in to testosterone and tend towards the alpha male/anti-woke persona. But even among that crowd, his colleagues declared that “Sketch was my homie yesterday, he’s my homie today, he’ll be my homie tomorrow. You guys are fkn weirdos”.
All this is to say that I think the public is getting better at distinguishing real scandals from faux-scandals. The stigma of sex tapes, sex work, or LGBT identity absolutely could have killed someone’s career a few decades ago. These days it’s met by fans with a shrug - the only outrage seems to that anyone would dare threaten a favored streamer with that kind of bullshit. It’s horrible that this kind of blackmail still happens, but I’m happy that we’re slowly getting better at reacting to it the right way.
Links
An interesting conversation between Noah Smith and Substack CEO Chris Best on AI slop.
Japan, in the year of our lord 2024, has finally decided to stop using floppy disks.
Music streaming is becoming more social.
Twitter stalls, with near-zero growth under Musk.
Queen of the ride-share mafia.
Gay furry hackers release data on the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’
Posts
The age requirement is written into the Constitution and is therefore de facto impossible to change
More generally, less than 25% of meat and 5% of vegetables in China are refrigerated during transit and storage. Food safety is *bad* over there y’all.
I don’t know how he identifies, but I’m assuming either gay or bi given the content of the OnlyFans.
I get the cringe from Mr. Beast's politics posting, and as an actual political philosophy it's obviously vacuous, but I feel like as rhetoric it's more solid than people want to give him credit for. I think there's a real longing out there for people who promise to do exactly what Mr. Beast is saying.
We're used to that kind of rhetoric coming from like, CEOs or other "very serious" business leaders and they never get any traction with it. But I think that's because they lack a proper platform or independent base of political support. The biggest YouTuber in the world is operating in a very different context and has a lot more relevant expertise.
Does that mean Mr. Beast is destined to be president? No, definitely not. But especially if existing parties continue to struggle to put up good candidates, I don't think we should rule out the idea that in a decade or two, charismatic YouTubers with nonsense political views might become a serious force.
The read on the wrecker Wikipedia editor was fascinating. One thing that I've observed over time about the social dynamics of the internet is that that technology, not even starting with message boards (more with Usenet and to an extent, sci-fi conferences) gave poorly adjusted, persistent, and neurotic people a much greater voice in social situations than they were otherwise granted. In other words, a lot of people without a whole lot to do except attack their perceived enemies. (The other obvious factor is that from early on, sci-fi was a refuge for people with socially deviant sexual preferences and kinks and that kind of SHINES through the mid-twentieth century history of the genre).
Cheaper means of distributing information are going to give the upper hand to people who are just willing to post, post, and post. Never stop posting, that's the rule. Facts, truth, and tact don't matter - only posting. We saw this when the printing press was invented too.