This is what caused me to wonder if allowing trolls, but eliminating their conversation from everyone but other trolling users might be an option. Let them revel in the attention of their friends, but have that attention only serve to give them the illusion that they're affecting others while directly causing others to ignore them (and thus, prevent unintentional feeding). It'd be tricky to get right and probably not worth the energy in most places, but would be interesting to see and study the results.
So in other words, like a multi user version of Shadowbanning?
It's an interesting idea (and I'm 100% sure it's been done before), but it doesn't really work out on any site with a significant audience. I mean, all you need is one of those trolls to access the site at work/school/wherever and notice their posts are being shown if they're not logged in, and then suspicions are raised.
Too easy to bypass and figure out. It's like how people figured out Twitter's shadowbans, because people who followed them said off site that they weren't seeing their messages.
I have yet to see an article about Internet trolls and cyberbullying that addresses the nuances inherent in a couple of points:
1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments don't make any sense and you are just an arrogant cyberbro I DRINK MALE TEARS", is she cyberbullying him?
Should her access to Twitter be cut off, or would voluntarily blocking her on the part of Bob address this problem in a sufficient manner?
2. How to balance prevention of trolling with limiting self-expression? The outside world is not a perfect place where everyone engages in reasoned discourse either. Given that pub-sub systems like Twitter are the equivalent of everyone shouting their opinions loudly in the same street, how much of the unreasonableness inherent in human discourse do we allow to penetrate these social networks to keep them essentially human in nature and not turn into a LinkedIn style list of platitudes?
I wish the article went some ways towards addressing these. Instead it seems to focus on ad-hoc initiatives set up by a lot of people who (in my opinion) seem to not have any concrete ideas of what they are trying to accomplish. For example, one of the research papers linked [1] describes cyberbullying as including "...posting mean or hateful
comments, aggressive captions or hashtags". In my opinion this is a rather extravagant definition of the term and should be examined more carefully and revised per the points above.
I just thought it would be good to point out that you are creating a strawman. You've created an example that you acknowledge isn't cyber bullying, and use that to suggest that therefore cyber bullying can't exist in any form.
A straw man is a misrepresentation of someone else's argument, and the poster did not say something anything so unsophisticated as what you have suggested. Your argument, on the other hand...
Not to point out the obvious, but "is she cyberbullying him?" and "Should her access to Twitter be cut off" are both clearly attempting to misrepresent the argument of the other side. Just because they are rhetorical questions doesn't mean it isn't obvious what the poster is implying.
This is the parent-level post. There's no dishonest misrepresentation of anyone. The poster also didn't even come close to suggesting anything so unsophisticated as "therefore cyberbullying can't exist in any form!"
That is an awful misrepresentation.
The paragraph in question basically pushes the conversation toward, "Where are the brightlines?"
Actually, it's not a straw man. Laws (or codes of conduct, at universities) like this actually do exist. In the US, they are generally unconstitutional, but challenging them is expensive and time consuming. For a fairly comprehensive listing of such laws/codes and an analysis of their constitutionality (again, only for US purposes), see Professor Volokh's blog, now part of the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/cat...
Not being a cry baby.
Just because someone called you fat/doesnt agree with you doesnt mean you need to cry about it on the internet all day.
The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.
TFA mentions Twitter at the beginning, but doesn't follow up at all with how terrible their interface is and has been for targeted users. The "solutions" discussed in TFA require the coordinated voluntary actions of users and site administrators, and are therefore impractical. We need instant technical solutions. It should be possible to "un-@" any other user, with no questions asked. That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.
> That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.
The problem with is then @alice controls whose tweets I can read if I want to follow her content. :/ Just because I want to hear what @alice has to say doesn't mean I want @alice to control whether I can talk to @bob.
I think solid ignoring features is really the limit to this approach due to that fact. [e.g. @alice ignores @bob, @bob never shows up in her feed no matter what]
OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.)
I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore.
The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"
> OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.)
That could work well enough. :)
Yeah, my main concern was a power user who people wouldn't want to unfollow abusing the feature to silence critics.
I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters.
The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character.
With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.
Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet.
Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog.
It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.
I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west.
They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).
The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.
Yep. It's a gentrification that has been chipping away at different aspects of the Internet for as long as I can remember. A struggle between the pioneers who have learned to live (and even flourish) within the chaos, and the rest of society who want the chaos eliminated.
Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.
Parent and me were talking about hardcore cases. There is no technological solution for people stubbornly following you everywhere and sending death threats.
Furthermore, from some anecdotal evidence, I think most victims in such cases already know who is harassing them.
And in the good old days almost nobody was trolled because the energy required to send a message via snail mail (starting with "do I even own stamps any longer"?) is several orders of magnitude higher than composing a one sentence death-threat on twitter.
It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).
I think the solution will lie as much with law enforcement as with the social media platforms. In examples as extreme as yours, they should be treated like any other credible threat and reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency right away. Unfortunately, I have a hard time imagining my local PD will even know what Twitter is, much less how to pursue a case involving it. I think social media platforms need to ensure that law enforcement can easily (through the appropriate legal channels) access the necessary information on the sites to pursue such cases.
Unfortunately, far more cases are less extreme than yours. The line gets blurrier when you get down to persistent low-level harassment, where individual examples will look relatively harmless to an outsider but the victim is forced to face them as a whole. In those instances, it's the responsibility of the social media platform to allow the victim to properly document and report the harassers, and most definitely put up the appropriate barriers to prevent future harassment. Twitter's biggest failing on this point is in how easy it is to create "sockpuppet" accounts, such that as soon as one is banned they can continue uninterrupted from the next.
It has everything to do with the internet -- fundamentally, the last ten years of online technology are the story of previously borderline behavior types demonstrating emergent properties at scale. The ways in which people are regularly, even commonly, harassed online now are life-destroying. If you think the cops have the resources to follow up on thirty thousand death threats from all over the world you're being willfully naive at best.
> More than 1,700 cases involving abusive messages sent online or via text message reached English and Welsh courts in 2012, the BBC has learned after a Freedom of Information request.
The criado-perez trolls were enabled by the Internet. They saw other people trolling and thought it was okay; they were able to create many accounts rapidly; they were able to send very many messages.
You're discounting the possibility that there's a difference. There's varying levels of harassment, and it should be up to the victim's discretion as to how severely it should be treated. If person A calls person B a jerk on Twitter, that's easily enough ignored (unless there's a pre-existing personal or parasocial relationship between persons A and B that would make "jerk" sting more than it otherwise would), but if person A organizes a campaign involving all of their followers whose sole intent is to make person B feel threatened then that's an entirely different matter.
The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.
> Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet.
Where was that said? I don't see this comment at all. "turning your devices off now and then" is akin to stepping out of a discussion when you start to take things personally. That doesn't mean you are banned from all conversations. It's healthy to take a break.
Given that modern harassment (particularly on Twitter) involves being targets by thousands of accounts over a period of months or years, how long do you think would be appropriate to turn your devices off for?
This isn't about someone "[taking] things personally" -- this is about organized groups making existing platforms unusable for their targets.
