The existence of mob justice has more to do with the failures of the legal system. Many times in history, when the populace feels that they are not getting "justice" from the legal systems in place, the populace turns to mob justice because the systems they rely on fail to mete out justice in any comparable way.
When cops can kill with impunity and are never subject to the laws they enforce, you have people wanting mob justice.
When politicians can lie with impunity and hide behind free speech and keep their jobs, their benefits, and all, you have people wanting mob justice.
When corporations can send bomb trains into your city, poison everyone within hundreds of miles, and then walk away with bonuses for covering their asses, you have people wanting mob justice.
These are wildly different things. Trolls are doing it because they want to hurt others, a lot of people are doing it because they want to stop being hurt by a system that has decided they don't deserve justice.
Back in the day Freud noted that sadists felt that their victims deserved to suffer and felt that they were doing God's work in bringing them to justice.
In the online space it's easy to imagine that people with the wrong politics or that are drawn to NFTs and ChatGPT like moths to a flame out of ignorance and sloth are pissing in the pool and need to be brought to justice too.
I guess I'm a sadist and a troll, I have no problem punishing ignorance when there should be none. I set standards for myself, and I don't think it's unfair to expect a similar level of standards for other people, sometimes the standards aren't even high, say complaining about not being taught how to do taxes yet you're 20 years old and never held a job. My state of mind there is what the hell have you been doing for the last 20 years? I don't think taxes are difficult, in fact the fillable forms themselves literally tell you what to do, and for the vast majority of people, your taxes are no more complicated than putting the same numbers from your W2 form directly into your 1040.
At some point, there has to be no coddling and babying for people. My opinion is that coddling should stop generally around 10 - 14, and consequences should become gradually harsher by the time you are legally declared an adult, in my country this is 18, but my opinion would be the same if we somehow drop that down to 16.
I also believe in the idea that people are not robots. If you live your life that way, I feel explicit contempt for you, and I do generally think your life is rather pointless. Some things are truly intuitive, like not putting flammable objects on top of your stove. I also have no problem feeling contempt for people who do dangerous things, and then die, because they force people to clean up after them.
Unfortunately, my sadism these days only goes as far as rejecting job applications, doing write ups, and in the end being a part of the firing process. Though, sometimes I am able to suspend which leads to a firing within the next 2 weeks which I guess is good enough.
And on the other side. I don't see that society should reward or even fix the bad decisions people make. All of the information is available and has been for long time. So why should society pay things like student loans of people who chose themselves non marketable degree? Enough information is out there and can be found to make many relevant decisions.
First, baked into your reasoning is an assumption of strong rationality and plenty of information. Even if levels are acceptable on average, an informed person will recognize there is considerable variation.
No rational person can blame an individual for not knowing something due to circumstances beyond their control. Not every qualified student in subject X has a parent / education / life experience that will give them an upbringing and background knowledge that will give them a good preparation for asking questions and preparing for industry Y. This realization quickly dispenses with any notion of people as perfect rational decision makers. It also dispenses with blaming or punishing people who don't have such advantages. It should also reduce the "halo" effect of prestigious schools and workplaces. Since luck and circumstances play such a high role in, say, admissions to top universities, people should act accordingly and stop elevating themselves.
People make mistakes-- this is statistically inevitable. Making harsher laws, reducing the safety net, and making insurance policies extremely strict to reduce moral hazard would make people more cautious and responsible, so the argument goes. But that argument often gets taken as dogma, and it not checked against reality.
In my view, consistent with philosophers such as John Rawls, optimizing for strictness is rarely the best technique to build a good society.
> At some point, there has to be no coddling and babying for people. My opinion is that coddling should stop generally around 10 - 14, and consequences should become gradually harsher by the time you are legally declared an adult
Interestingly, I have a very similar attitude—except it’s about your behaviors, instead of about ignorance.
> At some point, there has to be no coddling and babying for people. My opinion is that coddling should stop generally around 10 - 14, and consequences should become gradually harsher by the time you are legally declared an adult, in my country this is 18, but my opinion would be the same if we somehow drop that down to 16.
Hopefully you don't view yourself as qualified to make this judgement. Even if I agreed with your ethics, which I do not, I would not agree with your judgements. Here's why: You don't know enough to do it fairly. For example, it takes considerable effort for the U.S. justice system to gather (an imperfect subset of) information to make such (flawed) assessments.
No offense. Thank you for laying out your point of view.
You don't know if I would do it fairly, you mean. But let's go in on your assumption. What is 'fairness'?
From whose perspective are you making the judgement of 'fairness'? Would the man who you are convicting to life in prison after he murdered 20 people feel your fairness? What if he denies that what you are doing is 'fair', does you definition change then? What happens if you do care about consensus, but you know enough to discount this particular case, which other opinions do you discount? Because it sure won't be the last one
I could care less about the U.S. justice system, society has plenty of tools to punish individuals, and I have no problem using them.
My personal ideas of fairness are based on moral reasoning and scientific understanding. To state that more precisely, the criteria for this fairness being useful is the degree to which it is consistent with moral reasoning and scientific understanding.
In a democracy, I think of fairness as the general underlying ethical ideas implied by the set of laws. As such, this idea of fairness will seem inconsistent in some ways, because it is the result of various laws and court precedents established over time.
Individuals in any society have varying ideas of fairness of course. How they express and act on them varies considerably with the form of government they live in.
> I also believe in the idea that people are not robots. If you live your life that way, I feel explicit contempt for you, and I do generally think your life is rather pointless.
There are plenty of people who...
1. view human behavior as largely (but not completely) shaped by historical events; or
2. don't believe in traditional ideas of free will
and still find meaning in their lives.
I'd encourage you to challenge your beliefs here.
Do you want to feel contempt? This contempt is one kind of judgment. Why are you confident that you know enough to make such a harsh judgment?
I find it interesting that what you've written is quite opposite of secular Buddhism.
There's a great story from Buddhism about hate. I'll adapt it. Let's say you hate that an alcoholic drunk driver killed a family of four. What exactly do you hate? If the drunk driver had a habit of driving drunk, it was not a one-off. You should also hate all previous drunk drivings that didn't kill anyone. So you might hate the fact that such a bad habit took root? What history drove the alcoholism? What if it was parental abuse? Genetics? But what about all of the people who knew about the alcoholic and his drunk driving? Why did they not intervene? Why is alcoholism so prevalent? Why don't lawmakers do more about it?
My point is that if you connect the hate to its causes, you will find it impossible to situate it on just one person.
I suppose you could hate all of the contributing factors. But how many of the contributing factors have volition?
My conclusion is that most common ideas of hate (a) are not well thought out and (b) don't really help us solve problems.
Perhaps there is only a fine line between hate and a burning desire to improve something in the world. The latter can be done without holding people in contempt. It can be hard, but it is worth it.
Internet lore cleaves between this interpretation and references to the fishing practice of dropping a baited hook with a float (or fly) and then twitching the fishing line just enough to create the impression of some small creature fighting the current.
The author notes that they’ve personally expanded the definition as part of their own research. Like you, I think that’s unhelpful and tries to analyze dissimilar things and apply conclusions to them indiscriminantly.
But I suspect it’s more interesting to them this way, and easier to pursue funding when your thesis includes more socially impactful stuff like harassment and harm instead of just provocation and ideological derision. Institutional bureaucracy gonna bureaucrat.
In an online world of echo chambers, often just posting a different opinion can be considered trolling. "Trolling" can be used to describe such a wide range of behavior that it is barely meaningful anymore. It mostly means "undesired behavior" now.
I see it very similar to the word "woke", which also has such an absurdly wide definition that it becomes almost meaningless.
I know what you mean. The words do have (more or less) historically clear meanings.* If we clarify what we mean, we can still use them. It makes it harder, which I think is largely your point.
* Subsequent changes in meaning, as used by some people, can tell us a lot about those people.
Misrepresentation can extend even to the point of accusing wholly sincere but irritated people of 'trolling' in order to further annoy them. But when the term is used in the social sciences it's typically tightly defined. It doesn't really matter how dilute the popular understanding is; if it becomes so dilute that the association is meaningless than the behavior can just be given some other designation, such as reflexive control.
A lot of that behavior is about encouraging group cohesion in the ingroup as opposed to getting the outgroup to change their behavior.
Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “own the libs” but unlike many other political commentators (say conservatives William F. Buckley or leftist Gore Vidal) he rarely engaged with people he disagree with.
Cultural left ‘cancel mobs’ can cause distress to their victims but I think the real point is to get a thrill of being in a crowd with a heightened identity similar to what people get from going to a football game or to get some relief from meaninglessness in taking action.
I don't care too much for correlates with self-report scales (a limitation noted in the study itself in the Further Work section).
