Utah Gov’t Leaned So Hard Into Confirmation Bias That Its Transphobic Snitch Form Became A Playground For Trolls

This is the sort of dumb shit you do when you feel the only people who will bother responding to your hateful dog whistle are a bunch of dogs (with valid voting registration!) that constantly have one ear cocked towards their master’s voice.

You leave a web form for comments almost completely unsecured and pretty much completely exploitable by people who think you and the people you’re whistling towards are a bunch of hateful fuckheads. Details here are provided by ex-Motherboard/Vice journalist Samantha Cole at 404 Media, an entity that definitely deserves plenty of love and monetary support.

Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state’s recently-enacted transphobic “bathroom bill.” The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public—without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people’s submissions. 

You just can’t do this sort of thing. Not now. Not even a decade ago.

It’s not as though the internet is still just a plaything for people with hundreds to spend on dial-up connections every month. For the most part, it’s as common as tap water (and, like tap water, its quality and supply vary greatly from location to location). No government would allow anyone to dump whatever they want into the water supply. But when it comes to the internet, governments often still cling to a more utopian view of online activity where it’s assumed everything will turn out alright, even if no one makes any efforts to help ensure this outcome.

They continue to cling to this view even though the history of the internet is filled with anecdotal evidence that suggests an extreme amount of care and caution is required when opening up the complaint lines to the internet in general — everything from people suggesting “Hitler did nothing wrong” for a new Mountain Dew flavor to most of 4chan organizing to get moot (the creator of the site) voted in as “Man of the Year” at Time Magazine’s website.

This is the sort of hubris that ignores the history of the internet in favor of legislators’ subjective views of their wisdom and influence. And, like most people on the planet, Utah government officials tend to think they’re smarter than the rest of the world, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Utah’s legislators love the people who love their bigoted shtick, but they’re blessed with far more confidence than competence.

This “hotline” (as it were) was set up to give pro-hate legislators ammo for more hateful legislation by giving people, who thought they might have seen a non-cis enter a restroom, a place to confirm the biases of hate-filled legislators. The tip line was the follow-up effort of state lawmakers who helped enact a law requiring the state auditor to field complaints from bigots with axes to grind (and the free time to grind them) and report back to the legislature about any perceived restroom violations.

But that didn’t work out because state legislators were so sure only their own would respond. Once the tip line information was spread throughout the internet, it became a playground for people opposed to laws like these to fill the internet in-box with literally anything but confirmations of anti-LGBTQ bias.

The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles.

Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission—a photo of the yelling table cat meme—appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven’t seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.

The first problem is the state government said, “Just do it live. We’ll fix it in post.” And that’s always a problem when the government runs a tip line. Those wanting to hear what they want to hear will just discard the things they don’t want to hear and claim the constituency fully supports whatever hatred they’re trying to push.

The other problem is the assumption that only like-minded people would bother responding to this sort of narrowly focused tip line. When you make that assumption, you do incredibly stupid things — like not bothering to make any attempt to verify the humanity of those filling out the form… or, in this case, not bothering to secure the virtual complaint box or the personal information of those making these submissions.

As 404 Media points out, the auditor’s office decided it might be a good idea to require ID authentication for those seeking to access the contents of the online complaint box. It’s too little and way too late.

It probably won’t matter. You can’t win with hateful government employees like these. The legislators who passed a shitty law and added an unsecured web form as a chaser won’t learn anything from this experience. If the tip line had been flooded with tips confirming legislators’ (illegitimate) fears that trans individuals are using the “wrong” (wtf) bathrooms in public spaces, these lawmakers would have presented this as evidence the law was needed. Now that it’s been flooded with cat memes and bull testicles, the same legislators will probably spin this as either a leftist ploy to de-legitimize its important restroom enforcement efforts or as a definitive demonstration about why it’s always a waste of time to bother asking the governed what they think about anything.

No matter how they spin it, we’ll know the truth: legislators were so sure only people with the same narrow minds as themselves would be bothered to respond so they never even attempted to implement even the most basic of efforts related to security or veracity. That’s the sort of thing that only happens when you’re so blinded by ideology you’re unable to see even the most predictable of results.