One scenario: A celebrity with a million followers says something. A non-celebrity tweets an opposing response. 0.1% of the celebrity's followers take that as an attack on their idol and start heaping abuse on that person. (numbers sourced from rectal data repository, for illustrative purposes)
In that case, it's not really "organized" by anyone in particular.
The real-life equivalent of that scenario is a random Joe showing up at some political rally shouting "you're WRONG!". Of course shit will fly; the best realistic scenario is being corteously manhandled out of the venue. Why would you expect it to be different on teh intertubes?
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the issue is that the scale of these phenomena on the internet produces emergent qualities that don't exist in real life, which makes attempts at analogy particularly fruitless.
For example, in your analogy, they're not being manhandled out of the venue. Someone at the venue is taking their picture and following them home, distributing that information, then random people are showing up at their house for the next eighteen months or more. Then people are showing up at their family's house with threats, and their boss's house demanding that they be fired.
Is this the type of "shit [flying]" that you think people should be prepared to expect when they post things online?
What I mean is that "there will be consequences" is a thought that should cross one's mind before doing or saying anything in a public forum. Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public? Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?
(Btw yes, that sort of reactionary persecution can happen and does indeed happen in all sorts of places. It's part and parcel of meaningful political activism anywhere in the world.)
> Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public?
Why should the consequences be so completely out of proportion to what was originally said? "In public" covers more situations than it used to, and the size of your audience isn't always intuitive.
> Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?
Probably not. Will you be roughed up by thousands, be followed home, and be stalked and harassed for years? Probably not.
Proportionality is "in the eye of the beholder", unless you enshrine a measurement in law.
The fact that "in public" situations might have expanded (and sometimes replaced more private ones) is a problem that can (and should) be fixed with education. NBD.
Just because some people seem unable to comprehend the (massive) scale of internet space, it doesn't mean that we can magically make it a paradise where real-world behaviour honed in thousands of years simply does not happen. Internet space is a new all-encompassing dimension, the scale of which we've never seen. One should think carefully before acting in such an environment. It's not like interacting with press or peers in a given niche; it's like broadcasting on all channels in all countries at all hours. The chances of getting reactions you might not like are higher than with any other media or venue; but on the positive side, the chances of getting reactions you will like are also disproportionately higher than anywhere else. Continuously complaining that the glass is half empty will just provoke someone in smashing the glass to solve the problem -- because "you didn't like it much anyway, always complaining".
Caroline Criado Perez noticed that UK banknotes were changing. Bank notes have an image of a notable person on one side, and the monarch on the other. Criado Perez noticed that the new designs didn't include any women (apart from the queen, and she's only there through luck of birth).
Criado Perez started a petition to ask Bank of England to consider including a woman on the notes, and to remember to include women in future re-designs.
That's not much.
For that she was subjected to months long campaigns across all her social media accounts, extending to her AFK addresses, with severe threats of sexual violence.
One man was sending 50 messages an hour over 12 hours across multiple accounts.
It's disappointing that some people are defending those who make death threats. It's common over a keyboard, but AFK a death threat is serious business.
> Here there were a series of communications (not just a single one as referred to in the guideline) where extreme language was used and substantial fear was caused.
> Indeed it is hard to imagine more extreme threats (death, rape, and worse [Sorley]) and rape [Nimmo]. The harm is, and (despite what is said on your behalf) must have been intended to be, very high.
> The fact that they were anonymous heightened the fear. The victims had no way of knowing how dangerous the people making the threats were, whether they had just come out of prison, or how to recognise and avoid them if they came across them in public.
And about blocking:
> The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned
So you are calling a harassment campaign "trolling" and then are surprised that people are dismissing you?
As I said in response to your other post, this is something you report to the police. And I bet she did.
And about blocking:
> The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned*
Exactly. This isn't trolling. Your social network can do nothing for you. You accidentally pissed off many people, now you are in trouble, you go to the police for protection, prosecute those who are serious and, unfortunately, ignore the rest because little can be done about thousands of people hating you personally for their insecurities.
There's a big difference between trolling and stalking. The problem is that what happens to pass as trolling today isn't even trolling it's just plain stalking. When you post someone's address, a photo of their house, or call someone's local PD to coax them to send the SWAT to their house then you're not a troll. A troll is all about flames and absurd reactions from people.
A person who is not comfortable with an anonymous, fictional, and harmless interaction with someone who uses curse words or claims they will rape them can avoid this problem by not engaging in the specific components of internet usage where that may happen. Browsing their favorite news sites, shopping on Amazon, or booking airline tickets will likely be unaffected, meaning your comment is obvious hyperbole.
Some online behavior that crosses into the real world will and has always been illegal and actionable of course, as I noted in the original comment. Most of what people consider "online abuse" isn't in that category.
If you don't want to see rippling abs and cleavage you have to avoid nearly all advertising these days. If you don't like guns you can't watch movie trailers. The modern world has many such dilemmas. Ignoring the things you find objectionable shouldn't be discounted as a simple solution.
As I said, I realize I'm out of the mainstream. But I've been called horrible things and even doxxed and stalked and threatened in the real world by online commenters a couple times over the past 20 years. I've found that "not caring about it" has been a shockingly useful and effective tool.
but see, this is the issue with it happening today - back when it was all random IRC channels, ICQ chatroom or worse, if anyone was trolling you, it was easy to switch off and walk away and continue your life unabated, because it was just the internet. Even if it was real life, it was easy to avoid - you just don't go to wherever it was that these people hung out. It was easier for us to have (and I hate myself for using this word, but) a "safe space", it was usually at home.
For younger kids today, a overwhelming majority of their lives are online, so it's so much harder to escape - both for work/education purposes and entertainment, so it's so much easier to keep up the waves of harrassment, so simply saying "just ignore it" doesn't really work these days.
"Just ignore it" is the same as recommending someone leave a party when they're being sexually harassed, as if that's a satisfactory solution. It's punishing the wrong person.
Kick the jerks. Ban them if they are repeat offenders. Provide mechanisms for people to shrink or expand how much information is shared and how easy it is to contact them.
I'm actually dismayed that to this day very, very few sites enforce a system where you must be recommended by someone in order to join, or by a friend to ask to be friends/communicate with someone.
Those that get perpetually harassed would be far less likely to have to deal with trolls if those trolls had to be a "friend of a friend". Is vouching so technically complicated we haven't done it yet?
There are social structures and conventions that haven't really seen much traction in software. Someone's totally out of control at a party? Kick them out and kick out the person that invited them too.
I've written a response about three times here and just deleted it because I rambled for paragraphs something that could be summed up by saying: i have no fucking idea what the correct answer is.
I know services like Slack are kinda helping this along a little bit - I'm a part of one or two Slack groups that I've been invited to by other people, with a bit of a pep-talk at the start of like "here's the sort of shit that WON'T fly here..." that are just small single-interest focussed groups that have kinda organically grown, but it's definitely a rare situation.
I think it's just education for new users (kids), and making sure they fully understand how the internet works and being mindful of what information they share where and with whom. Trolls (in all their levels of extremity) will always exist - anyone claiming they know how to "get rid" of them are fooling themselves
It's less a problem of "getting rid" of trolls and more a case of giving people control over them instead of it being such a one-sided deal where trolls get to dictate where, when and how you can socialize.