Game theory offers an alternative approach of measuring a sample population's behavior in a suite of games with varying payoffs. The study below suggests most people's behavior patterns fall into just 4 major groups, with a 5th group (~20%) that seems to just make random choices. Even more surprisingly, these patterns seem to be established early in life and to be independent of socio economic factors. In that study, the largest cohort was found to be willing to experience a loss as long as the counterparty suffered a greater loss, and I suspect that would probably correlate well with the 'sadistic' cohort mentioned in OP's study.
I have a behavior pattern from my father: I'm initially 'happy' if someone is getting hurt (not Bad).
Like someone is dropping something or whatever.
I realized that's not the reaction I want to have and have a core memory of a woman asking a man who drove into the wall (with the back of a truck) if everything was okay with him before even checking the damage to the truck and her house wall.
I want my first reaction to be like that.
My older cousin told me on e that our grandpa was also like my father.
It's an unlogical trained behavior. Nothing more.
And unfortunately that also means there is no reason for people being like that than 'they learned it.
Germans have the word schadenfreude. Is it even a cultural pattern and my family just pushed the goal post further than others?
I don't know enough to say to what degree it's changeable; you can certainly train yourself in other directions, but reflexes learned in early life aren't easily overcome.
I don't think it's necessarily unlogical, eg it's adaptive if you are engaged in hunting or combat for survival. Perhaps you need to explore contexts in which the payoff for successful cooperation significantly exceeds that for defection.
Have sympathy for your old folks. Of course you have more clear context on this than me so I could be out on thin ice, but hear me out. My inclination though is that it is actually something like fear based. We smile to each other to send the signal “hey, I’m nice, don’t hurt me”, monkeys do that too. And a laugh at those kind of situations you describe could just mean a shocking reflex “I don’t know how to handle this situation” which results in a laugh (and described as “happy”).
I could come up with a few hypothetical questions from this though:
1) do narcissists find “fail videos“ more amusing?
1.a) if yes, then it can be trained away by reminding them to reflect on the situations. This is normal training for narcissism, put them in other people’s shoes.
2) watching the same “fail videos” over and over again makes them boring?
2.a) it’s on the same line as previously, but instead the hope that it internalizes the seriousness of a situation.
This surprised me because I don't feel that way, never said this and believe artists can fail in their creations and produce junk
> 2. There is art in divisive and hurtful manipulation
Trolling can be harmless, along the lines of pranks and jokes. April Fools day type stuff. MTG is trolling, but it's not very artful and it's mostly harmless. You may consider this "divisive and hurtful manipulation" but I don't. It's what people do on Twitter to amplify their Tweets. Both sides of any argument do it.
There are some who consider divisive and hurtful behavior can be artful, such as composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who said 9/11 was the "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and was widely condemned for it.
"the composer formally apologized for his remarks, explaining that he simply wanted to remind people of the role of destruction in art"
To make your good point less team-tinted and downvotable, I would say that most of the highest profile Millenial-and-younger politicians with social media presence know how to troll and make use of it regularly.
For better or worse, it’s part of the PR game for people who grew up with online life and want them retweets.
Some older politicians have committed to it to. Obviously.
It's effective, but to what effect? Is this really how decisions affecting real lives should be made? You see how you can make the other team angrier and then have a good laugh among yourselves? Is all the "anti-woke" legislation trolling or real?
Unfortunately the term "troll" has indeed been muddled. Often times I see people use them so incorrectly. You speak to someone calmly and someone suddenly throws the world "troll" at you. Like "Yeah, ok, you're trolling."
I don't get it. How do you come to that conclusion? People with a different set of opinions than yourself would go out of their way to have a conversation with you, construct a neat and tidy identity, just to make you angry? And this is not even in political conversation, sometimes it's just that you have different preferences. In what communities is it so common to have people so obsessed that they construct fictional identities and weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?
Because a very large amount of modern people believe that the consensus they've had constructed for them is the objective truth and if you say anything that calls that into question the only possibility is that you're trolling.
And it's articles like this one that largely cause this. They leave no room for the possibility that someone is genuinely provoking a response that mocks their view by the very absurdity of those views. Instead it's just oh no the ministry of truth signed off on those views and you're perfectly sensible to hold them and if anybody calls them into question they're hostile sadistic psychopathic trolls.
I think those “false positives” (to put them most charitably) come from the cultural bubbles we all live with and have always lived with.
Whether it’s because of your class, your friends, your region, or now your online circles, you have some natural sense of the world and the range of familiar sincere beliefs — even the ones you disagree with.
But sometimes when you encounter someone new, they’re perspective is do alien that you can’t integrate it at all. A first reaction is to just assume they’re being insincere and provocative, and because trolls (and “bots” and “shills”) are a foundational archetype of online life, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve encountered one.
It’s going to happen. The responsible next step is to be attentive to that possibility without becoming strictly convinced and accusatory. But that can be hard.
> In what communities is it so common to have people so obsessed that they construct fictional identities and weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?
A lot of people here in the comments are getting hung up on semantics, the definition of "troll", but the article author addresses this directly:
> Trolling can refer to a variety of online behaviour. In some circumstances, the intent of the trolling behaviour may even be to amuse and entertain. However, in my research, I have explored trolling as a malevolent behaviour, where the troll wants to hurt their online victim.
You can argue that "troll" isn't the right term, but then what is the right term for this? I think it's reasonable to use and adapt the term for this purpose, for lack of another more specific term. The article is describing a subset of trolls.
Yeah, this seems like the correct term for what the paper is describing. Or heck, just 'bully' in general, since that's what it'd be referred to if offline.
As much as the meaning seems to have drifted, trolling and bullying are two different issues, not different names for the same one.
I interpret cyberbullying as more targeted harassment, where you single out someone specifically, likely someone known by the harasser, whereas trolling would be more untargeted harassment involving strangers.
It's like trolling for fish is just trying to catch some fish but not any specific fish a la Moby-Dick (which admittedly is not a fish but rather a mammal, of course).
I welcome authors who lay out their assumptions and definitions before they construct their argument. We see exactly the same in mathematics and we're obligated to generalize the same standard and flexibility to other sciences.
I can't count the number of times I've read a math paper which says to the effect, "If the axiom of choice is true then such and such follows." In some ways math has even greater liberty in terms of conjectures - statements assumed true until proven.
All I'm asking is for logical consistency where math and other sciences are held to the same standards regardless of what they are.
I agree that laying out assumptions are essential and foundational and should be demanded of all serious academic work.
That said, different disciplines have different standards and practices about what should be surfaced.
Two examples:
1. Anthropologists describe the context and behaviors of a society. They can aspire to neutrality, but they are biased observers, in terms of what they notice and comment on. This is why it is especially useful for the observer to reflect on their preconceived notions and be transparent about them. This allows the reader to better understand what the "lens" observes.
2. I believe that all papers using statistical models should be fully transparent about, at least: (1) preconceived notions about what associations the authors thought would exist; and (2) how many functional forms were tried and discarded before arriving at the models used for the published results.
Semantics do matter. If you read a medical article that said "the lungs are the organ of the body that pump blood around, other authors may use the term 'heart'", you wouldn't pay much attention to it, right?
Griefing is usually in the context of a game, and griefing usually involves ruining the fun someone is having in that game. It's generally more benign than anti-semitism or promoting racism online.
As semantics matter, in your sentence "Semantics do matter." it would have been more better to say "Word choice matters." because semantics is the meaning of the word used (or the study thereof), not the actual word used.
You are not objecting, I believe, to the author's intended meaning--you seem to have clearly understood that and believe the different word would have been better used.
Be cautious about articles like this. The article does say that "trolling" describes a particularly wide range of behaviors, but then analyzes it only through a particularly negative and extreme worldview. I don't know if this author's definition of trolling is really the same as everybody else's.
In my opinion though, in countries without freedom of speech protections, politicians have been increasingly trying to use edicts against "harassment" or "cyberbullying" or "online trolling" to label many kinds of criticisms of them as illegal and to try and get social media networks or the law to shut them down.
Certainly, we should all acknowledge that trying to cyberbully some girl that was flirting with your boyfriend into suicide is an entirely different class of behavior than even the harshest repeated non-violent criticism of politicians. Does anybody disagree with that?
Re: the last paragraph above: Politicians, in the U.S. at least, are treated differently because they are public figures in areas of the law around slander and libel.*
From Wikipedia's entry on public figure:
> A public figure is a person who has achieved notoriety, prominence or fame within a society, whether through achievement, luck, action, or in some cases through no purposeful action of their own.
> In the context of defamation actions (libel and slander) as well as invasion of privacy, a public figure cannot succeed in a lawsuit on incorrect harmful statements in the United States unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with actual malice by knowing the falsity or by reckless disregard for the truth. The legal burden of proof in defamation actions is thus higher in the case of a public figure than in the case of an ordinary person.
