Trolls and tribulations (reblog)
Given debate in the media, and given that this here corner of t’interweb has a pretty low tolerance of trolls and a growing taste for swift, brutal and highly public executions of ’em, some of you may find this of interest:
As is happens this place – with its frequent visits from on-topic trolls – is as close to getting the balance right as I have come across and this is thanks largely to the engaged administration by @craig(1) and the others he has suckered talked into helping out.
Trolls don’t just make rape and death threats: most, in fact, just want to be annoying. There is no good reason to put up with them. Places like this are especially vulnerable to on-topic trolling, since the greatest feat one could pull off would be a huge spoiler to ruin the fun of the fans, having first lured us into thinking he was just another fan.
Yes, of course, the shocking misogyny and bullying end of the spectrum take the lion’s share of attention, but constant low grade disruption by – if you will excuse a technical term – half-witted imbeciles makes the web a poorer place.
(1) Is that sufficient arse-licking, Craig?
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@pedant – I think I was hoping you’d post your original blog contents in full here, rather than as a link (although you could always include the link). Let’s see what @Craig says.
Ah, misunderstood – am a bit wary of duplicating copy, and the WordPress “Reblog” button kept going round in circles and ending up back at my place.
Good article @pedant, @Craig and the other mods are doing an excellent job of keeping the trolls at bay here.
Cheers
Janette
@pedant
I’m afraid you’re spot on. I know it has been pointed out in the Media that once blocked all a Troll needs to be do is set up a new user name, but this is also crap. Every network address (the end of the wire) and every computer has a unique number. It should be very easy for Twitter or anyone else who owns and operates their platform to block abusive users from reopening accounts and make it expensive for them to start afresh. I agree it might hurt other users in the same physical location, but isn’t that part of the solution along side proper police action in the extreme cases (they really do know where we are after all).
Of course the ISPs, Google, Twitter et al really want to avoid taking any responsibility for policing the part of the internet they own and play up the difficulty, but that’s just an excuse to keep their costs down and their super profits (or plan to have future super profits) alive. Even that’s an excuse as almost all forums could be self policing at only a small cost.
I think all the signs are that its changing for the better and the rather unregulated US model will come to an end over the next few years. As Google, Yahoo and Facebook have found advertisers really don’t want to take any risk of being associated with wrong environment, which means that they will have to differentiate and monitor more closely if they really want to be in the advertising business.
Nick
@Pedant – good article.
I think the shocked surprise is because people – average people, who use the Internet an average amount – generally only see the ‘Doctor Who is a kids’ show, fnarf, fnarf’ type of troll. That is, the annoying and frankly rather unimaginative kind.
Whereas the type that have been outed and discussed in the last few days are the type who’d previously have been sending people anonymous letters. A ‘malicious communication’, under the Act. And the Service Providers have been hiding behind the point that a carrier is not held responsible for any service user’s criminal act -quite the contrary; misusing the carrier’s service is part of the offence.
But the difference between an anonymous tweet and an anonymous letter is that the Royal Mail have to physically open the letter to find out what’s in it. ISP’s, Twitter and forums only have to check their records. Or hire a moderator.
But what about the low grade disruption? The type where the ‘don’t feed the trolls’ advice is the one most given?
Well, there’s two main problems with ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’. Firstly, it creates a climate where the victim, not the perpetrator, is considered to be at fault. You Fed The Troll. If the troll then gets nastier and nastier, that’s the victim’s fault; YOU have now become the person who provoked THEM. Trolls, in this climate, become strangely innocent; they’re only doing what Trolls do. It’s the online equivalent of ‘she was provocatively dressed, Your Honour.’
Secondly, it then normalises a climate of constant low grade disruption. And constant low grade disruption is only fun for the disrupters – for everyone else, it makes work/conversation difficult-to-impossible.
There’s two ways to stop this. One is to be very, very careful who you let into your forum. The more difficult way (which is why I think @Craig and his team of volunteers are doing a great job) is to let anyone in – but keep a beady eye on people’s behaviour.
^^This^^
I fact, @Bluesqueakpip you have nailed absolutely the relationship between regular trolling and sexual trolling.
@pedant – (and @Bluesqueakpip )
“Incidentally, at the back end of the 90s and the early 00s – my last time using Usenet – the most persistent and irritating troll was a monomaniacal, one-track pest who popped up on every newsgroup I visited with huge regularity and even greater frequency. His pet topic?
This is where the line blurs – or I admit, blurred in the past in a way it simply can’t any more. Because I also remember Usenet. And those weird people who always popped up with their pet peeves and disrupted the conversatiion with seeming non sequiturs. As you rightly point out, @Pedant, at least one of those ‘weird people’ had an important point to make, and his/her only ‘crime’ was to wallpaper the nascent internet with their obsession.
