Mabus Redux: Operation Archangel Gets Dennis Markuze Arrested

On Friday, November 16, 2012 Dennis Markuze was once again arrested by the SPVM (Montreal Police) for violating the terms of his May 22 suspended sentence. It took many people many months to track him down and convince the police to arrest him. This is the story behind that.

For quite some time the most read item on this blog has been the lengthy history of a character named David Mabus (in real life a troubled man named Dennis Markuze of Montreal, Canada). It tells the story of how skeptics, atheists and science writers organized on Twitter to pressure the Montreal police department to take legal action against him, after he made repeated violent threats over many years. It took many cooperating people, several police reports, a Change.org petition, numerous phone calls and faxes and much other work to make that happen.

This post is a continuation of that story.

In recent months, skeptics and atheists started to notice a series of eerily familiar posts posted under various names including “Operation Archangel”. They once again mentioned Nostradamus, James Randi and atheism. They began on YouTube, spread to forums and blogs, and finally arrived on email and Twitter by the fall.

Those of us who followed the case closely knew that Mr. Markuze had pled guilty to eight counts of making threats on May 22. We suspected immediately that it was him again. Others were not so sure. There’s much nonsense on the Internet, and some insisted this must be a copycat or troll, perhaps trying to rile atheists with the spectre of Mr. Markuze.

This post is the story of how those posts once again led to Markuze’s arrest by the Montreal Police. As in 2011 it took quite a bit of work to make this happen. Tedious, painstaking, often thankless work.  But this is the type of work skeptic activists need to be ready to do in order to get results.

You will also learn how the Canadian court system, at least in Montreal, appears to be less than optimal when it comes to finding a positive outcome for cases like Markuze’s.

Social Media is a Gold Mine for Cold Readers

At the opening reception of TAM 2012 I had an interesting conversation about potential uses of technology by psychics, tarot readers and mediums. A recent Belgian public service announcement dramatically demonstrates what I was talking about, in a humorous way.

As most skeptics know, many of these performers use a technique known as cold reading to convince clients they have access to hidden knowledge, when in fact the client provides all the clues themselves.

But cold reading can be notoriously hard to do in practice, and sometimes leads to spectacular failures. So some psychics look for other ways to know about their clients.  This is known as warm or hot reading. Peter Popoff was famously called out for using hot reading techniques at his faith healing sessions in the 1980s by James Randi.

Hot reading can be difficult too, often you do not get advance notice of who will be at the session, so how do you research the people without tipping them off? So it can work in some situations but not all.

But what if you were a psychic and your clients were voluntarily providing information about themselves to you on the Internet, free for the taking?  Read on for how this works…

Twitter reaction to my #TAM2012 speech

I’ve gotten a fantastic reaction to my presentations at The Amazing Meeting 2012 (TAM2012) this year. Part of that reaction took place on Twitter during my talks and in the weeks since.

Twitter has a notoriously short memory, its search only goes a few days back. So comments on a live event can slip into Twitter’s memory hole alarmingly quickly. They’re actually all still there, but just inaccessible unless you know the URLs.

So I thought I would capture the live comments on my TAM2012 Plenary talk: You are the Future of Skepticism on the Internet. They give you an idea of what live-tweeting on a speech is like, and show what the initial reaction to the talk was.

I’ve included both positive and negative comments, as many as I could find.  These are presented in mostly chronological order, though I’ve reordered a few comments when it helps to follow the flow of conversation. And as you’ll see, I pulled out one sub-conversation so it can be read on its own.

Robots don’t get sarcasm – don’t link directly to bad content on social media!

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.

-Thomas Jefferson

Skeptics are quite fond of sarcasm and ridicule.

It’s understandable, really. How many blurry bigfoot films or bizarre alt-med claims can one person take? At some point you feel compelled to resort to humor. Or perhaps you just want to point out the most ridiculous claims to show how far from reality our cultural competitors are.

And so the skeptic blogosphere has long been rife with sarcastic takedowns and snide remarks. Now that social media is a big part of online skepticism, sarcasm and ridicule has come along for the ride there as well. When you’ve got to fit your comment in 140 characters there isn’t room for much more than a punch line.

But there are some side-effects to this approach that you may not have considered. I’m going to show you what those side effects are, and why you should think twice before linking directly to a pseudoscience or paranormal site from social media such as Twitter or Facebook.

There is no #AntiAtheistCampaign on Twitter. It’s just a crackdown on spam.

I happened to stumble across a few Tweets yesterday that contained the hashtag #AntiAtheistCampaign. Hashtags are often used to organize on Twitter. This appeared to be some people organizing against some sort of oppression against certain Twitter accounts. Was it widespread? Was it orchestrated by the religious?  I delved in further.

What I found was a disappointing lack of skepticism, a great deal of conspiracy mongering and very little evidence.

