I’m not sure if anyone can actually see this, but fans of MBC know that I am a magnet for the copycat troll/spoof accounts. The same thing happened last summer with my old ‘Milton Berle’s Cock’ profile. The impostor account would copy me the best he could and then go all over the Gawker universe and spread hateful, bigoted messages under the guise of being me. It one point I was completely banned until I pointed out to Max Read that I wasn’t the one actually making the remarks.

This is possible because kinja/Gawker has a huge gaping hole in their system that no one seems to think is important. That is anyone can copy a profile photo and name exactly and further cloak there identity by almost exactly copying the @kinja address which is the one unique identifier. For example, my kinja address is “kinja.com/mbcock,” my copycat troll is “kinja.com/mbcock-,” Did you see the difference? He took my exact name AND ADDED A HYPHEN TO IT. No one sees the difference so they rightfully assume that it’s me making all these horrible comments. The one thing that you can do to determine if it is the real MBC or the troll is to go in and look at the followers in the stats section. The troll only has one or two where as I have 60.

This is further complicated by the fact that Gawker’s stance on this is “We don’t want to be in the position of censoring profiles.” To which I replied, “You saying then that you would allow me to make an account that said I was Nick Denton?”

This is what happened last time. I ended up message Gawker IT as many as four and five times a day pointing the troll out. They would block the account and he would start a new one with a new variation of the kinja name in less than thirty minutes. Finally Gawker just banned my account and there was no way to resurrect it. This brings me to my new profile MBCock. I was talking to there IT department last week pointing out the process was starting all over again. They managed to shut down the spoof account but in the process they have shut mine down also.

Now I’ve already messaged Gawker IT today and I haven’t heard back. I’ll try again tomorrow, but for now I am just venting at how inefficient this whole kinja business is. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them. Is there a Gawker writer that I could engage or a subgroup I can join?

Milty