# 23. Media-Techno manipulation ## 23.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species ### 23.5.9. Spam and Troll blocking Spam is junk or unwanted email. Trolling is the act of pursuing and attacking someone real-time in a blog, or in the social media. Neither practice is welcome. Many mechanisms now exist to stop both Spam mail and to report Trolls. Mail can be filtered at the mail server to block certain subjects like "Rolex watch" or "Viagra" etc. Trolling behaviour can be reported to a moderator and the person blocked. However, these "safety" techniques can also be used to manipulate a victim or group of victims by suppressing their ability to communicate. For instance, a manipulator can report a victim's email addresses for inclusion on a so-called grey or blacklist of Spam originators. The effect of this is that the victim's emails are effectively frozen and will be refused by any mail servers using these grey or black lists (there are many). In a similar way, a real "troll" can effectively silence a blog contributor who seems to be attracting too much support from other contributors. To do this the manipulator simply sends multiple reports to the blog or social network moderator, until the victim is suspended or has membership cancelled. Some newspapers basically forbid any negative commentary on the behaviour of Israel. Any attempt to make even mild criticisms of Israel's conduct of its various wars will quickly lead to a suspension and eventually complete expulsion in certain right-wing publications. The latter is a popular ploy. Many high-profile blogs are patrolled by paid representatives of various politically biased lobby groups and think tanks. So, for example, a newspaper blog about America's invasion of Afghanistan will certainly be attended by some hard-line rightwing US supporters acting on behalf of one or more of the lobby groups. If a normal contributor appears to be getting too popular and is expressing views which are not in line with those of the lobbyist trolls, these contributors will almost certainly be attacked by the trolls in an attempt to suppress their writings. This is a particularly popular trick for trolls with right-wing views. Incapable of defending an argument in a normal way, they tend to use this method to remove their opposition. It is the cyber equivalent of the assassination of our political opponents. In effect the technique comes down to emasculation of opinions which don't match the manipulator. Newspaper blogs often participate in the game and tend to "block first and ask questions later", simply for legal reasons. ### 23.6.9. Avoidance of Spam and Troll blocking If you have been manipulatively grey or blacklisted you can have this undone by applying to the list owners for delisting or by requesting white listing. It takes a couple of days, but it's not a big issue to organise it. To find out how to do this, visit the websites of the companies which hold and distribute these lists. These companies are aware that people maliciously block email addresses in this way and are happy to oblige you to have this undone. Troll blocking can be a little more complicated. When a user is blocked from a newspaper blog by a manipulative troll, the blog will generally not allow the user to register again, even with a different email address. Usually the blog will block all users coming from your IP address (even if it is dynamic). To overcome this problem you can use "Tor" or a similar technology to connect to the blog again and register a lot of users under various email addresses. You can then start using the blog again. Generally, the best strategy is to find the trolls and report them as soon as you can and have them blocked. They will also fall back to other user identities, so the process may take time. Eventually, the best way to deal with this is to have a group of users working together to "hunt trolls down". Eventually they will run out of user ids and have to get some new ones. In the meantime, you should contact the moderator and discuss the problem with them.