> We are disgusted, angered, and appalled by everything these racists stand for and do.
Let's back up a second.
What's the mapping of online avatars on that site to human beings?
If it's 1:1 then I should continue reading Tor's statement.
1:1-times-N for any N other than 1 is quite unlikely so we can throw out that possibility.
1-times-N:1 for N = 10 or even N = 20 are likely and cheap. An echo chamber of ten racists doesn't warrant a response from Tor, while an echo chamber of hundreds might.
1:N:1 for N = 20+ is possible especially by state actors. A small group of paid scammers simulating activites of 1000+ racists is enough to cause noticeable social disruption.
So the next question is: does Tor devbase have a way to map medusa heads to torsos?
I think the answer is "no". Not only for Tor, but also Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News, The Guardian, and possibly even Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
If I'm right about that, then I read Tor's statement as essentially eating the cost of having no way to effectively separate signal from noise and simply rolling up their sleeves and treating all noise as potential signal. That's as wasteful as it was in the 90s & early 2000s to simply eat the cost of reading everything in the email inbox and deleting the spam manually. But here it's more than loss of productivity-- its potentially confusing a large portion of reality with a simulation. And unlike the widespread cynicism that came with tv broadcast, people seem to have convinced themselves that social media and random sites/comment sections are an earnest and democratic reflection of some meaningful segment of the general population.
Let's back up a second.
What's the mapping of online avatars on that site to human beings?
If it's 1:1 then I should continue reading Tor's statement.
1:1-times-N for any N other than 1 is quite unlikely so we can throw out that possibility.
1-times-N:1 for N = 10 or even N = 20 are likely and cheap. An echo chamber of ten racists doesn't warrant a response from Tor, while an echo chamber of hundreds might.
1:N:1 for N = 20+ is possible especially by state actors. A small group of paid scammers simulating activites of 1000+ racists is enough to cause noticeable social disruption.
So the next question is: does Tor devbase have a way to map medusa heads to torsos?
I think the answer is "no". Not only for Tor, but also Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News, The Guardian, and possibly even Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
If I'm right about that, then I read Tor's statement as essentially eating the cost of having no way to effectively separate signal from noise and simply rolling up their sleeves and treating all noise as potential signal. That's as wasteful as it was in the 90s & early 2000s to simply eat the cost of reading everything in the email inbox and deleting the spam manually. But here it's more than loss of productivity-- its potentially confusing a large portion of reality with a simulation. And unlike the widespread cynicism that came with tv broadcast, people seem to have convinced themselves that social media and random sites/comment sections are an earnest and democratic reflection of some meaningful segment of the general population.
edit: formatting