If people feel like they have tools to push back against trolls they'll use them. If they feel like they're powerless, they'll leave. If they leave the troll to user ratio skews a bit higher and might end up poisoning the entire community.
These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site.
At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.
I believe K5 also stopped accepting new accounts for awhile. It's a shame; there was a lot to like about how the site worked. The collaborative review process seemed like the future of how science and journalism ought to work on the Internet. Instead it became dystopian parable of how such things don't work on the Internet.
Right now, the login/password field is bugged so you have to type in the URL string to get to your account. ICU/brain dead is about right for K5 now, unfortunately.
As a younger internet participant, I'm starting to see this in Reddit (ironically, backed by Y-combinator, which i've now moved to). It seems as a site gets more and more popular, Sturgeon's Law takes effect and the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.
> the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.
90% of human interactions are crap ;) Pre-Internet people lived in isolated bubbles and the mess we have now is just a demonstration what happens when too many people from one bubble start interacting with another.
Funny you mention that. When I left Digg, I started participating in Reddit because it was far more civil at the time. Thinking about interactions in the last several years across several sub-reddits, it's long suffered from the same problems that wrecked Digg and as a result I've not participated in that community in quite some time.
Hacker News has been pretty rigid with its community standards and though there's (legitimate) complaints about the rigidity, the trade-off encoutered from a "downvote because I disagree" vs "downvote because comment is hostile" is well within my tolerances here.
At an individual level, I agree. At the community level, I don't think it will be that easy. If trolls can destroy the SNR, the community will also be destroyed.
Exactly. If your solution is to "ignore trolls" then eventually you have to upgrade your ignore to the entire community.
USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.
Usenet died because of 2 reasons:
The burden of carrying alt.binaries
The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries
They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame.
It was dead long before I saw any copyright issues being raised or before binary newsgroups were a problem.
The infamous "Green Card Spammers" (http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/) shifted the tone dramatically, and from there it was inevitable that the whole community would collapse. There was very limited control over what people could post, USENET was intended to be free and open. This succeeded wildly in an academic environment where if someone was seriously out of line you could address their university and get their account pulled.
As soon as the general population came on and there was no accountability to anyone it was simply a matter of time before unchecked abuse started to happen.
Most providers pulled the plug because the only thing of any value left on USENET was binaries. The discussions were virtually dead.
"The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person."
No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.
What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses.
Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.
People are happy to make idiotic comments under their real names linked to their real identity.
See the Sikh who advertised Facebook ("What's this raghead terrorist doing on my wall?") or comments under any news article (especially Daily Fucking Mail ("Kill the immigrants")).
If you read the OP comment carefully, you'll notice he actually is saying the opposite: he'd rather live with the trolls, than have to give up anonymity.
I wish this were a silver bullet, and of course, nothing would completely be a silver bullet, but even in forums/comments that require the use of a "Real Name" (to the extent it can truly be enforced), it's clear that people are OK with trolling under their actual name. The perception of anonymity is important, yes, but the illusion that they're not attacking a "real person" seems to be enough to let people become detached enough to be examples of terrible human beings.
And losing anonymity also reduces someone's willingness to talk openly (and civilly) about a topic that they may otherwise be unwilling to discuss (sexuality, medical issues, etc). Heck, I won't even talk directly about my political opinion after reading articles about how people with strong political views are willing to reject a candidate for hiring entirely because of them not aligning politically (not really a problem for me since I generally hate politics).
This also lowers the number of available voices and it might reduce the ratio as it relates to trolls. In a sensitive topic do we lose more trolls this way or do we lose more civil conversation? I'm not sure.
Elimination of anonymity helps, yes, but isn't appropriate for every kind of discussion and must be combined with other methods.
If you're so sensitive that your day is ruined or you feel uncomfortable by what a random, anonymous idiot says on the internet, you need to either
A. Stay off the internet
or
B. Only participate in communities where you control who has the ability to post content you see (i.e. facebook).
The world doesn't owe you a safe-space hugbox. Trying to censor people for being mean is just as shitty as trying to censor them for saying things you disagree with. I value the rights Americans have to be horrendous shitheads on the internet and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
This "toughen up" sentiment sounds nice in theory but it's absurd in practice. Listen to writer Mindy West's story on This American Life about confronting one of her worst trolls [1]. Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque.
Not being online or in a community not full of jackasses (what you derisively call a "hugbox") isn't an option for West. She's a writer who has to be on the internet and engaged with social media to do her job.
Before you say "Well if you can't handle that, get another job," think about that statement. You're normalizing people being jackasses and blaming their victims for trying to be regular people doing their jobs. You are literally saying, "It's your fault for being on the internet, what did you expect?"
West is a good example of how ridiculous this mentality is. We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed. Frankly, if the mostly white, mostly male tech community was less so, they might actually understand that.
This kind of victim-blaming is absurd. I understand a lot of people in tech are fond of free speech principles (and rightly so, they're important) and edgy South Park libertarianism, but this is not the right hill to die on.
What options do well-intentioned people have to fight back? Doxxing the doxxers? Maybe someone will eventually form an online version of the Guardian Angels [1] to combat this issue.
Oh god. Trying to troll the trolls and fight back just tends to lead to a cycle of revenge and an online civil war. This sort of reasoning is partly why GamerGate blew up the way it did, because people (on all sides) were attacking the hell out of everyone who disagreed with them. What was a disagreement over a fairly minor matter soon exploded into people trying to find excuses to get their opponents fired/arrested/swatted/etc.
The internet doesn't need more excuses to form social media vigilante mobs.
>We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed.
My priority is anonymity and freedom of expression. You're never going to be able to satisfactorily reconcile that with your priority of not making anyone feel uncomfortable.
Doesn't it then make sense to stick to different kinds of internet communities? You stick to facebook and real names, I'll stick to twitter with freeform handles? Why try to force change on platforms clearly not made for you? Isn't that just naked greed?
>Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque.
How far does this go? Should we enforce 100 points of ID on letters to the editor of local newspapers, in case I pretend to be someone on the other side of the world and write mocking things?
Surely at some point every sane person must learn to ignore things, or they'll have a heart attack trying to control every word spoken around them?
I didn't elaborate on this enough in the previous post, but please do not assume I'm trying to make no one uncomfortable or enforce real names or remove anonymity. That's a pure strawman.
Being uncomfortable is fine. Disagreeing is fine. Anonymity is fine. Living with people who say disagreeable things is part of life. I have issues with stalking, harassment and death threats. It's not anonymity or disagreement that are the problem, it's aggressive harassment that would get you a visit from the police if you did it in real life.
Please don't think in simplistic, binary terms. We can have free speech, anonymity and argue all day without stalking and death threats. That's the happy medium I want.
As for why be part of a platform "not made for you," I just explained why. Twitter is a useful tool that is indispensable for some jobs.
I'd also ask you to flip your assumptions on their head. Why do you think Twitter shouldn't be changed? Isn't it more greedy of you to insist that certain people, usually women and minorities, continue suffering abuse? Isn't it selfish of you to not make a change?