Now, clearly there were in fact some Twitter accounts that had been disabled, the evidence of that is undeniable. But with a little bit of awareness of what these folks were doing with their accounts, along with quick scan of the Twitter blog and even the tech news sites, one can piece together what is happening.

Bottom line: there is no evidence at all that Christians are ganging up on atheists on Twitter in an organized (and successful) campaign to get their accounts disabled. There is a much simpler explanation. Read on.

My Top Posts of 2011: A Lesson Learned Again

This is the time of year you see a many “year in review” posts. It’s good to take a moment and look back at what you’ve done.

In the spirit of this blog, I’ve got a year in review post coming later that will be a how-to about measuring your own skeptical contribution for the year. But for this one I just thought I’d look at what my top posts in each venue (blog, social media and so on) were and how much traffic or attention they got.

As I’ve pointed out before, raw traffic levels are often a misused indicator. Traffic can surge for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of the post itself, so it can be dangerous to let yourself be guided entirely by “ratings” as it were.

That having been said, the traffic levels may have some a lesson to teach us (albeit one that we have seen before on this blog). Read on.

What is the point of Twitter? Bruce Hood broadcasts an answer

As you can see from the icons at right, I participate in at least three different social media sites. I post updates about this blog, What’s the Harm stories and my daily Skeptic History facts for other skeptics to read.

I post some material to all three but a different mix of posts to each as appropriate to the features of that site. Those features keep changing, but for a long time I’ve personally preferred Twitter as my main social media conduit. I post the most on Twitter.

One thing I like is that Twitter is dead simple. Facebook seems intent on adding more and more gadgets and features every time I look at it, and often it just seems too much. It’s like the overkill of launching Photoshop just to crop a photo. But Twitter stays with a bare bones feature set. I admire that.

The default public nature of Twitter, where everyone can see all your posts (unless you take action otherwise) is a key to its value. I wrote back in August about how this allowed community action to take place against a spammer that wouldn’t have been nearly as easy on the other services. That action resulted in a police arrest.

This post is nowhere near that (in scope or length). It’s just about how I managed to pay a nice compliment to my girlfriend on national television via the medium of Twitter and the help of some friends. Read on, it’s a fun story.

Case Study: How a notorious spammer was brought down via Twitter

Today the Montreal Police announced that an arrest has been made (in French here) in the “Mabus” case. It wouldn’t have happened but for Twitter. This post explains how.

Twitter has been around for five years now, but there is still much confusion about what it is good for. How can you post anything useful in 140 characters? Isn’t it just people posting what they had for lunch? It’s a massive time waster. Those are typical complaints.

And yet there are several thousand self-proclaimed skeptics actively using Twitter quite effectively as a means of communication and organization. I quite like it myself. Unlike some complicated multi-purpose websites like Facebook, Twitter is dead simple. And you can do amazingly useful things with it.

“Like what?” you might ask. Well in the last week the science, journalism, skeptic and atheist communities on Twitter organized to pressure a law enforcement agency to take action on someone who has been a copious source of spam and death threats on the Internet for at least 15 years. Today’s arrest came about in under 10 days from the first moves.

I think the sequence of events of how this came together are quite interesting, and perhaps an object lesson in online activism. As it was happening I was capturing links to the relevant posts so I could document how it came about. Read on…

Web of Trust even more crucial to skeptics with Facebook integration

Back in March I wrote about how important Web of Trust could be for skeptical outreach. A few recent developments have made it even more useful, and in fact have even made it urgent that skeptics be involved in Web of Trust in a big way.

You can read about what Web of Trust actually does at the original post, but suffice it to say is it is a browser-based gadget that warns you when you are about to visit a dodgy or malicious web site. Since skeptics are fundamentally all about warning people about misinformation anyway, it is right up our alley.

These new developments are all about reach. We are always looking for better ways to reach more people, and in my post I pointed out that Web of Trust had millions of users. Well, it gets better. Read on to find out how much better.

How to filter persistent trolls (and spammers) on Twitter

UPDATES: Additional clients Plume, Kiwi, Tweetings, TweetCaster and Choqok were added.
UPDATE March 10: Just added Hibari and Slipstream.

Any new communication medium is bound to attract annoyances. And so it is with Twitter: the trolls and spammers have definitely arrived.

Skeptics are long familiar with pathological behaviors amongst believers online. When you challenge people’s deeply held beliefs, be they about religion or ghosts or alternative systems of medicine, you are bound to get a few of them riled up. And now that there are several thousand self-proclaimed skeptics actively using Twitter, trollish behavior on that service directed toward skeptics has become more common, particularly recently.

In this post I will show you a technique you can use with certain third-party Twitter clients to get more proactive with trolls and block them before they become an annoyance.