While I was doing some browsing, I also found this. Is anyone interested in the broader subject of internet use in the cult wars? This is a good link to an essay which discusses CENSURs attempts to collect data from mainly scientology discussion sites.
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Three conclusions may be drawn from this short experiment. Firstly, Usenet, in which the widely discussed -- and often exaggerated -- phenomenon of "Internet disinhibition" is more apparent (see Joinson 1998), magnifies the obsessive attempt by extreme anti-cultists to switch from the internal to the external history of scholarly theories. Among the several hundred messages we collected, only a limited number presented arguments directly related to the cult/anti-cult issue. Internal history arguments from "our" side normally generated external history answers (such as: "Most scholars do not believe the brainwashing hypothesis" -- "You/they are paid by Scientology"). When "Internet disinhibition" finally prevailed on both sides, arguments degenerated into typical flame wars. While useful for exchanging references and technical information, Usenet did not prove itself a very suitable medium for argumentation, at least in our field, neither towards extreme anti-cultists nor towards moderate third parties. Our findings replicated conclusions drawn by Mitra (1997) on newsgroups on the subject of Indian politics and religion, and by Zickmund (1997) on interaction with white supremacy "cyberhaters".
Secondly, the typical Internet myth of the "crucial document" appeared to be even more pervasive on the Usenet. Extreme anti-cultists are constantly looking for "smoking guns": a message, a letter, or a document that would conclusively prove their point and "expose" the opponent. When the "crucial document" is in turn analyzed or exposed as being less than vital, the search for a new "crucial document" begins. The concepts of both "document" and "information" are naively constructed as anything existing in print or electronical form, leaving serious difficulties with regards to reconstructing a hierarchy of sources. The "crucial document" could be a private memorandum, an article from a tabloid or extremist publication, or a court decision.
Thirdly, although both participants in our research and (we suspect) the "other side" included individuals using more than one identity, the exchanges confirmed comments made by Reid (1998, 37-40) on the crucial "lack of flexibility" in Internet identities, that prevents negotiation and escalates conflicts. "In the normal course of daily life" -- Reid argued -- "we often speak with imprecision. We assert certainty where we have only hunches, appeal to authority when what we truly have is a vague memory of an old magazine article, assert rank when we have only opinion. We rephrase and repudiate our own arguments, relying on force or character and the vagaries of our interlocutors' memories to allow us an attitude to redefine our position to suit the emerging argumentative terrain". In on-line dialogues, on the other hand, "frequent calls are made in flamewars for combatants to produce documentation and references, and very often the prior words of a combatant are quoted to the detriment of their author". As a result, "we cannot be flexible when easily referenced documentation of our words makes flexibility look like hypocrisy. The resultant illogicalities necessitated by this lack of flexibility compound the hostility of combatants as they are forced to eat their own words". Flexibility, therefore, is sought by multiplying identities, and leads to disintegration of the self and of communication itself. Or, in the words of Duval Smith (1999), "the computer interface, the anarchy of the Net structure, and the power asymmetry of most virtual communities, make the task of conflict management especially difficult". Ultimately, what we had was an escalation of conflict (that anti-cultists were no doubt attributing to "us"), and no way of progressing toward a solution.
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http://www.cesnur.org/testi/anticult_terror.htm