"My priority is anonymity and freedom of expression. You're never going to be able to satisfactorily reconcile that with your priority of not making anyone feel uncomfortable."
I'm 10,000% positive that it is possible to satisfactorily reconcile "freedom of expression" with not allowing rape and death threats. If you can't, then maybe you need to do some serious self examination.
"Surely at some point every sane person must learn to ignore things, or they'll have a heart attack trying to control every word spoken around them?"
That is extremely easy to say when you haven't had this done to you.
>That is extremely easy to say when you haven't had this done to you.
You should check my comment history dude. There's a chap named "assocguilt" who on this very site spent about two months stalking every post I made here posting snarky comments because I suggested the software industry should refuse to employ people who have job histories working for dodgy government departments. He started making references to my home city and former employer about half way through the process.
Everyone gets threatened and stalked on the internet. It's like getting burgled. It happens to pretty much everyone at some point. You can let it forever destroy your confidence, or you can recognize it as an essentially random happening and move on.
I think you leave out some extremely relevant points in your comment and have mischaracterized the situation. Lindy West is one of the poster children for the "fat acceptance movement", a self described activist, cofounded a social media campaign called "Shout Your Abortion", and just released a book titled "Shrill" whose subtitle includes "Feminists don't have to be nice".
She has extremely controversial views that she expresses in the most public way possible. Even if she is not deliberately trying to incite discord against her, I am not sure how she could possibly do it any more effectively.
From what I can tell from my brief searching about her, she shoves extremely offensive (to many people) opinions in the faces of the public at large. She is just as complicit in creating an offensive environment on the internet as all the people who send her mean messages on Twitter. Just because she is on "the right side of history" in many of her viewpoints doesn't make it any more justified. Which is essentially my entire point - everyone offends everyone. You cannot stop it and it will never end. All you can do is insulate yourself from it.
I think it's a pretty far stretch to call it victim blaming if I were to tell Lindy West to maybe not make a public, professional career out of advocating the most controversial opinions possible in the most public way possible if she didn't want to get called mean things on Twitter by people she's deeply offended.
I don't especially care what she endorses. I've never read one of her articles. However, if you disagree with someone, you owe it to them to do it without death threats and faking their dead father.
Also, you are absolutely blaming the victim right now. Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma. Saying her writing is equally as complimit in online toxicity as systemic harassment dodges the problem and blames the victim.
Like I said in the other reply, I don't endorse a world where no one disagrees with each other. Don't put up a strawman for my position.
Living with opinions you don't like is part of life. Harassment should not be.
Death threats are already illegal, so that's beside the point.
The line between "voicing an opinion someone disagrees with" and "harassment" is pretty vague, especially when from one person's perspective, thousands of people voicing disagreement to you sure looks like harassment, despite no single person necessarily being harassing.
Her opinions that she voices publicly are just as traumatic, if not more so, than someone pretending to be her dead father. She literally had a "Shout your Abortion" social media campaign. Possibly one of the most traumatic things a woman will ever go through, and she's encouraging people to discuss it as much as possible, even implicitly (or explicitly) suggesting it be discussed with pride. I think you'd have to be pretty delusional to not understand how that's extremely traumatic to a lot of people.
>Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma
People aren't being mean to her because she's a liberal or writing books, they're mean because she's saying and writing things that are offensive and traumatic to them. She's essentially thrown the first punch and getting upset that they're punching back. This isn't victim blaming anymore than it's victim blaming to say she shouldn't attack someone bigger than her if she doesn't want to get her ass kicked.
"I think you leave out some extremely relevant points in your comment and have mischaracterized the situation. Lindy West is one of the poster children for the "fat acceptance movement", a self described activist, cofounded a social media campaign called "Shout Your Abortion", and just released a book titled "Shrill" whose subtitle includes "Feminists don't have to be nice"."
I fail to see how ANYTHING in that justifies the crap she got. You seriously need to reexamine your life if you think it does.
You're missing the outsized effect of mass-coordination allowing for thousands of people to harangue someone else on the Internet. Additionally, (A) isn't really an option in the interconnected world where (1) if you want to do business, you're probably doing it online to some extent and (2) trolls will now step up their 'game' to target people physically (in ways that are still asymmetric and hard for real-life law enforcement to interdict).
I don't have a good solution for this, other than to observe that there are some kinds of free expression that even Americans draw some solid lines against; when a civil demonstration becomes a riot, the police come to break it up (and, yes, the question of whether something is 'a civil demonstration' or 'riot' is one that can be debated ad nauseum by participants and observers; the presence of legal authority to break up a riot is what is undisputed).
I am a web developer, my entire livelihood would not exist if not for the internet, and it would be effortless for me to avoid anything online that is offensive to me, even if the entire country knew my name and wanted me dead. I am not sure you have a valid argument unless your business involves tremendous social media presence that only you personally can manage, which is both unlikely and still surmountable (just post stuff, don't read what others reply).
Your second point is a bit of a slippery slope. Yeah, you'll have people trying to SWAT you, but that's more an issue with our legal system than it is with bullying on the internet. The instances of someone, even on a national level of negative publicity, getting actual real world physical violence against them, is incredibly rare.
Your comparison to a riot doesn't really hold up. Riots are bad because they cause property damage, interfere with the normal functioning of a city, and get people physically hurt or killed. A fat acceptance advocate getting called names on Twitter hurts his/her feelings, which doesn't in my opinion justify having laws created to protect his/her feelings.
A beer truck? Seriously everywhere you have free and open communication some people will be trolls. The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword.
The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword.
I think, though, that it's a pretty huge difference. The speed with which someone can crap all over a discussion is instantaneous and psychologically a lot easier due to not being "in person". Trolling in the form that it would have existed a couple of centuries ago[1] still exists today (without the sword, perhaps, but the threat of violence in retaliation to trolling still exists today -- we just have better technology and better enforcement). I would use Donald Trump as an example. He gets his share of trolling (and non-trolling protesting) at his in-person events, however, I'd hazard a guess that the amount of such activity during his entire campaign would be about as much as is seen in an hour on Reddit.
[1] We don't have a lot of historical evidence that dates back 2500 years, so I'm assuming that was a typo or an embellishment used to make a point (or, perhaps, something I missed in my speed reading of the article).
I've wondered about this for a while. There's no shortage of dicks[1] on the Internet. It's too easy to spout off and attack someone online in a way you'd never do "in person" and there's plenty of people who make a sport of it. For the former, there's not much that can be done, for the latter, I think there are a few solutions (variations of which I've seen tried).
Personally, I think it starts first with community standards and moderation. Hacker News, Stack Overflow and such do a pretty good job already. You get a share of jerks here and there but by and large the community self-filters the tone[2] as much as the quality of the comments.
When the inevitable trolls appears, one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it. I wonder how often this practice is figured out and remediated by creating a new account. It'd be possible to extend this further by categorizing troll posts and selectively providing them to each other (as well as providing all replies) so that they think "it's working" and don't bother switching accounts, all the while hiding all of the trash from everyone else. Perhaps that's a lot of wasted energy but I'd be interested in hearing if something like that has been tried anywhere.