That's a fair point to add, but note that I specifically mentioned that this is a problem for countries without freedom of speech protections.
In the US, we're semi-protected from government interference with this level of free speech that is critical of public figures, though technology firms have the capability of deciding what content is allowed on their platforms and can still provide some form of censorship if they choose to for various real or artificial reasons.
> Be cautious about articles like this. The article does say that "trolling" describes a particularly wide range of behaviors, but then analyzes it only through a particularly negative and extreme worldview. I don't know if this author's definition of trolling is really the same as everybody else's.
No. This sibling comment counters this claim quite well:
> A lot of people here in the comments are getting hung up on semantics, the definition of "troll", but the article author addresses this directly:
>> Trolling can refer to a variety of online behaviour. In some circumstances, the intent of the trolling behaviour may even be to amuse and entertain. However, in my research, I have explored trolling as a malevolent behaviour, where the troll wants to hurt their online victim.
> You can argue that "troll" isn't the right term, but then what is the right term for this? I think it's reasonable to use and adapt the term for this purpose, for lack of another more specific term. The article is describing a subset of trolls.
Please reply to the sibling comment to keep it consolidated, thanks.
1) That's not a particularly great comment for these 2 reasons. a) the author engages in partial mind-reading by adding this "where the troll wants to hurt their online victim" b) responses to their comment laid out some arguably better terminology like griefing or cyberbullying.
2) My comment added something else that I view as important to this discussion for a tech audience (labeling things as trolling for the purpose of censorship)
3) While you did so very politely, I don't think it's the most proper thing to tell people where they should post, thanks.
That's a fair point to make and I believe I probably stand corrected on that point.
Nevertheless, it doesn't seem like a self-selected study (particularly one with a heavy Australian slant) is a particularly good one for this kind of topic. And I think that 68% of the participants being women probably indicates that self-selection might not be the right model for this study right off the bat given the probable nature of online trolling.
> 2) My comment added something else that I view as important to this discussion for a tech audience (labeling things as trolling for the purpose of censorship)
An important point, though I will state my concern about how often censorship gets referenced here on HN:
When one worries about censorship, it is easy to see any feedback mechanism as an attack vector.
But since we also value constructive communication*, we must strike a balance. Of course we should not rule out a feedback mechanism only because there is a small probability of misuse.
* Along with every online forum comes an associated ethos; i.e. accepted ways of interacting. To completely refuse to shape discussions out of fear of "censorship" is abdicating responsibility for establishing and maintaining norms. To do nothing, claiming to be completely free of speech restrictions, is equivalent to letting individuals, often the loudest and most self-important, to define the platform, and history shows it gets nasty fast. A reasonable compromise is to lay out your standards and process for enforcement. Your audience hopefully can assess if your forum has what it takes to be worth their time.
If we were in a normal time period in history where "the left" was a lot closer to the classical liberal stance on speech (sort of an attitude of "I might hate what you say, but I must defend your right to say it") then I don't think as many people would bring up the problem of censorship so aggressively and repeatedly as there'd be significant pushback in institutions against speech restrictions.
But we're in an era where it certainly feels like some people are rushing to cheerlead censorship of all forms: whether from government or mega-corporation in concert with government.
I view this as a really big problem for the world as some of the most important and life-changing issues are effectively shut down from discussion, which could lead to a great calamity. So what suggestions would you offer to somebody like me who sees this as a really gigantic problem?
I probably don't share the degree to which you fear of censorship.
I also find it intellectually problematic to emphasize censorship without also talking about the broader problems of manipulation occurring with too much centralized control over media. Censorship is just one particular form of manipulation -- and practically speaking, just the tip of the iceberg.
Focusing on censorship to the exclusion of broader goals for a healthy population and society is too narrow and leads to poor policy.
But since you asked for suggestions, I'll try. I don't have time to make this brief. Sorry!
At the individual level: I think it's really important to educate and discuss the following with many people as you can -- when and how is the hard part! --
A. Personally, don't be too quick to shut the door on relationships. The default response to someone who offends you should not be to shout them down nor to cut all ties. Depending on the context, seek to understand, if possible, share your point of view, and in the rare cases where a real discussion happens, you might have a small impact. With enough of these interactions, we can stop demonizing each other.
B. Understand what the First Amendment protects and does not protect.
C. Understand the similarities and differences between censorship and moderation. There can be a fine line, and we need to talk about it more.
D. Let's get clear on when censorship is appropriate. Little Malfoy wants to publish an article about torturing their pet dog in the school newsletter? No thanks. Yes, please censor him.
E. If an organization controls a forum, it is its prerogative to shape its content according to the policies it sets and responsibility to comply with applicable laws.
F. Let's get clear on why it is important for a government to protect freedom of expression. The primary reason is to protect citizen rights to criticize their government.
G. Let's talk about employment contracts. Under what conditions would you sign a contract that prevents you from disparaging your employer? To step back to the legal policy level, when are these kind of contracts in the public interest?
H. Let's talk about media ownership. What happens when one party exercises significant (direct or indirect) control over a media market?
I. There are many forms of media manipulation that at times can be worse than censorship. Misinformation, conflicts of interest, outright lies, promotion of vice, and much more.
J. How do you prove censorship? How do you prove media manipulation?
K. What responsibility does a media outlet have to its audience?
L. Let's talk about how many media outlets have shifted to caring more about {short term ratings and entertainment} and relatively less about investigative journalism. This may seem like a little bit of a tangent, but it explains what is actually happening without resorting to any conspiracy to censor.
M. Understand why organizations sponsor celebrities. It is all about image. When that image is a liability, it is rational for a sponsorship to get cancelled.
N. If you are a content producer and you are concerned that your media channel could drop you at any instant, look into alternative channels and contract protections. Lacking such protections, recognize that you better be careful with what you say. And if you do get canceled, don't go out and blame other people like it was some surprise. You probably knew it was coming. You may have even wanted the controversy.
O. Understand that "being cancelled" largely falls into the same category as other "information cascades" (the term by James Surowiecki). This is the same dynamic that makes standing in line for an hour for a cupcake cool. There does not have to be any large political organization pulling strings for this to happen. All that is required is humanity's natural tendencies (status signaling, behavior emulation as a low information strategy); in other words, the proclivity to be lemmings.
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. My suggestion would be to write a book (you sort of already did) because you seem to want to dive deep into some of these issues and a non-HN format might give you a better platform for that.
Lacking the time to more fully respond, I'll just give my quick thoughts on 3 quick points.
> J. How do you prove censorship? How do you prove media manipulation?
The current business model of the media guarantees bad behavior. Once the technology was invented to "count clicks" and directly see what caused somebody to visit them, the media figured out a way to drive their own profit. This makes it impossible to not have unethical behavior. I don't really need to prove anything when the system guarantees bad behavior.
You don't need to have a formal scientific study and citations to know that an ice cream cone left outside on a hot day will melt. The environment its in guarantees it.
> S. Understand that many people complaining about "woke culture" are often parroting talking points. These are not usually people who are pausing think about the issue deeply. Such people are upset and have plenty to be upset about. Much of their discomfort comes from disagreeing with how the world is changing.
I'd just like to point out that the people who are complaining about woke culture are caught in a very painful situation.
They see the world changing, but then the censorship largely forbids them to fully complain about that.
And the world only ever responds by wanting to minimize their voice, firing them from their job, and calling them names like racist.
Whatever you want to say about the ethics of this situation, this is not a recipe for a good social outcome.
If you want to create a pile of socially alienated people with nothing left to lose (never a good outcome) the current course we're on is the perfect trajectory for that.
> V. Now if someone does a clearly inappropriate thing -- saying a racist or sexist comment -- we should not assume they do this repeatedly. We should treat them as irredeemable. We should not pretend like "we" have always been perfect either.
Did you mean to say "We should not treat them as irredeemable"?
Excellent point about how people feel trapped where they can't say what they feel. This gets overlooked.
Yes, media dynamics are predictably dysfunctional.
Thanks for discussing. I'll try to write more.
Yes, I got (V) wrong. Whoops. I meant that we should view people as redeemable. On a second look, I don't like my word choice of "redeemable" ... the word itself suggests that a wrong belief or statement by a person makes them less worthy of respect. I don't mean that.
> Similarly, Hector Cantú, best known for his Latino-American comic Baldo, said he believes in freedom of speech, but not freedom from repercussions.
> "Don't gloss this over by saying it's politics or it's cancel culture," he said. "If you're going to offend people, you risk paying the price."
Sub-questions:
- Does it matter if the offensive comments are "out of band?" i.e. on a YouTube channel, not in the cartoon?
- Did the various publishers explore other options besides dropping Dilbert altogether? Should they have?
- Media outlets may claim that they are acting morally. Still, to a large degree, they are responding to societal and commercial pressures. Does this weaken their argument?
