brigade
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To brigade or brigading is a coordinated effort by an online group to bully, manipulate, or harass an individual or another group online typically by mass commenting, reposting, and/or liking.
Recommendation: user-interface features which can enable and in particular amplify abuse-like brigading should generally be avoided in web interactions and designs.
Examples
Gamergate
As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.—The Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds” via BuzzFeed News
IndieWeb counter-examples
- micro.blog creator
Manton Reece has stated that he's designed his platform to specifically not have a repost/retweet functionality as a means of helping to prevent abuse.
See Also
- repost
- quote tweet
- dunking
- report abuse
- design
- compare with like-brigade (via Urban dictionary)
- Robin Sloan has written about slowing down the ever accelerating social web.
- Brigade was also the name of a failed social media startup supported by Sean Parker in 2015. See: Brigade: new social network from Facebook co-founder aims to 'repair democracy'