[1] That word always seems to describe the behavior best, to me. I'll use "jerk" from now on. :)
[2] I've always believed that you can say "someone/something is wrong on the internet!" without having to be a jerk about it and have seen many examples of such on Hacker News and the StackExchange family of sites. Those who cannot lack creativity and are, unfortunately, less likely to have their (possibly) valid arguments heard.
I always find it strange how people are seriously concerned with trolling. I understand that children, the emotionally immature, and the psychologically ill are actually harmed by trolling. However, those people are already at risk of being harmed by anything approaching verbal abuse. These are the people who have more important issues to deal with than trolling. These people are irrelevant in this context.
The people who matter to trolls are those who can't take a joke, who are super serious all the time; they want to be mad about something. Trolls merely give those people what they want. Flame wars ensue. Purposeful trolls are social pranksters and are conscious of their trolling; these can be reasoned with and are thus not serious issues to fora.
The actual trolls worth worrying about are those who troll yet know not their trollish behavior. These people begin arguments over trivialities and get called jerks/dicks/assholes. These people are much harder to reason with, because they will only listen when they are emotionally sober; bringing up their trolling just gets them deep into another argument. You can't stop trolls; they have to grow out of their own emotional immaturity.
Thus, as the unconscious trolls are themselves a subset of those harmed by trolling, they can and do harm others without understanding what harm they cause.
The article alludes to it, but there's some pretty neat work at Riot Games around improving player behavior. Here's a pretty good video:http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-.... It's half an hour long but has some fun results. When you have a player base as large as Riot does with League of Legends, some sorts of experiments become possible.
Moderation is the best way to stop them. If you've got actual people going through posts and content and removing the low quality stuff, you'll maintain a much more well ordered and useful community than you would a mostly 'uncensored' platform.
Unfortunately, this has a few issues...
1. You need the manpower to actually check what's being posted on a regular basis. Or enough active members willing to help out that they'll do it for you on a voluntary basis as moderators. This is obviously easier for small sites like customer support forums and the average fan site.
2, You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances. This is what Twitter doesn't do at the moment, to the point being a 'progressive' troll is a good way to never get banned while being a conservative or having an unpopular opinion will get your account suspended for the smallest trangression.
3. A willingness to ban popular, rich or 'powerful' users as much as anyone else, if they break the rules. A good forum/community manager will just as easily kick out a troll with ten thousand posts as one with ten, but social media sites don't seem to have figured this out yet.
So for a community manager or site owner, moderation is the best way to stop internet trolls (and every other type of troublemaker or nuisance as well).
Making a user's post invisible to everyone but himself (shadowbanning or as vBulletin called it, Tachy goes to Coventry) and making their time on the site a nightmare due to fake errors (hell banning/miserable users) used to work. Note the word used to, since the internet is a lot more savvy about this sort of stuff and will usually figure out these systems pretty quickly now.
As for how to avoid internet trolls as a user? Well, stay off large social sites with few rules (or in some cases, extremely badly enforced ones) and go to places where the people tend to be a bit nicer to each other due to a shared interest or two. Less Twitter, more forums.
Stay fairly anonymous wherever possible. Seriously, trolls love knowing every detail about someone's offline existence and what annoys or upsets them. By giving less personal information, you force people to either REALLY dig for information to use or to attack your arguments rather than your background/appearance/personality.
Don't engage in arguments with trolls/idiots. The more you make it seem to affect you, the more pleasure a troll will get from their actions. If you've ever watched The Simpsons, you probably remember the scenes where Bart prank calls Moe's Tavern, right? Or how often, Moe would basically scream back down the phone in anger afterwards? That's what a troll wants to see. They want people who are easy to annoy.
So yeah. Moderated community platforms tend to be the best way to stop internet trolls, since they mean such users and comments are removed as quickly as possible.
> You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances.
This is a political non-starter right now, which is why Twitter doesn't do it. Seriously, when they accidentally ban someone for threatening violence against other Twitter users in the name of left-wing activism a huge swathe of the tech and security community launches a campaign to reinstate them and accuse Twitter of all matters of evils fro banning them in the first place.
Well, they could always get a thicker skin themselves. Forum and community owners have been the subject of complaints for doing stuff like that for years, the best solution is just to say 'here are the rules, if you don't like them, LEAVE'. You have to be willing to potentially lose a few popular users to keep the peace.
Easy: introduce laws that require all communication to be consensual. We don't allow people to force food down your mouth, and we shouldn't allow people to force words into your brain either.
What would this be like? Before seeing something, you'd be asked if you want to see "An advertisement for a home care product." Or "An angry personal attack" (Maybe with some indication of who it's against.)
This solution allows everyone to say whatever they want, and adds the ability for everyone to not be exposed to what they don't want to be exposed to.
How do you know I want to be exposed to a consent related question?
Kinda like how asking certain questions about consent can be classified as harassment if you have already been told no, even if the actions of which consent was being requested for were never carried out.
In public we arrest those who break down civil society by smashing windows, beating people up or threating law-abiding citizens. On the internet, we dispute whether anything is actually going wrong. Or how to automatically solve it.
At some point I think a wet team is the only solution.
117 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe article hopes to offer an advance in troll detection technology based more on reason than hope. ;-)
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-f...
It's an interesting idea (and I'm 100% sure it's been done before), but it doesn't really work out on any site with a significant audience. I mean, all you need is one of those trolls to access the site at work/school/wherever and notice their posts are being shown if they're not logged in, and then suspicions are raised.
Too easy to bypass and figure out. It's like how people figured out Twitter's shadowbans, because people who followed them said off site that they weren't seeing their messages.
1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments don't make any sense and you are just an arrogant cyberbro I DRINK MALE TEARS", is she cyberbullying him? Should her access to Twitter be cut off, or would voluntarily blocking her on the part of Bob address this problem in a sufficient manner?
2. How to balance prevention of trolling with limiting self-expression? The outside world is not a perfect place where everyone engages in reasoned discourse either. Given that pub-sub systems like Twitter are the equivalent of everyone shouting their opinions loudly in the same street, how much of the unreasonableness inherent in human discourse do we allow to penetrate these social networks to keep them essentially human in nature and not turn into a LinkedIn style list of platitudes?
I wish the article went some ways towards addressing these. Instead it seems to focus on ad-hoc initiatives set up by a lot of people who (in my opinion) seem to not have any concrete ideas of what they are trying to accomplish. For example, one of the research papers linked [1] describes cyberbullying as including "...posting mean or hateful comments, aggressive captions or hashtags". In my opinion this is a rather extravagant definition of the term and should be examined more carefully and revised per the points above.
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[1] "Detection of Cyberbullying Incidents on the Instagram Social Network" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf
Gregory Alan Elliot is drawing that line right now in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott
It's a disingenuous argument at best.
That is an awful misrepresentation.
The paragraph in question basically pushes the conversation toward, "Where are the brightlines?"
The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.
The problem with is then @alice controls whose tweets I can read if I want to follow her content. :/ Just because I want to hear what @alice has to say doesn't mean I want @alice to control whether I can talk to @bob.