- Free speech is easy to support when no one cares about what you say. When it strikes a nerve, that's when we have to confront the issue.
- What happens when more content producers use pen names to limit their risk of public backlash?
I think what's often labeled as "free speech/wokeness/cancel-culture" sort of issues would best be called a "freedom of association" issue. And I support freedom of association.
But either you have freedom of association or you don't.
Now, the problem from my libertarian-ish perspective, is that the government has meddled in freedom of association significantly. There's obvious types of examples (Bake the cake, bigot!) and far less obvious examples like the government enforced credit card cartel that gives a small number of financiers significant artificial power to shape the world.
I'm fine living with the consequences of a society with freedom of association, however that turns out, if only we had that. But I suspect that most people on the political left who currently champion ideas like "Actually, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" don't actually want freedom of association. It seems like they like that there's a system where they have their cake and eat it too.
As far as Scott Adams comments, I have been busy lately and haven't had the chance to listen to the full podcast and his followup arguments, but I strongly suspect that few people have actually really analyzed his arguments and are just feigning moral outrage. Personally speaking, I'd say it's a big fucking problem for me too if 50% of black people can't agree with a statement like "It's Ok to Be White".
One can examine the ethics of a racial question by switching the races.
If you were asked whether or not "It's Ok to Be Black" or "It's Ok to be Jewish" or "It's Ok to Be Hispanic" or "It's Ok to be Asian" and answered with anything but "yes", what would people say about you?
I agree this is a useful philosophical and logical lens. Rearranging logical statements and forms and ensuring that certain higher principles hold (which we might call 'moral invariants') is a useful way to do moral reasoning!
Still, the logical reasoning above is only part of the larger discussion of human meaning in general and {race and identity} in particular. Words relating to history and culture are not so neatly substitutable and reversible.
Personal note: I hope I've been at least clear (and perhaps even persuasive) w.r.t. to the subjective interpretation of survey questions. Merely swapping labels without bringing along the cultural and mental connections isn't enough.
Example: a narrow textual analysis of the following phrases tends to miss what people actually mean when using them:
- "Black lives matter"
- "All lives matter"
- "Blue lives matter"
---
A summary of the necessary context, from the corresponding Wikipedia pages, copypastad today:
> Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. It started following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. The movement and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation.
---
> The All Lives Matter movement was created as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Use of the phrase began as an inclusive alternative to Black Lives Matter, though it quickly became associated with opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. The use of the All Lives Matter slogan on Twitter following the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner began in 2014 to "undermine the purpose and message of the #BlackLivesMatter call to action", and it was used to deny recognition of racial violence against African Americans. Some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement adopted the All Lives Matter slogan to shift debate away from semantics, while others avoided the term entirely.
---
> Blue Lives Matter (also known as Police Lives Matter) is a countermovement in the United States advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes.
> Critics have pointed out that while being Black is an identity-based characteristic, being a police officer is a choice, and that police officers are already typically respected and honored in communities. They add that attacking or killing a police officer already carries a higher penalty than attacking a non-police officer, and argue that the movement is really more about suppressing minorities than supporting law enforcement.
> While you did so very politely, I don't think it's the most proper thing to tell people where they should post, thanks.
My suggestion was intended to help group related threads together, thereby helping people reading the comments. I also see it as an area where reasonable people may disagree.
What I don't follow is the rationale of disliking the request itself. If I may ask: by what standards do you find it inappropriate?
> b) responses to their comment laid out some arguably better terminology like griefing or cyberbullying.
Fair point. Cyberbullying might well be a clearer term for most than trolling. Assessing this would require another study. (eyebrow)
"Griefing" is a new one to me. For some reason, it conjures an image of Charlie Brown getting the football pulled away from him at the last instant. And yet it happens over and over. At some point, you think that he can't be that naive! -- it almost seems like he likes that particular experience of failure.
This feels like the guide for youngins that haven't experienced internet chat of any form for the past 30 years before this bit of enlightening investigative journalism. People enjoy each other's misery, duh, just look at reality television. Even sitting at a restaurant for dinner last night, others and I were watching on a wall ChiveTV, which is a constant loop of human failures in people crashing, biffing, wrecking, in general epically screwing up, and one can't help but laugh and be memorized by it just waiting for some poor sucker to fail miserably for my entertainment. Trolling comes from precipitating purposefully the same sort of trainwreck of human behavior for one's entertainment, particularly when good at it. Some otherwise call this politics.
Traditional trolling is a response to self-seriousness that tries to undermine and debase it. And it didn’t start online. It’s the fast-talkers way to disarm people who are being overtly “smart” or authoritative. It’s a kind of disrespect and rhetoric, and it can be offensive, embarrassing, distracting, etc etc in ways that feel harmful but its not sadistic. It’s a part of a dialog.
This researcher, explicitly, but probably not alone, has expanded that language to also include any kind of harassment and bullying that happens online.
It’s too bad, because having different words for different things is usually handy.
I feel that people have been trying and failing to make this distinction for decades, and failing. Just like "hacking". Possibly because it depends on motivation which can't be reliably percieved by bystanders.
Meanwhile it's expanded into fairly mainstream politics.
I've not thought of trolling in this way, and I've been around since the BBS days. Maybe I missed it, and/or maybe I have a more accurate/common idea. I don't know.
All in all, it is fascinating to see all the definitions of trolling.
Generally, early on, I thought of trolling as an intentional derailment of an on-topic discussion. I also noticed people doing it ironically, which seemed
funny at times, but it became hard to tell the difference around intentions. Over time, I've started to expand the meaning include an intention to cause strife to people. As such, it is not just a waste of time but also an attempt to degrade people.
Generally, I tend to think of trolling as one manifestation of some nasty parts of the human condition.
I have to mention that there is also another form, or it may be different from trolling altogether, although it's not purely destructive in nature and it's more of a test, and I think an explanation will best describe what I mean.
There are online groups that will try to provoke people into giving them a reaction. You call people derogatory words and make them feel uncomfortable. If you can easily provoke a reaction out of them, they are outsiders unfit for the group you want them to partake in. If they react by "correctly" responding to those provocations either by insulting back in a joking manner, or directly referencing something regarding those words, you know that they're fit to be in your group.
I really hope there's other people in this thread who know about this practice.
As described, this is a form of hazing. Endure some {pain, embarrassment, temporary lower status, insults, etc} in order to gain membership in a club and then later inflict the same on others. This is an unfortunate part of human behavior. At times only annoying (but perhaps useful for bonding if done within humane constraints), but often worse.
Not exactly what I was referring to. The form I describe is more so to test if you are easily offended by those insults and are easily provoked. If you can find humor or bonding with those words, you can be part of the group, essentially differentiating them from those who are too emotional, easily provoked and quick to react negatively.
Hazing is a little different insofar as people apply to join and then have to go through the hazing ceremony to gain acceptance (which with time can become highly abstracted, eg initiation rites in Freemasonry).
What's being described above is covert signaling, where the group is trying to expand and employs pseudo-aggression as a combination recruitment/sorting strategy.
I used to enjoy typing “ggez” at the end of multiplayer matches. Especially if it was an even game or close victory.
Some people would just explode in anger at the sight of it, it’s unbelievable. Someone once messaged me after that for a solid hour just venting like a mad man.
Well who do you think is the one with the issues here, I’m just a random stranger throwing out a 4 letter bait. What is the point of getting upset? Literally zero benefit whatsoever. It’s like people loosing their mind in traffic, who exactly are you yelling at inside your car?
Of course not talking about things like bullying, stalking, plain mean people.
But genuine trolls are good people! Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort is just holding a mirror in front of people. I always hoped it would eventually lead people to self-reflect.
------
edit: ok I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. Don’t take life so serious. I’m not a sociopath or having delusions of helping people, thanks for suggesting the diagnosis though. In the future I’ll do my best to not stir up any unnecessary negative emotions!
> Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort
This is just a justification to yourself of sociopathy. Of course there are lots of easy things you can do to upset people. Your job as a citizen is to learn not to do that and apologize.
Generally we don’t like to think of ourselves as hurting others to make us feel good - we’ll come up with all kinds of excuses: we’re only trying to help, they shouldn’t have been hurt anyway, they deserved it, I didn’t mean it that way, yadda yadda yadda.
Ultimately they’re all just excuses. The truth is, it feels good to hurt other people, that truth makes most people deeply uncomfortable, and will concoct nearly any excuse to cope with that cognitive dissonance. Nobody likes to think of themself as a bad guy.
> But genuine trolls are good people! Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort is just holding a mirror in front of people
The language and thinking you use here seems worryingly close to sociopathy. I say this because the language above discounts the pain experienced. So to respond in a relatively clinical way, using that kind of language, no, doing that is not just a mirror. It is your choice to introduce a statistically likely stressor with a statistically predictable stress response.
