Facebook Engineers Proposed ‘Troll Twilight Zone’ to ‘Confuse and Demoralize’ with Purposeful Glitches

Two lead Facebook engineers proposed the creation of a “Troll Twilight Zone” which would secretly glitch out the accounts of alleged “trolls” on the social network, to “confuse and demoralize them” around key election dates.

Facebook Data Science Manager Seiji Yamamoto and Facebook Chief Data Scientist Eduardo Arino de la Rubia made their proposition in a 2017 presentation titled, “Coordinating Trolling on FB,” which was shared by a former Facebook insider with investigative journalism outlet Project Veritas.

According to the Facebook presentation,”troll accounts” in the “Troll Twilight Zone” could have their bandwidth “drastically limited” for “a few hours,” be logged out automatically “every few minutes,” and have their comments “magically fail to upload,” which the Facebook engineers boasted could “confuse and demoralize them.”

The presentation even noted key election dates which such manipulation could be deployed for, and claimed “trolls” could be identified by certain keywords they use.

Some of the words provided in the presentation, which Yamamoto and de la Rubia claimed could be used to identify trolls, included “zucced,” “normie,” “MSM,” “Overton Window,” “IRL,” “red pilled,” “SJW,” “shitposting,” “Kek,” and “REEE.”

The presentation also proposed alerting the “troll’s” friends on Facebook when they become banned in an effort to shame them and “strike fear in the hearts of trolls.”

Yamamoto claimed the “troll accounts” were engaged in “destructive behaviors” like “Red-pilling normies to convert them to their worldview,” and “Toxic meme creation.”

“By understanding the source of bad memes, we can choke off the distribution,” declared the presentation, explaining how Facebook could use “meme templates” as “marked bills.”