I think solid ignoring features is really the limit to this approach due to that fact. [e.g. @alice ignores @bob, @bob never shows up in her feed no matter what]
I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore.
The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"
That could work well enough. :)
Yeah, my main concern was a power user who people wouldn't want to unfollow abusing the feature to silence critics.
The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character.
With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.
Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog.
It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.
They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).
In the good old days, people used to send you such threats by anonymous snail mail instead of twitter.
But that's probably (definitely) a terrible thing to do, so maybe it's better to find other ways to solve these problems.
Furthermore, from some anecdotal evidence, I think most victims in such cases already know who is harassing them.
It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).
Unfortunately, far more cases are less extreme than yours. The line gets blurrier when you get down to persistent low-level harassment, where individual examples will look relatively harmless to an outsider but the victim is forced to face them as a whole. In those instances, it's the responsibility of the social media platform to allow the victim to properly document and report the harassers, and most definitely put up the appropriate barriers to prevent future harassment. Twitter's biggest failing on this point is in how easy it is to create "sockpuppet" accounts, such that as soon as one is banned they can continue uninterrupted from the next.
Which is right?
Thousands of reports are made to police each year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24160004
> About 2,000 crimes related to online abuse are being reported to the police in London each year, according to new figures.
Over a thousand reach the threshold for court action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502291
> More than 1,700 cases involving abusive messages sent online or via text message reached English and Welsh courts in 2012, the BBC has learned after a Freedom of Information request.
The criado-perez trolls were enabled by the Internet. They saw other people trolling and thought it was okay; they were able to create many accounts rapidly; they were able to send very many messages.
The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.
Since when does that help? http://www.adistantsoil.com/2011/12/18/stalked-someones-watc... http://www.themarysue.com/zoe-quinn-drops-case/
Where was that said? I don't see this comment at all. "turning your devices off now and then" is akin to stepping out of a discussion when you start to take things personally. That doesn't mean you are banned from all conversations. It's healthy to take a break.
This isn't about someone "[taking] things personally" -- this is about organized groups making existing platforms unusable for their targets.
Who is targeted by that and why? Who organizes that - I mean, why would thousands of people suddenly have reason to hate you?
In that case, it's not really "organized" by anyone in particular.
For example, in your analogy, they're not being manhandled out of the venue. Someone at the venue is taking their picture and following them home, distributing that information, then random people are showing up at their house for the next eighteen months or more. Then people are showing up at their family's house with threats, and their boss's house demanding that they be fired.
Is this the type of "shit [flying]" that you think people should be prepared to expect when they post things online?
(Btw yes, that sort of reactionary persecution can happen and does indeed happen in all sorts of places. It's part and parcel of meaningful political activism anywhere in the world.)
Why should the consequences be so completely out of proportion to what was originally said? "In public" covers more situations than it used to, and the size of your audience isn't always intuitive.
> Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?
Probably not. Will you be roughed up by thousands, be followed home, and be stalked and harassed for years? Probably not.
The fact that "in public" situations might have expanded (and sometimes replaced more private ones) is a problem that can (and should) be fixed with education. NBD.
Just because some people seem unable to comprehend the (massive) scale of internet space, it doesn't mean that we can magically make it a paradise where real-world behaviour honed in thousands of years simply does not happen. Internet space is a new all-encompassing dimension, the scale of which we've never seen. One should think carefully before acting in such an environment. It's not like interacting with press or peers in a given niche; it's like broadcasting on all channels in all countries at all hours. The chances of getting reactions you might not like are higher than with any other media or venue; but on the positive side, the chances of getting reactions you will like are also disproportionately higher than anywhere else. Continuously complaining that the glass is half empty will just provoke someone in smashing the glass to solve the problem -- because "you didn't like it much anyway, always complaining".
Criado Perez started a petition to ask Bank of England to consider including a woman on the notes, and to remember to include women in future re-designs.
That's not much.
For that she was subjected to months long campaigns across all her social media accounts, extending to her AFK addresses, with severe threats of sexual violence.
One man was sending 50 messages an hour over 12 hours across multiple accounts.
It's disappointing that some people are defending those who make death threats. It's common over a keyboard, but AFK a death threat is serious business.
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Document...
> Here there were a series of communications (not just a single one as referred to in the guideline) where extreme language was used and substantial fear was caused.
> Indeed it is hard to imagine more extreme threats (death, rape, and worse [Sorley]) and rape [Nimmo]. The harm is, and (despite what is said on your behalf) must have been intended to be, very high.
> The fact that they were anonymous heightened the fear. The victims had no way of knowing how dangerous the people making the threats were, whether they had just come out of prison, or how to recognise and avoid them if they came across them in public.
And about blocking:
> The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned
As I said in response to your other post, this is something you report to the police. And I bet she did.
Exactly. This isn't trolling. Your social network can do nothing for you. You accidentally pissed off many people, now you are in trouble, you go to the police for protection, prosecute those who are serious and, unfortunately, ignore the rest because little can be done about thousands of people hating you personally for their insecurities.Because you're a woman on the internet, and said something.
Some online behavior that crosses into the real world will and has always been illegal and actionable of course, as I noted in the original comment. Most of what people consider "online abuse" isn't in that category.
If you don't want to see rippling abs and cleavage you have to avoid nearly all advertising these days. If you don't like guns you can't watch movie trailers. The modern world has many such dilemmas. Ignoring the things you find objectionable shouldn't be discounted as a simple solution.
As I said, I realize I'm out of the mainstream. But I've been called horrible things and even doxxed and stalked and threatened in the real world by online commenters a couple times over the past 20 years. I've found that "not caring about it" has been a shockingly useful and effective tool.
For younger kids today, a overwhelming majority of their lives are online, so it's so much harder to escape - both for work/education purposes and entertainment, so it's so much easier to keep up the waves of harrassment, so simply saying "just ignore it" doesn't really work these days.
Kick the jerks. Ban them if they are repeat offenders. Provide mechanisms for people to shrink or expand how much information is shared and how easy it is to contact them.
I'm actually dismayed that to this day very, very few sites enforce a system where you must be recommended by someone in order to join, or by a friend to ask to be friends/communicate with someone.
Those that get perpetually harassed would be far less likely to have to deal with trolls if those trolls had to be a "friend of a friend". Is vouching so technically complicated we haven't done it yet?
There are social structures and conventions that haven't really seen much traction in software. Someone's totally out of control at a party? Kick them out and kick out the person that invited them too.
I know services like Slack are kinda helping this along a little bit - I'm a part of one or two Slack groups that I've been invited to by other people, with a bit of a pep-talk at the start of like "here's the sort of shit that WON'T fly here..." that are just small single-interest focussed groups that have kinda organically grown, but it's definitely a rare situation.
I think it's just education for new users (kids), and making sure they fully understand how the internet works and being mindful of what information they share where and with whom. Trolls (in all their levels of extremity) will always exist - anyone claiming they know how to "get rid" of them are fooling themselves
If people feel like they have tools to push back against trolls they'll use them. If they feel like they're powerless, they'll leave. If they leave the troll to user ratio skews a bit higher and might end up poisoning the entire community.
At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.