If a person knows there is a high probability that doing X will upset people, under what conditions is doing so ethical?
If you claim to "be teaching them an important lesson" then you probably should pause and study human psychology. Exposing people ad-hoc (in an uncontrolled setting) to a stressor is not a generally good strategy to "cure" them of the response. There is lots of research here: I recommend learning more.
A lot of the replies mention sociopathy, but couldn't this be something else? Maybe you are in the position where you aren't phased by provocations and find it weird how people are so easily negatively influenced. Essentially, when you provoke someone, you indeed put up an easy bait to provoke a reaction out of someone, and if they fall for it, you can assume that the person might not be acting logically or rationally most of their life. After all, how can something so simple enact such rage from someone, they must be crazy if they don't just ignore it, at least get mildly frustrated. Are they the sort of person to yell in the restaurant if someone forgets to put cream in their coffee? It could also be a method to differentiate between the seasoned gamers and those who are new to it. After all, banter and shit-talking was prevalent and you had to adapt to it to remain in that space, and before you knew it, you were part of it.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past"
1) This article has very little to do with anti-Semitism, other than arguably pointing out that a subset of trolls are also anti-Semites. That doesn't distinguish trolls from any other population group however. Additionally, posting a random quote with no context or argument doesn't really bring much of anything to a discussion.
2) Are Semites above criticism? Quotes like this seem to shut down even the possibility of criticism of a large collection of valid commentary.
re: 2, criticism based purely on ethnicity is off limits. You have to stick to either individual malfeasance with evidence, or specific criticism of actions of the government of Israel. This is important to get right if you have valid criticisms of Zionism that you don't want to have dismissed as mere racism.
Your short post brings up a lot of potential questions, but I'll just throw 2 of them out there to the void.
1) Why is criticism based on ethnicity off limits? If I expressed that say Scandinavians were repugnant for generally not wanting to feed their house guests, would this be an unconscionable sin? Why should criticizing some group, while still recognizing that its members are individuals and may have their own differing views on feeding guests, be forbidden?
2) Is it possible for bad intentioned people to falsely conflate criticism of some group or even country's politics with racism? In American politics for instance, we all know what sort of name-calling happens to politicians that express a little too harsh opinions on a certain country, right?
That quote happened to be written in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and so it focused on anti-semitism. But it's really about the behavior in general, which today we call "trolling".
Obviously Jews aren't above criticism. But there's a kind of insincere criticism that can't be answered because that's not it's goal. The goal is to waste time and make people angry.
It's worth citing the quote because it calls out that behavior nearly 80 years ago, and it's still recognizable today. At the time the author referred to it as "bad faith", and it's just as applicable now.
> But there's a kind of insincere criticism that can't be answered because that's not it's goal. The goal is to waste time and make people angry.
You might suspect that somebody does X for Y reason or is not sincere, but it should clearly be stated that mind-reading never has been and never will be a thing. Speaking of bad faith arguments, imagine trying to discuss with somebody who literally invents their opponents thoughts out of thin air and then impugns their motives based on those invented thoughts.
You are, of course, correct. It can be difficult to tell when somebody is stupid, or an asshole, or merely pretending to be a stupid asshole.
It's all the same to the person on the receiving end. It's not worth engaging with people who don't listen. Whether they are deliberately trying to aggravate, or are merely too stupid to know that their arguments are tedious.
> You are, of course, correct. It can be difficult to tell when somebody is stupid, or an asshole, or merely pretending to be a stupid asshole.
It could be the case that somebody is stupid or an asshole. But you've left out one of the most important possibilities: maybe the other person is dead right about something that you're dead wrong about.
> It's all the same to the person on the receiving end. It's not worth engaging with people who don't listen. Whether they are deliberately trying to aggravate, or are merely too stupid to know that their arguments are tedious.
Using a phrase like "people who don't listen" seems a little problematic to me. That's not the kind of phrase that somebody who is a genuine knowledge seeker who is willing to consider the full diversity of human ideas would ever consider.
So far, a vast majority of replies here on HN comment on the paper's definition of trolling but do not engage with the author's subsequent recommendations. I'd like to offer this comment as a placeholder for us to do more of the latter.
> Don’t fight fire with fire. Respond with outward indifference and strict no tolerance. Let’s work together to dismantle the power of the troll and take back the internet from their influence.
Society and legal standards have a long history about zero tolerance responses. I find it problematic to see zero tolerance recommended. Why?
First, some interpretation must happen before a comment gets categorized as trolling.*
Second, this interpretation ranges from clear-cut to murky.
Third, in cases of clear trolling, the troll might range from being (a) a first timer to a long-time troller; and (b) unwilling or unwilling to change.
I'd suggest that any interventions around trolling account for these variations above.
Zero tolerance has a way of also being "one size fits all" which can create additional unnecessary problems. For example, if unfairly used, it can become a convenient blunt attack for a wide range of interpersonal disagreements.
* As mentioned at the top of this thread, I'm taking the author's definition of trolling.
119 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhen cops can kill with impunity and are never subject to the laws they enforce, you have people wanting mob justice.
When politicians can lie with impunity and hide behind free speech and keep their jobs, their benefits, and all, you have people wanting mob justice.
When corporations can send bomb trains into your city, poison everyone within hundreds of miles, and then walk away with bonuses for covering their asses, you have people wanting mob justice.
These are wildly different things. Trolls are doing it because they want to hurt others, a lot of people are doing it because they want to stop being hurt by a system that has decided they don't deserve justice.
In the online space it's easy to imagine that people with the wrong politics or that are drawn to NFTs and ChatGPT like moths to a flame out of ignorance and sloth are pissing in the pool and need to be brought to justice too.
At some point, there has to be no coddling and babying for people. My opinion is that coddling should stop generally around 10 - 14, and consequences should become gradually harsher by the time you are legally declared an adult, in my country this is 18, but my opinion would be the same if we somehow drop that down to 16.
I also believe in the idea that people are not robots. If you live your life that way, I feel explicit contempt for you, and I do generally think your life is rather pointless. Some things are truly intuitive, like not putting flammable objects on top of your stove. I also have no problem feeling contempt for people who do dangerous things, and then die, because they force people to clean up after them.
Unfortunately, my sadism these days only goes as far as rejecting job applications, doing write ups, and in the end being a part of the firing process. Though, sometimes I am able to suspend which leads to a firing within the next 2 weeks which I guess is good enough.
No rational person can blame an individual for not knowing something due to circumstances beyond their control. Not every qualified student in subject X has a parent / education / life experience that will give them an upbringing and background knowledge that will give them a good preparation for asking questions and preparing for industry Y. This realization quickly dispenses with any notion of people as perfect rational decision makers. It also dispenses with blaming or punishing people who don't have such advantages. It should also reduce the "halo" effect of prestigious schools and workplaces. Since luck and circumstances play such a high role in, say, admissions to top universities, people should act accordingly and stop elevating themselves.
People make mistakes-- this is statistically inevitable. Making harsher laws, reducing the safety net, and making insurance policies extremely strict to reduce moral hazard would make people more cautious and responsible, so the argument goes. But that argument often gets taken as dogma, and it not checked against reality.
In my view, consistent with philosophers such as John Rawls, optimizing for strictness is rarely the best technique to build a good society.
Interestingly, I have a very similar attitude—except it’s about your behaviors, instead of about ignorance.
Hopefully you don't view yourself as qualified to make this judgement. Even if I agreed with your ethics, which I do not, I would not agree with your judgements. Here's why: You don't know enough to do it fairly. For example, it takes considerable effort for the U.S. justice system to gather (an imperfect subset of) information to make such (flawed) assessments.
No offense. Thank you for laying out your point of view.
You don't know if I would do it fairly, you mean. But let's go in on your assumption. What is 'fairness'?
From whose perspective are you making the judgement of 'fairness'? Would the man who you are convicting to life in prison after he murdered 20 people feel your fairness? What if he denies that what you are doing is 'fair', does you definition change then? What happens if you do care about consensus, but you know enough to discount this particular case, which other opinions do you discount? Because it sure won't be the last one
I could care less about the U.S. justice system, society has plenty of tools to punish individuals, and I have no problem using them.
In a democracy, I think of fairness as the general underlying ethical ideas implied by the set of laws. As such, this idea of fairness will seem inconsistent in some ways, because it is the result of various laws and court precedents established over time.
Individuals in any society have varying ideas of fairness of course. How they express and act on them varies considerably with the form of government they live in.
You are interested in fairness, no? What kinds of systems of justice are you interested in?
Do you subscribe to the might makes right argument?
The word coddling generally has a negative connotation and implies the relevant actors / systems do too much of it.
There are plenty of people who...
