WaPo: We studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack — and found a conspiracy in the making.
I was able to read this on iPad; hopefully this link will get you to readable text.
There was some discussion on Twitter last night about how we (of the earlier blogging gen) should have shut down extremism, instead of perceiving 'all opinions' as a First Amendment issue. In being magnanimous and patting ourselves on the back, we allowed Pandora's Box to flap open. I faced attacks over this issue in 2000; as I've mentioned before, I find it ironic that my former accusers now moderate their own feeds - or have dropped comments entirely. A certain segment of the warblogger generation opened their comment areas to any and all, creating small self-justifying black holes of discontent; the defining feature of that group was to turn aside from our previous generation, use the tech and culture we had created, and set up their own systems of achievement. We, the originators, became invisible in a short couple of years around the time of the second Iraq War, and some journalists still look back to that warblogger group as the 'original' webloggers. We lost influence - became nearly irrelevant - through having our own rug pulled out from under us. We enabled the tech for utopian goals; we forgot human nature.