Right now, the login/password field is bugged so you have to type in the URL string to get to your account. ICU/brain dead is about right for K5 now, unfortunately.
90% of human interactions are crap ;) Pre-Internet people lived in isolated bubbles and the mess we have now is just a demonstration what happens when too many people from one bubble start interacting with another.
Hacker News has been pretty rigid with its community standards and though there's (legitimate) complaints about the rigidity, the trade-off encoutered from a "downvote because I disagree" vs "downvote because comment is hostile" is well within my tolerances here.
USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.
Usenet died because of 2 reasons: The burden of carrying alt.binaries The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries
They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame.
But that's why it died.
The infamous "Green Card Spammers" (http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/) shifted the tone dramatically, and from there it was inevitable that the whole community would collapse. There was very limited control over what people could post, USENET was intended to be free and open. This succeeded wildly in an academic environment where if someone was seriously out of line you could address their university and get their account pulled.
As soon as the general population came on and there was no accountability to anyone it was simply a matter of time before unchecked abuse started to happen.
Most providers pulled the plug because the only thing of any value left on USENET was binaries. The discussions were virtually dead.
No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.
This solution seems to have worked for some people :)
What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses.
Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.
I'd rather just live with the trolls. Is it that bad?
See the Sikh who advertised Facebook ("What's this raghead terrorist doing on my wall?") or comments under any news article (especially Daily Fucking Mail ("Kill the immigrants")).
Anonymous apps tend to bring out the worst in people, especially with groups like teenagers and cyberbullying.
Seems kind of insane that people are willing to dox themselves on the internet.
And losing anonymity also reduces someone's willingness to talk openly (and civilly) about a topic that they may otherwise be unwilling to discuss (sexuality, medical issues, etc). Heck, I won't even talk directly about my political opinion after reading articles about how people with strong political views are willing to reject a candidate for hiring entirely because of them not aligning politically (not really a problem for me since I generally hate politics).
This also lowers the number of available voices and it might reduce the ratio as it relates to trolls. In a sensitive topic do we lose more trolls this way or do we lose more civil conversation? I'm not sure.
Elimination of anonymity helps, yes, but isn't appropriate for every kind of discussion and must be combined with other methods.
A. Stay off the internet
or
B. Only participate in communities where you control who has the ability to post content you see (i.e. facebook).
The world doesn't owe you a safe-space hugbox. Trying to censor people for being mean is just as shitty as trying to censor them for saying things you disagree with. I value the rights Americans have to be horrendous shitheads on the internet and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Not being online or in a community not full of jackasses (what you derisively call a "hugbox") isn't an option for West. She's a writer who has to be on the internet and engaged with social media to do her job.
Before you say "Well if you can't handle that, get another job," think about that statement. You're normalizing people being jackasses and blaming their victims for trying to be regular people doing their jobs. You are literally saying, "It's your fault for being on the internet, what did you expect?"
West is a good example of how ridiculous this mentality is. We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed. Frankly, if the mostly white, mostly male tech community was less so, they might actually understand that.
This kind of victim-blaming is absurd. I understand a lot of people in tech are fond of free speech principles (and rightly so, they're important) and edgy South Park libertarianism, but this is not the right hill to die on.
[1]: http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels
The internet doesn't need more excuses to form social media vigilante mobs.
My priority is anonymity and freedom of expression. You're never going to be able to satisfactorily reconcile that with your priority of not making anyone feel uncomfortable.
Doesn't it then make sense to stick to different kinds of internet communities? You stick to facebook and real names, I'll stick to twitter with freeform handles? Why try to force change on platforms clearly not made for you? Isn't that just naked greed?
>Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque.
How far does this go? Should we enforce 100 points of ID on letters to the editor of local newspapers, in case I pretend to be someone on the other side of the world and write mocking things?
Surely at some point every sane person must learn to ignore things, or they'll have a heart attack trying to control every word spoken around them?
Being uncomfortable is fine. Disagreeing is fine. Anonymity is fine. Living with people who say disagreeable things is part of life. I have issues with stalking, harassment and death threats. It's not anonymity or disagreement that are the problem, it's aggressive harassment that would get you a visit from the police if you did it in real life.
Please don't think in simplistic, binary terms. We can have free speech, anonymity and argue all day without stalking and death threats. That's the happy medium I want.
As for why be part of a platform "not made for you," I just explained why. Twitter is a useful tool that is indispensable for some jobs.
I'd also ask you to flip your assumptions on their head. Why do you think Twitter shouldn't be changed? Isn't it more greedy of you to insist that certain people, usually women and minorities, continue suffering abuse? Isn't it selfish of you to not make a change?
I'm 10,000% positive that it is possible to satisfactorily reconcile "freedom of expression" with not allowing rape and death threats. If you can't, then maybe you need to do some serious self examination.
"Surely at some point every sane person must learn to ignore things, or they'll have a heart attack trying to control every word spoken around them?"
That is extremely easy to say when you haven't had this done to you.
You should check my comment history dude. There's a chap named "assocguilt" who on this very site spent about two months stalking every post I made here posting snarky comments because I suggested the software industry should refuse to employ people who have job histories working for dodgy government departments. He started making references to my home city and former employer about half way through the process.
Everyone gets threatened and stalked on the internet. It's like getting burgled. It happens to pretty much everyone at some point. You can let it forever destroy your confidence, or you can recognize it as an essentially random happening and move on.
Are you seriously tell me that facebooks real name policy has made cyberbullying less hurtful?
She has extremely controversial views that she expresses in the most public way possible. Even if she is not deliberately trying to incite discord against her, I am not sure how she could possibly do it any more effectively.
From what I can tell from my brief searching about her, she shoves extremely offensive (to many people) opinions in the faces of the public at large. She is just as complicit in creating an offensive environment on the internet as all the people who send her mean messages on Twitter. Just because she is on "the right side of history" in many of her viewpoints doesn't make it any more justified. Which is essentially my entire point - everyone offends everyone. You cannot stop it and it will never end. All you can do is insulate yourself from it.
I think it's a pretty far stretch to call it victim blaming if I were to tell Lindy West to maybe not make a public, professional career out of advocating the most controversial opinions possible in the most public way possible if she didn't want to get called mean things on Twitter by people she's deeply offended.
Also, you are absolutely blaming the victim right now. Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma. Saying her writing is equally as complimit in online toxicity as systemic harassment dodges the problem and blames the victim.
Like I said in the other reply, I don't endorse a world where no one disagrees with each other. Don't put up a strawman for my position.
Living with opinions you don't like is part of life. Harassment should not be.
The line between "voicing an opinion someone disagrees with" and "harassment" is pretty vague, especially when from one person's perspective, thousands of people voicing disagreement to you sure looks like harassment, despite no single person necessarily being harassing.
Her opinions that she voices publicly are just as traumatic, if not more so, than someone pretending to be her dead father. She literally had a "Shout your Abortion" social media campaign. Possibly one of the most traumatic things a woman will ever go through, and she's encouraging people to discuss it as much as possible, even implicitly (or explicitly) suggesting it be discussed with pride. I think you'd have to be pretty delusional to not understand how that's extremely traumatic to a lot of people.
>Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma
People aren't being mean to her because she's a liberal or writing books, they're mean because she's saying and writing things that are offensive and traumatic to them. She's essentially thrown the first punch and getting upset that they're punching back. This isn't victim blaming anymore than it's victim blaming to say she shouldn't attack someone bigger than her if she doesn't want to get her ass kicked.
I fail to see how ANYTHING in that justifies the crap she got. You seriously need to reexamine your life if you think it does.
I don't have a good solution for this, other than to observe that there are some kinds of free expression that even Americans draw some solid lines against; when a civil demonstration becomes a riot, the police come to break it up (and, yes, the question of whether something is 'a civil demonstration' or 'riot' is one that can be debated ad nauseum by participants and observers; the presence of legal authority to break up a riot is what is undisputed).
Your second point is a bit of a slippery slope. Yeah, you'll have people trying to SWAT you, but that's more an issue with our legal system than it is with bullying on the internet. The instances of someone, even on a national level of negative publicity, getting actual real world physical violence against them, is incredibly rare.
Your comparison to a riot doesn't really hold up. Riots are bad because they cause property damage, interfere with the normal functioning of a city, and get people physically hurt or killed. A fat acceptance advocate getting called names on Twitter hurts his/her feelings, which doesn't in my opinion justify having laws created to protect his/her feelings.
I think, though, that it's a pretty huge difference. The speed with which someone can crap all over a discussion is instantaneous and psychologically a lot easier due to not being "in person". Trolling in the form that it would have existed a couple of centuries ago[1] still exists today (without the sword, perhaps, but the threat of violence in retaliation to trolling still exists today -- we just have better technology and better enforcement). I would use Donald Trump as an example. He gets his share of trolling (and non-trolling protesting) at his in-person events, however, I'd hazard a guess that the amount of such activity during his entire campaign would be about as much as is seen in an hour on Reddit.
[1] We don't have a lot of historical evidence that dates back 2500 years, so I'm assuming that was a typo or an embellishment used to make a point (or, perhaps, something I missed in my speed reading of the article).
Personally, I think it starts first with community standards and moderation. Hacker News, Stack Overflow and such do a pretty good job already. You get a share of jerks here and there but by and large the community self-filters the tone[2] as much as the quality of the comments.
When the inevitable trolls appears, one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it. I wonder how often this practice is figured out and remediated by creating a new account. It'd be possible to extend this further by categorizing troll posts and selectively providing them to each other (as well as providing all replies) so that they think "it's working" and don't bother switching accounts, all the while hiding all of the trash from everyone else. Perhaps that's a lot of wasted energy but I'd be interested in hearing if something like that has been tried anywhere.
[1] That word always seems to describe the behavior best, to me. I'll use "jerk" from now on. :)
[2] I've always believed that you can say "someone/something is wrong on the internet!" without having to be a jerk about it and have seen many examples of such on Hacker News and the StackExchange family of sites. Those who cannot lack creativity and are, unfortunately, less likely to have their (possibly) valid arguments heard.
Shadowbanning does work well but requires (somewhat obviously) fair admins/moderators. Otherwise it becomes something like a censorship tool.
There is such a thing as people being presented with content that's irrelevant to their interests.
I better way to semantically express what we need, as well as a recommendation system that goes with it, is what we lack today.
The people who matter to trolls are those who can't take a joke, who are super serious all the time; they want to be mad about something. Trolls merely give those people what they want. Flame wars ensue. Purposeful trolls are social pranksters and are conscious of their trolling; these can be reasoned with and are thus not serious issues to fora.
The actual trolls worth worrying about are those who troll yet know not their trollish behavior. These people begin arguments over trivialities and get called jerks/dicks/assholes. These people are much harder to reason with, because they will only listen when they are emotionally sober; bringing up their trolling just gets them deep into another argument. You can't stop trolls; they have to grow out of their own emotional immaturity.
Thus, as the unconscious trolls are themselves a subset of those harmed by trolling, they can and do harm others without understanding what harm they cause.
Good fun.
Unfortunately, this has a few issues...
1. You need the manpower to actually check what's being posted on a regular basis. Or enough active members willing to help out that they'll do it for you on a voluntary basis as moderators. This is obviously easier for small sites like customer support forums and the average fan site.
2, You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances. This is what Twitter doesn't do at the moment, to the point being a 'progressive' troll is a good way to never get banned while being a conservative or having an unpopular opinion will get your account suspended for the smallest trangression.
3. A willingness to ban popular, rich or 'powerful' users as much as anyone else, if they break the rules. A good forum/community manager will just as easily kick out a troll with ten thousand posts as one with ten, but social media sites don't seem to have figured this out yet.
So for a community manager or site owner, moderation is the best way to stop internet trolls (and every other type of troublemaker or nuisance as well).
Making a user's post invisible to everyone but himself (shadowbanning or as vBulletin called it, Tachy goes to Coventry) and making their time on the site a nightmare due to fake errors (hell banning/miserable users) used to work. Note the word used to, since the internet is a lot more savvy about this sort of stuff and will usually figure out these systems pretty quickly now.
As for how to avoid internet trolls as a user? Well, stay off large social sites with few rules (or in some cases, extremely badly enforced ones) and go to places where the people tend to be a bit nicer to each other due to a shared interest or two. Less Twitter, more forums.
Stay fairly anonymous wherever possible. Seriously, trolls love knowing every detail about someone's offline existence and what annoys or upsets them. By giving less personal information, you force people to either REALLY dig for information to use or to attack your arguments rather than your background/appearance/personality.
Don't engage in arguments with trolls/idiots. The more you make it seem to affect you, the more pleasure a troll will get from their actions. If you've ever watched The Simpsons, you probably remember the scenes where Bart prank calls Moe's Tavern, right? Or how often, Moe would basically scream back down the phone in anger afterwards? That's what a troll wants to see. They want people who are easy to annoy.
So yeah. Moderated community platforms tend to be the best way to stop internet trolls, since they mean such users and comments are removed as quickly as possible.
This is a political non-starter right now, which is why Twitter doesn't do it. Seriously, when they accidentally ban someone for threatening violence against other Twitter users in the name of left-wing activism a huge swathe of the tech and security community launches a campaign to reinstate them and accuse Twitter of all matters of evils fro banning them in the first place.
What would this be like? Before seeing something, you'd be asked if you want to see "An advertisement for a home care product." Or "An angry personal attack" (Maybe with some indication of who it's against.)
This solution allows everyone to say whatever they want, and adds the ability for everyone to not be exposed to what they don't want to be exposed to.
How do you know I want to be exposed to a consent related question?
Kinda like how asking certain questions about consent can be classified as harassment if you have already been told no, even if the actions of which consent was being requested for were never carried out.
At some point I think a wet team is the only solution.
I don't use Twitter and likely never will. It's a cesspool of discrimination and abuse. I hope it dies as a medium.
Joining a dungeon in World of Warcraft and wiping the group is trolling.
Sending someone genuine sounding death threats on twitter isn't.
There's a spectrum there somewhere, but more often than not it feels like we've lost another useful term to hyperbole.