1. view human behavior as largely (but not completely) shaped by historical events; or
2. don't believe in traditional ideas of free will
and still find meaning in their lives.
I'd encourage you to challenge your beliefs here.
Do you want to feel contempt? This contempt is one kind of judgment. Why are you confident that you know enough to make such a harsh judgment?
I find it interesting that what you've written is quite opposite of secular Buddhism.
There's a great story from Buddhism about hate. I'll adapt it. Let's say you hate that an alcoholic drunk driver killed a family of four. What exactly do you hate? If the drunk driver had a habit of driving drunk, it was not a one-off. You should also hate all previous drunk drivings that didn't kill anyone. So you might hate the fact that such a bad habit took root? What history drove the alcoholism? What if it was parental abuse? Genetics? But what about all of the people who knew about the alcoholic and his drunk driving? Why did they not intervene? Why is alcoholism so prevalent? Why don't lawmakers do more about it?
My point is that if you connect the hate to its causes, you will find it impossible to situate it on just one person.
I suppose you could hate all of the contributing factors. But how many of the contributing factors have volition?
My conclusion is that most common ideas of hate (a) are not well thought out and (b) don't really help us solve problems.
Perhaps there is only a fine line between hate and a burning desire to improve something in the world. The latter can be done without holding people in contempt. It can be hard, but it is worth it.
But I suspect it’s more interesting to them this way, and easier to pursue funding when your thesis includes more socially impactful stuff like harassment and harm instead of just provocation and ideological derision. Institutional bureaucracy gonna bureaucrat.
For decades now. The sort of extremely gentle, early-Usenet-style teasing/provocation you're thinking of didn't last long.
I see it very similar to the word "woke", which also has such an absurdly wide definition that it becomes almost meaningless.
Have all lost their meaning due to the abundant incorrect usage over the last few years.
* Subsequent changes in meaning, as used by some people, can tell us a lot about those people.
Misrepresentation can extend even to the point of accusing wholly sincere but irritated people of 'trolling' in order to further annoy them. But when the term is used in the social sciences it's typically tightly defined. It doesn't really matter how dilute the popular understanding is; if it becomes so dilute that the association is meaningless than the behavior can just be given some other designation, such as reflexive control.
Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “own the libs” but unlike many other political commentators (say conservatives William F. Buckley or leftist Gore Vidal) he rarely engaged with people he disagree with.
Cultural left ‘cancel mobs’ can cause distress to their victims but I think the real point is to get a thrill of being in a crowd with a heightened identity similar to what people get from going to a football game or to get some relief from meaninglessness in taking action.
Game theory offers an alternative approach of measuring a sample population's behavior in a suite of games with varying payoffs. The study below suggests most people's behavior patterns fall into just 4 major groups, with a 5th group (~20%) that seems to just make random choices. Even more surprisingly, these patterns seem to be established early in life and to be independent of socio economic factors. In that study, the largest cohort was found to be willing to experience a loss as long as the counterparty suffered a greater loss, and I suspect that would probably correlate well with the 'sadistic' cohort mentioned in OP's study.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
Like someone is dropping something or whatever.
I realized that's not the reaction I want to have and have a core memory of a woman asking a man who drove into the wall (with the back of a truck) if everything was okay with him before even checking the damage to the truck and her house wall.
I want my first reaction to be like that.
My older cousin told me on e that our grandpa was also like my father.
It's an unlogical trained behavior. Nothing more.
And unfortunately that also means there is no reason for people being like that than 'they learned it.
Germans have the word schadenfreude. Is it even a cultural pattern and my family just pushed the goal post further than others?
I don't think it's necessarily unlogical, eg it's adaptive if you are engaged in hunting or combat for survival. Perhaps you need to explore contexts in which the payoff for successful cooperation significantly exceeds that for defection.
Than it takes enough situations.
I could come up with a few hypothetical questions from this though: 1) do narcissists find “fail videos“ more amusing? 1.a) if yes, then it can be trained away by reminding them to reflect on the situations. This is normal training for narcissism, put them in other people’s shoes. 2) watching the same “fail videos” over and over again makes them boring? 2.a) it’s on the same line as previously, but instead the hope that it internalizes the seriousness of a situation.
1. All things created by artists are art, and
2. There is art in divisive and hurtful manipulation.
This surprised me because I don't feel that way, never said this and believe artists can fail in their creations and produce junk
> 2. There is art in divisive and hurtful manipulation
Trolling can be harmless, along the lines of pranks and jokes. April Fools day type stuff. MTG is trolling, but it's not very artful and it's mostly harmless. You may consider this "divisive and hurtful manipulation" but I don't. It's what people do on Twitter to amplify their Tweets. Both sides of any argument do it.
There are some who consider divisive and hurtful behavior can be artful, such as composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who said 9/11 was the "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and was widely condemned for it.
"the composer formally apologized for his remarks, explaining that he simply wanted to remind people of the role of destruction in art"
http://www.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm
For better or worse, it’s part of the PR game for people who grew up with online life and want them retweets.
Some older politicians have committed to it to. Obviously.
Money. It's mainly designed to increase her reach to people who might consider donating because they like her message and attitude.
Isnt it actually a good thing to encourage people to see dogmatic issues in new perspectives.
I don't get it. How do you come to that conclusion? People with a different set of opinions than yourself would go out of their way to have a conversation with you, construct a neat and tidy identity, just to make you angry? And this is not even in political conversation, sometimes it's just that you have different preferences. In what communities is it so common to have people so obsessed that they construct fictional identities and weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?
And it's articles like this one that largely cause this. They leave no room for the possibility that someone is genuinely provoking a response that mocks their view by the very absurdity of those views. Instead it's just oh no the ministry of truth signed off on those views and you're perfectly sensible to hold them and if anybody calls them into question they're hostile sadistic psychopathic trolls.
Whether it’s because of your class, your friends, your region, or now your online circles, you have some natural sense of the world and the range of familiar sincere beliefs — even the ones you disagree with.
But sometimes when you encounter someone new, they’re perspective is do alien that you can’t integrate it at all. A first reaction is to just assume they’re being insincere and provocative, and because trolls (and “bots” and “shills”) are a foundational archetype of online life, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve encountered one.
It’s going to happen. The responsible next step is to be attentive to that possibility without becoming strictly convinced and accusatory. But that can be hard.
This happens more often than you think.
In most online communities.
> Trolling can refer to a variety of online behaviour. In some circumstances, the intent of the trolling behaviour may even be to amuse and entertain. However, in my research, I have explored trolling as a malevolent behaviour, where the troll wants to hurt their online victim.
You can argue that "troll" isn't the right term, but then what is the right term for this? I think it's reasonable to use and adapt the term for this purpose, for lack of another more specific term. The article is describing a subset of trolls.
As much as the meaning seems to have drifted, trolling and bullying are two different issues, not different names for the same one.
It's like trolling for fish is just trying to catch some fish but not any specific fish a la Moby-Dick (which admittedly is not a fish but rather a mammal, of course).
I can't count the number of times I've read a math paper which says to the effect, "If the axiom of choice is true then such and such follows." In some ways math has even greater liberty in terms of conjectures - statements assumed true until proven.
All I'm asking is for logical consistency where math and other sciences are held to the same standards regardless of what they are.
That said, different disciplines have different standards and practices about what should be surfaced.
Two examples:
1. Anthropologists describe the context and behaviors of a society. They can aspire to neutrality, but they are biased observers, in terms of what they notice and comment on. This is why it is especially useful for the observer to reflect on their preconceived notions and be transparent about them. This allows the reader to better understand what the "lens" observes.
2. I believe that all papers using statistical models should be fully transparent about, at least: (1) preconceived notions about what associations the authors thought would exist; and (2) how many functional forms were tried and discarded before arriving at the models used for the published results.
Semantics do matter. If you read a medical article that said "the lungs are the organ of the body that pump blood around, other authors may use the term 'heart'", you wouldn't pay much attention to it, right?
I've never heard that one before, despite being online for decades.
It seems to be specific to online gaming, which I don't participate in.
You are not objecting, I believe, to the author's intended meaning--you seem to have clearly understood that and believe the different word would have been better used.
They think they can teach the person a lesson but the only thing they are doing is either trolling or even worse abusing the person.
When you look what people have done to "Chris Chan" then you wonder who really is the "Monster" here.
In my opinion though, in countries without freedom of speech protections, politicians have been increasingly trying to use edicts against "harassment" or "cyberbullying" or "online trolling" to label many kinds of criticisms of them as illegal and to try and get social media networks or the law to shut them down.
Certainly, we should all acknowledge that trying to cyberbully some girl that was flirting with your boyfriend into suicide is an entirely different class of behavior than even the harshest repeated non-violent criticism of politicians. Does anybody disagree with that?