Bluey, as usual you have hit the nail on the head here. What has changed is a focus from the perpetrator to the perpetrated against. As @Pedant has already rightly quoted, this from your comment is important to consider:
I remember the early 90’s version of chatrooms and it was (in retrospect) so charming, so innocent, and so much about realising that you could reach out and talk to people all over space (and time, in the sense that they might be a hemisphere away from you and experiencing ‘tomorrow’ when you were still wrangling with ‘tonight’). Maybe it was because, back in those halcyon days, that we were all geeks of a certain type, who required a certain technical nous to even be present in those usegroups.
I don’t remember being afraid of being a female in that environment; quite the opposite. There were so few females ‘back in the day’ that we – I – felt safe and secure for being so ‘wanted’ to participate in what was then such a heavily male environment. (yes, yes, there was all of ‘that‘ too. But just like the Lance Armstrong obsessives – oh, how wrong we all were to dismiss them so easily! – it was too easy to ignore the right-handers. And like I said, there was a kind of mutual respect for ‘the girls’ who had found their way onto any usegroup.)
Then {cue ominous music}, over the years quite literally everyone and his dog got internet access. and we started seeing stereotypical human nature in its most base form. Not just ‘geeks’ any more on usegroups, primarily sharing tips on how to make our programmes perform better; now, it’s starting to be every blinking person who’s had internet access through work; and then every blipping person who stumbled upon Carphone Warehouse and got an early web-enabled mobile phone; and then, everyone who’s shipped up at the Apple Store. And they all seemed to revert to reptilian base human behaviour with the realisation that they are ‘joyously’ anonymous, and that their comments would be untraceable, and they could indulge in the worst of their own self-flagellating fantasies without any fear of being ‘caught’.
As an interested observer of human nature, I wonder if the original usegroup congeniality (which I had ample time to partake in) was simply a result of so few participants, and such a self-selecting group of people? And has the recent ‘let’s send rape and evisceration tweets because she suggested having Jane Somebody on some banknote’ nadir of internet discussion, simply been the inevitable result of so many more people being internet-enabled, and feeling some kind of power through anonymity to unleash their basal personalities?
@shazzbot @Bluesqueakpip You may find it amusing to check the comments on my personal blog (feel free to dive in, but don’t feel obliged). It’s like one trying to make our point for us.
And on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iancundell
I almost managed to squeeze ARSE in….
@pedant – you have been busy today, on your original blogpost but also on twitter! Good for you, fighting the good fight. Do people have no self-awareness? They’re making your argument for you.
Bizarre, isn’t it? But there are few simple joys more fun than making an on-topic troll angry.
Great post and comments.
In terms of low level ‘disruptive’ activity, I’ve stopped thinking of “trolls” per se, and just that it’s a person trolling. I think giving their role a name like this dehumanises them (literally) and allows them, as said in comments above, to only do what trolls do.
Instead it’s probably better to focus on the person who is deliberately writing poorly and provocatively, and wonder why.
The fun must be very singular; the person often has enough intelligence that if they just engaged in normal conversation, there’d have much more fun with people rather than on their own and at others’ expense.
Online is a fantastic place to enjoy other people’s company for a whole host of reasons – it’s a shame some people don’t get that.
Of course, taking the piss and getting laughs is very very addictive.
when I was a kid (somewhere between 14 and 16) my all-boys school merged with the equivalent all-girls school in the area.
I was a bit of a joker (verbal jokes) and it came as a slap in the face one day when a mate snapped, saying “for fucks sake – will you stop making girls laugh at the expense of the guys” [or words to that effect – we were kids so probably shorter and less or more eloquent].
As I say, it stunned me physically and I went into the next lesson very quietly.
My mate apologised for what he’d said and (in my memory though who knows the reality) I actually told him that he’d given me the best advice I’d ever had.
Which was true – it was.
I hope from that point on I was less piss-takey and more inclusive in my humour. I was still horny (lets face it, that was a major cause of it), but I managed to change my habit.
I still managed to try to be funny and get laughs (from all genders), so my ego wasn’t crushed and i didn’t stop being “me” – but hopefully I was someone who could have fun, create fun and not at the expense of others. It was also more fun, as there were no butts to the joke who couldn’t join in.
its easy to get suckered into the laughs (whether they’re from the pack around or in your own head).
It just happens to feel better when someone else ain’t feeling shit because of it.
@Whisht – interesting, I had a different reaction to this quote from your friend:
Not knowing the whole situation, it sounded to me like he could have been jealous of you
Because we gals do love a guy with a GSOH! And perhaps he wasn’t making headway with the girls as well as you were?
But your overall point is a good one: good humour is inclusive, not excluding. And that’s where trolls (for lack of a better word) are so wrong – their ‘humour’ is all about making other people feel bad so they can feel … good? superior? important in a world in which they feel so lost, so insignificant? Anyway, the very opposite to ‘inclusive’.