Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Two weeks ago the Internet Movie Data Base—IMDb—deleted all its discussion boards. These were message boards for starting topics and posting replies on movies, television, and individuals who were credited in movies and television.

In 1999, seven years before I listed Lady Magdalene’s, my first movie, on IMDb, I started and replied to comments in the IMDb message boards. I found the discussions collegial and enjoyable.

IMDb.com is a division of Amazon.com, as is Withoutabox.com, a service for submitting independent films for festival play. IMDb encouraged indie filmmakers such as myself to make as much use of IMDb as possible to promote our films, including posting background info in the IMDb message boards.

So I did, and that’s when the message boards turned into a nightmare for me.

Withoutabox asked first-time directors to fill out a survey and encouraged us to share it to the IMDb message boards. One of the questions was obvious: what movie directors did we consider influences? I answered with my favorites: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Preminger.

The next thing I knew was a spate of messages: “Schulman thinks he’s the next Kubrick, Hitchcock, Preminger!”

Anything I replied after that was a Chinese finger trap: the harder I tried to pull away the tighter it held me.

From that day in 2006 through the shut down of the IMDb message boards I was followed by what I soon learned were “trolls”—anonymous writers using multiple “sock puppet” accounts—who worked to destroy the lives and works of anyone working in the film or television business that they could.

Did it require any actual reasons? I don’t know. I think it might be that it was the use of power for the sake of power. They did it because they could and it felt good to feel empowered, even if it was only the power to destroy. I don’t think any personal animus was even required.

I was a prime target. I was accused of making up the film-festival awards Lady Magdalene’s won. I was accused of writing the positive reviews my movie received, or having my friends write them. When I announced Kevin Sorbo would be starring in Alongside Night I was accused of lying about it.

IMDb has user ratings for movies that have started play, ratings from one to ten. The trolls used their multiple accounts so that overnight hundreds of “1” ratings appeared for both my movies on days the movie had played nowhere for months, and from countries where the movie had never been seen. These ratings are quoted all over the Internet, including on Amazon’s own catalog pages.

Positive user reviews were called “fake” and downvoted while negative user reviews were lauded by dozens of accounts.

Complaints on “Help” boards just increased the trolling exponentially. Asking for help from IMDb staff did too, convincing me that some of the trolls worked inside IMDb, and that IMDb was encouraging trolls to increase the site’s traffic—likely as a statistic IMDb management could show the parent company, Amazon.

It didn’t stop at IMDb. The trolls went to Amazon when Lady Magdalene’s first appeared as a streaming video and a DVD, and dozens of killer one-star reviews appeared, many with the exact same paragraphs, word for word. The trolls found my books and started trashing them, too. I pulled Lady Magdalene’s off sale from Amazon for several years in an attempt to mitigate the damage to my overall reputation.

I was accused of writing my own Wikipedia article and that was stripped of almost all true bio info posted by my fan base, replaced by vicious falsehoods put there by my detractors.

I’ve written about most of this before. Why am I bringing it up again now? To gloat that the IMDb trolls have to find another swamp to infest?

No.

I’m here to point out that trolling has become mainstream. The issue is no longer destruction of indie filmmakers on a now- defunct entertainment media message board. It’s that IMDb was a Potemkin Village to train an army of mainstream pundits who are now using the same strategy and tactics to destroy political opponents.

Milo Yiannopoulos has made a meal out of outrageous behavior, trolling liberals on college campuses and in the media by pretending to dark positions only because doing so triggers them. It became unfunny when it resulted in rioting, vandalism, and arson.

Richard Spencer giving a Nazi salute to Donald Trump was similarly performance art designed to gain attention by feeding into the Never- Trump narrative that Trump was surrounding himself with bigots. Spencer is a low-grade tribalist whose nationalism is so wimpy no actual historical Nazi—or even neo-Nazi—would be as broad- minded and inclusive. He’s a poseur.

So we get from the little fish to the whale.

Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, is now reduced to being me, with his hand stuck in the Chinese finger trap.

TV comics—Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher, John Oliver, even the “nice guys” Jimmy Fallon and James Corden—have turned their shows into non-stop Trump Trolling. Saturday Night Live has become Trump Trolling Central.

The mainstream news media do to Trump exactly what the IMDb trolls did to me: find nothing good and spin everything bad, even when you’re saying something the trolls had previously stated as their own position.

Trump trolls the trolls back like I tried to do, only he has an immensely bigger fan base than I ever had. But Trump has counter- trolling skill sets I never had.

When Kellyanne Conway misspoke and made a reference to a non- existent Bowling Green Massacre, the news, commentary and comedy media obssessed on it for days.

I think Trump has a learning curve.

So in a Florida rally when President Trump referred to something horrific in Sweden that also never happened, these same media jumped on the red meat again. I don’t think this second time was accidental. I think it’s a calculated diversionary strategy to move the attention-deficit news cycle away from the false narrative—already refuted by Julian Assange—that Russia put Trump in power.

My friend, writer, filmmaker, publisher Brad Linaweaver, has been warning me for years of the destructive potential of the Internet. I always argued back that without the Internet I would be completely invisible since the major mainstream media—right, left, and even libertarian—tend to downplay me if not marginalize me completely.

But when I see how this destructive creature of the Internet has now spread to all other media—when I see a civil war between a crazy far left and a demented far right—I see Brad’s point.

I see the remaining sane libertarians who haven’t been body- snatched by puppet masters already, drowning in a polluted ocean between them.

Changing metaphors, as I must:

The IMDb troll is now the size of Godzilla, and God save Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, and us all.

© 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved. Web and email links with attribution permitted and encouraged. Other reprints permitted only with prior permission of the author. Reprinted from JNeilSchulman @ acorist.com http://jneilschulman.agorist.com/2017/02/troll/