From Wikipedia's entry on public figure:
> A public figure is a person who has achieved notoriety, prominence or fame within a society, whether through achievement, luck, action, or in some cases through no purposeful action of their own.
> In the context of defamation actions (libel and slander) as well as invasion of privacy, a public figure cannot succeed in a lawsuit on incorrect harmful statements in the United States unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with actual malice by knowing the falsity or by reckless disregard for the truth. The legal burden of proof in defamation actions is thus higher in the case of a public figure than in the case of an ordinary person.
In the US, we're semi-protected from government interference with this level of free speech that is critical of public figures, though technology firms have the capability of deciding what content is allowed on their platforms and can still provide some form of censorship if they choose to for various real or artificial reasons.
No. This sibling comment counters this claim quite well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34948083
> A lot of people here in the comments are getting hung up on semantics, the definition of "troll", but the article author addresses this directly:
>> Trolling can refer to a variety of online behaviour. In some circumstances, the intent of the trolling behaviour may even be to amuse and entertain. However, in my research, I have explored trolling as a malevolent behaviour, where the troll wants to hurt their online victim.
> You can argue that "troll" isn't the right term, but then what is the right term for this? I think it's reasonable to use and adapt the term for this purpose, for lack of another more specific term. The article is describing a subset of trolls.
Please reply to the sibling comment to keep it consolidated, thanks.
2) My comment added something else that I view as important to this discussion for a tech audience (labeling things as trolling for the purpose of censorship)
3) While you did so very politely, I don't think it's the most proper thing to tell people where they should post, thanks.
The research is based on self-reports from volunteers, so it's not mind-reading.
Nevertheless, it doesn't seem like a self-selected study (particularly one with a heavy Australian slant) is a particularly good one for this kind of topic. And I think that 68% of the participants being women probably indicates that self-selection might not be the right model for this study right off the bat given the probable nature of online trolling.
That did seem strange.
An important point, though I will state my concern about how often censorship gets referenced here on HN:
When one worries about censorship, it is easy to see any feedback mechanism as an attack vector.
But since we also value constructive communication*, we must strike a balance. Of course we should not rule out a feedback mechanism only because there is a small probability of misuse.
* Along with every online forum comes an associated ethos; i.e. accepted ways of interacting. To completely refuse to shape discussions out of fear of "censorship" is abdicating responsibility for establishing and maintaining norms. To do nothing, claiming to be completely free of speech restrictions, is equivalent to letting individuals, often the loudest and most self-important, to define the platform, and history shows it gets nasty fast. A reasonable compromise is to lay out your standards and process for enforcement. Your audience hopefully can assess if your forum has what it takes to be worth their time.
But we're in an era where it certainly feels like some people are rushing to cheerlead censorship of all forms: whether from government or mega-corporation in concert with government.
I view this as a really big problem for the world as some of the most important and life-changing issues are effectively shut down from discussion, which could lead to a great calamity. So what suggestions would you offer to somebody like me who sees this as a really gigantic problem?
I also find it intellectually problematic to emphasize censorship without also talking about the broader problems of manipulation occurring with too much centralized control over media. Censorship is just one particular form of manipulation -- and practically speaking, just the tip of the iceberg.
Focusing on censorship to the exclusion of broader goals for a healthy population and society is too narrow and leads to poor policy.
But since you asked for suggestions, I'll try. I don't have time to make this brief. Sorry!
At the individual level: I think it's really important to educate and discuss the following with many people as you can -- when and how is the hard part! --
A. Personally, don't be too quick to shut the door on relationships. The default response to someone who offends you should not be to shout them down nor to cut all ties. Depending on the context, seek to understand, if possible, share your point of view, and in the rare cases where a real discussion happens, you might have a small impact. With enough of these interactions, we can stop demonizing each other.
B. Understand what the First Amendment protects and does not protect.
C. Understand the similarities and differences between censorship and moderation. There can be a fine line, and we need to talk about it more.
D. Let's get clear on when censorship is appropriate. Little Malfoy wants to publish an article about torturing their pet dog in the school newsletter? No thanks. Yes, please censor him.
E. If an organization controls a forum, it is its prerogative to shape its content according to the policies it sets and responsibility to comply with applicable laws.
F. Let's get clear on why it is important for a government to protect freedom of expression. The primary reason is to protect citizen rights to criticize their government.
G. Let's talk about employment contracts. Under what conditions would you sign a contract that prevents you from disparaging your employer? To step back to the legal policy level, when are these kind of contracts in the public interest?
H. Let's talk about media ownership. What happens when one party exercises significant (direct or indirect) control over a media market?
I. There are many forms of media manipulation that at times can be worse than censorship. Misinformation, conflicts of interest, outright lies, promotion of vice, and much more.
J. How do you prove censorship? How do you prove media manipulation?
K. What responsibility does a media outlet have to its audience?
L. Let's talk about how many media outlets have shifted to caring more about {short term ratings and entertainment} and relatively less about investigative journalism. This may seem like a little bit of a tangent, but it explains what is actually happening without resorting to any conspiracy to censor.
M. Understand why organizations sponsor celebrities. It is all about image. When that image is a liability, it is rational for a sponsorship to get cancelled.
N. If you are a content producer and you are concerned that your media channel could drop you at any instant, look into alternative channels and contract protections. Lacking such protections, recognize that you better be careful with what you say. And if you do get canceled, don't go out and blame other people like it was some surprise. You probably knew it was coming. You may have even wanted the controversy.
O. Understand that "being cancelled" largely falls into the same category as other "information cascades" (the term by James Surowiecki). This is the same dynamic that makes standing in line for an hour for a cupcake cool. There does not have to be any large political organization pulling strings for this to happen. All that is required is humanity's natural tendencies (status signaling, behavior emulation as a low information strategy); in other words, the proclivity to be lemmings.
P. Now, if y...
Lacking the time to more fully respond, I'll just give my quick thoughts on 3 quick points.
> J. How do you prove censorship? How do you prove media manipulation?
The current business model of the media guarantees bad behavior. Once the technology was invented to "count clicks" and directly see what caused somebody to visit them, the media figured out a way to drive their own profit. This makes it impossible to not have unethical behavior. I don't really need to prove anything when the system guarantees bad behavior.
You don't need to have a formal scientific study and citations to know that an ice cream cone left outside on a hot day will melt. The environment its in guarantees it.
> S. Understand that many people complaining about "woke culture" are often parroting talking points. These are not usually people who are pausing think about the issue deeply. Such people are upset and have plenty to be upset about. Much of their discomfort comes from disagreeing with how the world is changing.
I'd just like to point out that the people who are complaining about woke culture are caught in a very painful situation.
They see the world changing, but then the censorship largely forbids them to fully complain about that.
And the world only ever responds by wanting to minimize their voice, firing them from their job, and calling them names like racist.
Whatever you want to say about the ethics of this situation, this is not a recipe for a good social outcome.
If you want to create a pile of socially alienated people with nothing left to lose (never a good outcome) the current course we're on is the perfect trajectory for that.
> V. Now if someone does a clearly inappropriate thing -- saying a racist or sexist comment -- we should not assume they do this repeatedly. We should treat them as irredeemable. We should not pretend like "we" have always been perfect either.
Did you mean to say "We should not treat them as irredeemable"?
Yes, media dynamics are predictably dysfunctional.
Thanks for discussing. I'll try to write more.
Yes, I got (V) wrong. Whoops. I meant that we should view people as redeemable. On a second look, I don't like my word choice of "redeemable" ... the word itself suggests that a wrong belief or statement by a person makes them less worthy of respect. I don't mean that.
> Similarly, Hector Cantú, best known for his Latino-American comic Baldo, said he believes in freedom of speech, but not freedom from repercussions.
> "Don't gloss this over by saying it's politics or it's cancel culture," he said. "If you're going to offend people, you risk paying the price."
Sub-questions:
- Does it matter if the offensive comments are "out of band?" i.e. on a YouTube channel, not in the cartoon?
- Did the various publishers explore other options besides dropping Dilbert altogether? Should they have?
- Media outlets may claim that they are acting morally. Still, to a large degree, they are responding to societal and commercial pressures. Does this weaken their argument?
- Free speech is easy to support when no one cares about what you say. When it strikes a nerve, that's when we have to confront the issue.
- What happens when more content producers use pen names to limit their risk of public backlash?
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159605012/dilbert-cartoonist...
But either you have freedom of association or you don't.
Now, the problem from my libertarian-ish perspective, is that the government has meddled in freedom of association significantly. There's obvious types of examples (Bake the cake, bigot!) and far less obvious examples like the government enforced credit card cartel that gives a small number of financiers significant artificial power to shape the world.
I'm fine living with the consequences of a society with freedom of association, however that turns out, if only we had that. But I suspect that most people on the political left who currently champion ideas like "Actually, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" don't actually want freedom of association. It seems like they like that there's a system where they have their cake and eat it too.
