Oh Temper! Oh Mores! (Arrington/Laporte and Flamewar 2.0)

Was quite fascinated by the Leo Laporte / Mike Arrington spat on the Gillmor Gang on the weekend....not because of the spat itself (see above video of said spat) but because of the problem dealing with the commenting afterwards. (The spat itself was that Mr Arrington implied Mr Laporte's review may just be a bit biassed as he was given one of the freebie Pre devices from the manufacturer, and Mr Laporte - er, well, watch the video)

No, what is more interesting is that afterwards, the Laporte faithful hammered all the TechCrunch feeds, so hard and with such vitriol that TechCrunch eventually turned off its commenting and pulled their Friendfeed account. They also defaced the Arrington Wikipedia entry, and flame-spammed Twitter.

Now this was ad-hoc, spur of the moment stuff - we doubt Mr Laporte organised or even countenanced it.

But this is what Flamewar 2.0 looks like - when the "wisdom of crowds" flips into the baying of a mob, and a spat is not just something going on in a newsgroup. You can attack all of a person's social media assets - and the more assets they have, the bigger the target.

Also, with the bigger blogs and online media, moderating immoderate people is very hard to scale, as the BBC is also finding, and you start to have to be more restrictive with sign ins - essentially increasing the transaction costs so that people are very committed (reducing the drive-bys) and/or cool down a bit.

(An irony was that a bunch of us were observing on Thursday that flaming on sites where the individual was better authenticated was much less pervasive than the Olde Web 1.0 days too....)

But it shows a worrying glimmer of the future, when groups of people dedicated to a cause will use all means at their disposal to hit another's social media assets, and it also show how weak the defences of even a powerful voice like TechCrunch is in the face of such an attack.

I suspect that the first really co-ordinated attacks will be political, be interesting to see where......(I thought the BNP* may get a Flamewar but fortunately wiser heads are prevailing as rational analysis emerges)

Its also interesting to think through the defences, but higher barriers to authentication are a start, as I suspect is some form of AI moderation

*The British National Party (BNP), a far-rightwing (racist/fascist/neo-Nazi according to its detractors) party won 2 UK seats out of 72 in the European Elections. This had some of its labour/liberal/left detractors calling for it to be banned, silenced, blocked on social media etc this morning in a most undemocratic way, I thought.. (Disclaimer - I do not support the BNP in any way, but I do support Democracy and Freedom of Speech)