By now, pretty much anyone who follows political news is aware of how Mark Robinson, the current Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the post of governor, was found to been a frequent visitor to porn sites where he made all manner of posts in the comments section that would cause his religious supporters to wince, to put it mildly. He had already publicly made incendiary comments about women and the LGBTQ community as well as denying the Holocaust.
While I was aware of the story and posted about it last week, I had not paid much attention to how the reporters managed to identify him as the source of all the comments.
Seth Meyers describes how he was identified and I could not believe how mind bogglingly stupid he was.
Because he’s a Republican and he chose to follow his party in its messy bitter divorce from reality. Next question…?
I’ve been writing about Robinson, but more importantly the coverage of Robinson, over on Wonkette (and a bit on my Substack as well).
I don’t think he was particularly stupid. If someone wanted to read an exhausting number of my posts and comments, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out my real life identity. It would just be very time consuming. At the time he was active on the porn forum, he simply wasn’t an important enough person for anyone to bother doing the work.
He quit the forum (apparently) in 2013 or so, and he gave a speech in 2018 or so that went viral. That gave him a thirst for the spotlight and people around him encouraged him to go into politics. It would have been awkward to tell those people, “No, actually, I have a deeply impolitic history of comments on the internet, saying pretty horrible things about liking Mein Kamf and hating MLK and so may other things, so I’ll decline.”
So, he goes forward, and Lt Gov is not a position with that much power, and people don’t find his old internet history. he’s been important for years, and no one has found it, so he thinks it’s safe to run for Gov, because he has months and months and months of experience in the public eye that tells him it’s safe and no one is checking his past.
But Gov is a more important post, and someone decided to search his e-mail addresses and internet aliases and found them used on a porn forum and … that’s it. Someone decided it was important enough to bother. He simply couldn’t have predicted it, and he’d sort of trapped himself into it by not demurring right away when encouraged to run for Lt Gov.
If he had only ever occupied the LG’s office, his past very well might never have come to light.
He played the odds as he saw them, given the experiences he had, and the dice were nice to him right up until they weren’t.
@Crip Dyke #2: Personally, I go out of my way to make it extremely hard to identify me from anything I post anywhere. Every time I do a minor (and purposeful) “slip up” because I feel it’s important enough to do so, I make sure I never do that specific personal reveal with any of my other various online identities, ever. I also have [number redacted*] different email accounts for those various identities.
…as an example, I have mentioned this particular detail of “I make it extremely hard to identify me” as ‘Snowberry’ before (on a different site), but have never done so under any other name.
I have had a couple of (offline) people say that this is ridiculously paranoid. Maybe it is. I’m not that important and probably never will be. But it’s basically, rather than a “risk tolerance”, I have a “risk budget” -- I occasionally do things to help other people which put me in danger, and since that burns through my budget I end up going a bit over-the-top in safety in some other areas in my life. Basically, I roll the dice, but limit when and where the dice get rolled. But hey, if I ever do become important, most of my internet past will be buried, which might turn out to be helpful? Who knows.
It’s pretty unusual for me to reuse a particular identity on another website, though it’s not the first time. If you recognize my name, then I’ll take this opportunity to say that the *other* website you know me from has been back up for a couple months now. In case you care and didn’t know.
Anyway, Mark Robinson. If he gets taken down by his past, which doesn’t seem to be fundamentally different from his present, then I’ll take that as a win. Even if there was a lot of luck involved. But I’m going to sigh a bit, since it meant that people couldn’t see what was right in front of them.
As the above couple of comments point out, I think most people don’t realize how easily they can be tracked down unless they’re very careful with what information they let out there; it is mostly a matter of whether or not there is someone determined enough to find out. Just like most home security systems are fine for the casual burglar looking for the easiest score where all you need is to make breaking in difficult enough that they’ll look elsewhere, but stopping someone who is going after you in particular for some reason is a lot more difficult.
You don’t even have to start off with hard associations, behaviours can give you clues where to start looking. Many years ago I was fairly active on an online chat roleplaying site, and one of my friends there was a known author. It got to the point where if somebody completely new showed up in one particular room on the site, with a complete and detailed backstory, and clearly understood some of the dynamics of the room already, myself and several other friends would basically go ‘Oh, that’s [author] taking a character from a story currently in progress around for a test drive to get inside the character’s head’, because it had happened so many times.
I had another friend who was a psych student who amused herself by figuring out how many of the people playing female characters were actually male. Most folks she could pin down within half an hour of interacting with them. I found out about this when she told me that it had taken days for her to feel like she had a reading on me. (She herself played a rather flamboyant male character on the same RP site.)
Frankly I agree that… well, let’s put it this way: Robinson’s inability to realize that all this stuff could be traced back to him isn’t enough evidence to call him stupid. We need (and have) lots of other evidence for that.
Q:”Was it pornhub?”
A:”No that would be too normal. It was Nude African”
One has to be pretty aware to avoid leaving big sloppy fingerprints all over the Internet. I recently purchased some items from a site I have never used before. I was not surprised that my name and address could be auto filled, but I was a tad horrified when Google offered to auto fill my credit card account #. I have always been careful to hand type sensitive info like that, but apparently Google just decided to keep that number handy from when I subscribed to them, the bastards.
Getting back to MR, I do find it odd he would call himself a “Black Nazi” on Nude Africa. I expect a site called “Nude Africa” would have a high proportion of Black viewers, and Nazis didn’t like Black people much, so it seems a provocative (and pretty stupid) thing to say on that site.
re: Crip Dyke
Your analysis is convincing but the remarks themselves are stupid.
And yet the odds at FiveThirtyEight are slipping back in Trump’s favor. NC has tipped back into the R column. I demand to know what keeps causing this! Every time Harris gains, something intervenes after about one week to push things back toward a likely Trump victory — an outcome the world literally cannot afford and that therefore must not happen.
What is it that keeps intervening in Trump’s favor one week after anything helps Harris? Whatever that thing is it has to be hunted down and destroyed. It is endangering hundreds of millions of lives.
God fucking DAMN YOU. Whoever messed with it, fix the formatting in the previous comment and DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING I WRITE EVER AGAIN!
stop yelling at Mano
Bekenstein Bound @#9,
The only person who can make any changes to any comment after they have appeared is me. I did not do anything to your comment. It looks like you did it yourself by omitting to close an italics tag.
I also do not appreciate your abusive and threatening tone. That is not the attitude that I expect people to take towards me or anyone else on this site.
You are no longer welcome here.
Goodbye.