Internet justice is served for Twitter trolls and PR puppets [View all]
You know Shark Week on the Discovery Channel? This is Troll Week on the Internet.
Actually, trolls have more in common with piranha -- small, vicious, single-minded creatures that kill you one small bite at a time -- but the concept is similar. This week, these anonymous haters are being outed in droves, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people.
First up: Jofi Joseph. Who's that? Until today, he was a member of the National Security Council's nuclear nonproliferation team, working on negotiations with Iran. But he was also the pseudonymous Twitter account @NatSecWonk (since retired), which routinely savaged his own employers as well as members of the opposing team.
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Their wicked wiki ways
But NatSecWonk's outing is just one of a series of exposures of creatures who've been hiding under rocks for too long. Earlier this week, the folks behind Wikipedia ousted some 250 "editors" of the online encyclopedia, who were in fact employees of a public relations firm called Wiki-PR with the sole job of posting nice articles about their clients.
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According to a new book on Rupert Murdoch, written by NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, Fox's PR team hired people to create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to counter criticism of the 24/7 cable network, going to extreme lengths to hide what they were doing. Per Media Matters:
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/internet-justice-served-twitter-trolls-and-pr-puppets-229397