As far as Scott Adams comments, I have been busy lately and haven't had the chance to listen to the full podcast and his followup arguments, but I strongly suspect that few people have actually really analyzed his arguments and are just feigning moral outrage. Personally speaking, I'd say it's a big fucking problem for me too if 50% of black people can't agree with a statement like "It's Ok to Be White".
WRT responses to survey prompts, it is easy to forget that the same words can mean different things to different people.
To some, the prompt might mean:
- "it is ok to be white today, even though history has shown the terrible things white people have done in the past"
- "it is ok to embody the full set of ideas that are associated with whiteness"
- "it's ok for white people to have a structural advantage over non-whites"
These differences in interpretation lead to more plausible interpretations of the survey.
If you were asked whether or not "It's Ok to Be Black" or "It's Ok to be Jewish" or "It's Ok to Be Hispanic" or "It's Ok to be Asian" and answered with anything but "yes", what would people say about you?
Still, the logical reasoning above is only part of the larger discussion of human meaning in general and {race and identity} in particular. Words relating to history and culture are not so neatly substitutable and reversible.
Personal note: I hope I've been at least clear (and perhaps even persuasive) w.r.t. to the subjective interpretation of survey questions. Merely swapping labels without bringing along the cultural and mental connections isn't enough.
Example: a narrow textual analysis of the following phrases tends to miss what people actually mean when using them:
- "Black lives matter"
- "All lives matter"
- "Blue lives matter"
---
A summary of the necessary context, from the corresponding Wikipedia pages, copypastad today:
> Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. It started following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. The movement and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation.
---
> The All Lives Matter movement was created as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Use of the phrase began as an inclusive alternative to Black Lives Matter, though it quickly became associated with opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. The use of the All Lives Matter slogan on Twitter following the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner began in 2014 to "undermine the purpose and message of the #BlackLivesMatter call to action", and it was used to deny recognition of racial violence against African Americans. Some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement adopted the All Lives Matter slogan to shift debate away from semantics, while others avoided the term entirely.
---
> Blue Lives Matter (also known as Police Lives Matter) is a countermovement in the United States advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes.
> Critics have pointed out that while being Black is an identity-based characteristic, being a police officer is a choice, and that police officers are already typically respected and honored in communities. They add that attacking or killing a police officer already carries a higher penalty than attacking a non-police officer, and argue that the movement is really more about suppressing minorities than supporting law enforcement.
My suggestion was intended to help group related threads together, thereby helping people reading the comments. I also see it as an area where reasonable people may disagree.
What I don't follow is the rationale of disliking the request itself. If I may ask: by what standards do you find it inappropriate?
It's the specific wording choice.
You did it fairly politely and even said please, but as a general outlook on life, I don't like being told what to do.
Telling me where to post = bad
Suggesting where to post for x logical reason = good
Fair point. Cyberbullying might well be a clearer term for most than trolling. Assessing this would require another study. (eyebrow)
"Griefing" is a new one to me. For some reason, it conjures an image of Charlie Brown getting the football pulled away from him at the last instant. And yet it happens over and over. At some point, you think that he can't be that naive! -- it almost seems like he likes that particular experience of failure.
Thanks for the convo y'all.
This researcher, explicitly, but probably not alone, has expanded that language to also include any kind of harassment and bullying that happens online.
It’s too bad, because having different words for different things is usually handy.
Meanwhile it's expanded into fairly mainstream politics.
All in all, it is fascinating to see all the definitions of trolling.
Generally, early on, I thought of trolling as an intentional derailment of an on-topic discussion. I also noticed people doing it ironically, which seemed funny at times, but it became hard to tell the difference around intentions. Over time, I've started to expand the meaning include an intention to cause strife to people. As such, it is not just a waste of time but also an attempt to degrade people.
Generally, I tend to think of trolling as one manifestation of some nasty parts of the human condition.
There are online groups that will try to provoke people into giving them a reaction. You call people derogatory words and make them feel uncomfortable. If you can easily provoke a reaction out of them, they are outsiders unfit for the group you want them to partake in. If they react by "correctly" responding to those provocations either by insulting back in a joking manner, or directly referencing something regarding those words, you know that they're fit to be in your group.
I really hope there's other people in this thread who know about this practice.
Perhaps you are suggesting the 'tests' are not arbitrary but instead are an essential part of evaluating if someone is fit for a group?
What's being described above is covert signaling, where the group is trying to expand and employs pseudo-aggression as a combination recruitment/sorting strategy.
Some people would just explode in anger at the sight of it, it’s unbelievable. Someone once messaged me after that for a solid hour just venting like a mad man.
Well who do you think is the one with the issues here, I’m just a random stranger throwing out a 4 letter bait. What is the point of getting upset? Literally zero benefit whatsoever. It’s like people loosing their mind in traffic, who exactly are you yelling at inside your car?
Of course not talking about things like bullying, stalking, plain mean people.
But genuine trolls are good people! Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort is just holding a mirror in front of people. I always hoped it would eventually lead people to self-reflect.
------
edit: ok I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. Don’t take life so serious. I’m not a sociopath or having delusions of helping people, thanks for suggesting the diagnosis though. In the future I’ll do my best to not stir up any unnecessary negative emotions!
This is just a justification to yourself of sociopathy. Of course there are lots of easy things you can do to upset people. Your job as a citizen is to learn not to do that and apologize.
Ultimately they’re all just excuses. The truth is, it feels good to hurt other people, that truth makes most people deeply uncomfortable, and will concoct nearly any excuse to cope with that cognitive dissonance. Nobody likes to think of themself as a bad guy.
The language and thinking you use here seems worryingly close to sociopathy. I say this because the language above discounts the pain experienced. So to respond in a relatively clinical way, using that kind of language, no, doing that is not just a mirror. It is your choice to introduce a statistically likely stressor with a statistically predictable stress response.
If a person knows there is a high probability that doing X will upset people, under what conditions is doing so ethical?
If you claim to "be teaching them an important lesson" then you probably should pause and study human psychology. Exposing people ad-hoc (in an uncontrolled setting) to a stressor is not a generally good strategy to "cure" them of the response. There is lots of research here: I recommend learning more.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past"
See also https://newrepublic.com/article/139004/ironic-nazis-still-na... (2016)
2) Are Semites above criticism? Quotes like this seem to shut down even the possibility of criticism of a large collection of valid commentary.
1) Why is criticism based on ethnicity off limits? If I expressed that say Scandinavians were repugnant for generally not wanting to feed their house guests, would this be an unconscionable sin? Why should criticizing some group, while still recognizing that its members are individuals and may have their own differing views on feeding guests, be forbidden?
2) Is it possible for bad intentioned people to falsely conflate criticism of some group or even country's politics with racism? In American politics for instance, we all know what sort of name-calling happens to politicians that express a little too harsh opinions on a certain country, right?
Obviously Jews aren't above criticism. But there's a kind of insincere criticism that can't be answered because that's not it's goal. The goal is to waste time and make people angry.
It's worth citing the quote because it calls out that behavior nearly 80 years ago, and it's still recognizable today. At the time the author referred to it as "bad faith", and it's just as applicable now.
You might suspect that somebody does X for Y reason or is not sincere, but it should clearly be stated that mind-reading never has been and never will be a thing. Speaking of bad faith arguments, imagine trying to discuss with somebody who literally invents their opponents thoughts out of thin air and then impugns their motives based on those invented thoughts.
It's all the same to the person on the receiving end. It's not worth engaging with people who don't listen. Whether they are deliberately trying to aggravate, or are merely too stupid to know that their arguments are tedious.
It could be the case that somebody is stupid or an asshole. But you've left out one of the most important possibilities: maybe the other person is dead right about something that you're dead wrong about.
> It's all the same to the person on the receiving end. It's not worth engaging with people who don't listen. Whether they are deliberately trying to aggravate, or are merely too stupid to know that their arguments are tedious.
Using a phrase like "people who don't listen" seems a little problematic to me. That's not the kind of phrase that somebody who is a genuine knowledge seeker who is willing to consider the full diversity of human ideas would ever consider.
Society and legal standards have a long history about zero tolerance responses. I find it problematic to see zero tolerance recommended. Why?
First, some interpretation must happen before a comment gets categorized as trolling.*
Second, this interpretation ranges from clear-cut to murky.
Third, in cases of clear trolling, the troll might range from being (a) a first timer to a long-time troller; and (b) unwilling or unwilling to change.
I'd suggest that any interventions around trolling account for these variations above.
Zero tolerance has a way of also being "one size fits all" which can create additional unnecessary problems. For example, if unfairly used, it can become a convenient blunt attack for a wide range of interpersonal disagreements.
* As mentioned at the top of this thread, I'm taking the author's definition of trolling.