Sockwatch - Ritzs_mustache_ride is a good person
This post has nothing to do with the murder investigated in season 1 of Serial. It is about understanding the community of social media participants that sprang up around the podcast (the "fandom").
Here we are looking at a few examples of the content posted by a user who trolled the Serial fandom with an astonishing number of accounts. They complained about the tone of the discussion, ran interference in support of dedicated innocent-aligned users, and attacked users apparently for the lolz.
##Characteristics
While looking for content posted by this user, I identified accounts with the following features:
- Username invoking a person or event from the Serial content and its reddit audience.
- Content that draws negative attention to law enforcement personnel and/or to individual users in the Serial fandom.
The same user(s) operating the accounts I identified may have also used (many) other accounts lacking one or both of the above features, but it becomes harder to draw the line between the user and their friends and imitators for accounts lacking both features.
For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to call the user "Ritzs_Mustache", in reference to a particularly notorious version of this user's persona.
##Theories
I was unable to settle on a single theory of "who" Ritzs_Mustache is, or if they can even be connected to any single coherent identity among us.
The Special Relationship
The user is clearly connected to summer_dreams/s100181. She can be seen interacting with Ritzs_Mustache accounts in a warm and supportive way.
u/Ritzs_mustache_ride is a good person, and I have no doubt he/she gets banned because of "prohibited" conduct. And he/she supports SS, because SS is intelligent and detail oriented. You may disagree with her position, but many of us don't.
Also, summer claimed she had a "friend" who used their accounts to "fuck with the guilters":
- Screenshot
- https://www.reddit.com/r/SerialThunderDome/comments/4eiuzy/i_submit_myself_for_the_first_ever_cbn_ama/d20q0ty/
summer's credibilty on the question of which accounts are and aren't "hers" is pretty low. And if it's true that summer was friends with Ritzs_Mustache, it's possible she had the passwords to the Ritzs_Mustache accounts and wore them to post content. And/or that she emulated her friend's style for comments and account-naming. I don't think we'll ever know, beyond the very strong evidence that the accounts were connected in some way.
Ritzs_MustacheTrixdUs?
Another theory is that the username troll is a user such as KoenigTrixdUs, a user who has acknowledged switching accounts, and was open to using alt accounts to target guiilters. But KTU has not acknowledged activity in the Ritz accounts to my knowledge.
Many Mustaches
In the alternative, this user may be a cluster of users coalescing around a trolling style, a style that guilters such as u/islamisawesome also adopted characteristics of.
##Identified Accounts
u/noiresque made this report of another profane username attacking a regular guilter poster.
##June 2015 r/serialdiscussion attack
r/serialdiscussion was a spin-off sub started in January 2015 by user serialmonotony during an unpopular moderation experiment in r/serialpodcast. It hosted discussion parallel to the main sub with a looser moderation policy.
A flood of bizarre threads hit r/serialdiscussion in June 2015. This comment chain is a reasonably good tl;dr from user MrsTiggyWiggy of what was happening.
In retrospect, the threads appear to have been posted for the entertainment of a small number of trolls with insider access to the private innocent subreddits, exposing frustrations and paranoia around the purges to remove sock accounts and suspected State agents.
This incident, particularly the post Boring Sock stuff, was public confirmation that thanksformutton/summer_dreams was posting with multiple accounts, and documented why accounts associated with her were shadowbanned by Reddit Admin. While that post identified summer_dreams as the username troll, according to s100181/summer, [she and a friend attacked the mods of r/serialdiscussion together](https://www.reddit.com/r/SerialThunderDome/comments/4eiuzy/i_submit_myself_for_the_first_ever_cbn_ama/d21azss/?context=5).
And then there were the hate PMs. A user named in the troll account names received harassing, profane PMs. Similar to these?. We just don't know.
##Conclusion
The user operating "Ritzs_Mustache" and associated accounts was (is?) persistent, vicious, and, at the height of their activity period, ubiquitous. It is hard to find a single thread or comment in this family of accounts that clarifies the Serial content or generates good will. From that point of view, the user's influence on the discourse in the Serial fandom was shockingly out of proportion to their contributions, prolific as they were.
Previous: Sockwatch - I'm glad janecc spoke her minds
##P.S. Recommending RES
If you are exploring the history of the Serial fandom in a web browser, I recommend installing the extension Reddit Enhancement Suite. It adds the ability to tag users in Reddit, which is very useful for marking sock accounts and also for ignoring them.
Posted Mar 8, 2017, 3:37 AM UTC · edited