What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#2Don't feed them?
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#3Don't feed them?
That means everyone has to get on board with your excellent advice. Not likely, sadly.
The article hopes to offer an advance in troll detection technology based more on reason than hope. ;-)
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#4Don't feed them?
That doesn't work. They are perfectly happy to revel in the attention of their friends.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-f...
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#5I have yet to see an article about Internet trolls and cyberbullying that addresses the nuances inherent in a couple of points:
1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments don't make any sense and you are just an arrogant cyberbro I DRINK MALE TEARS", is she cyberbullying him? Should her access to Twitter be cut off, or would voluntarily blocking her on the part of Bob address this problem in a sufficient manner?
2. How to balance prevention of trolling with limiting self-expression? The outside world is not a perfect place where everyone engages in reasoned discourse either. Given that pub-sub systems like Twitter are the equivalent of everyone shouting their opinions loudly in the same street, how much of the unreasonableness inherent in human discourse do we allow to penetrate these social networks to keep them essentially human in nature and not turn into a LinkedIn style list of platitudes?
I wish the article went some ways towards addressing these. Instead it seems to focus on ad-hoc initiatives set up by a lot of people who (in my opinion) seem to not have any concrete ideas of what they are trying to accomplish. For example, one of the research papers linked [1] describes cyberbullying as including "...posting mean or hateful comments, aggressive captions or hashtags". In my opinion this is a rather extravagant definition of the term and should be examined more carefully and revised per the points above.
--------
[1] "Detection of Cyberbullying Incidents on the Instagram Social Network" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#6Not being a cry baby.
Just because someone called you fat/doesnt agree with you doesnt mean you need to cry about it on the internet all day.
The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#7TFA mentions Twitter at the beginning, but doesn't follow up at all with how terrible their interface is and has been for targeted users. The "solutions" discussed in TFA require the coordinated voluntary actions of users and site administrators, and are therefore impractical. We need instant technical solutions. It should be possible to "un-@" any other user, with no questions asked. That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#8I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters.
The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character.
With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#9Not being a cry baby. Just because someone called you fat/doesnt agree with you doesnt mean you need to cry about it on the internet all day. The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.
Im being downvoted, oh no I better cry about it
Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?
#10I have yet to see an article about Internet trolls and cyberbullying that addresses the nuances inherent in a couple of points: 1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments do…
> Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie?
Gregory Alan Elliot is drawing that line right now in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott