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What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

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Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#71

Post by CM30 »

makomk wrote: post #68
CM30 wrote: post #54

Moderation is the best way to stop them. If you've got actual people going through posts and content and removing the low quality stuff, you'll maintain a much more well ordered and useful community than you would a mostly 'uncensored' platform. Unfortunately, this has a few issues... 1. You need the manpower to actually check what's being posted on a regular basis. Or enough active members willing to help out that t…

> You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances. This is a political non-starter right now, which is why Twitter doesn't do it. Seriously, when they accidentally ban someone for threatening violence against other Twitter users in the name of left-wing activism a huge swathe of the tech and secu…

Well, they could always get a thicker skin themselves. Forum and community owners have been the subject of complaints for doing stuff like that for years, the best solution is just to say 'here are the rules, if you don't like them, LEAVE'. You have to be willing to potentially lose a few popular users to keep the peace.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#72

Post by Lawtonfogle »

javajosh wrote: post #66

Easy: introduce laws that require all communication to be consensual. We don't allow people to force food down your mouth, and we shouldn't allow people to force words into your brain either. What would this be like? Before seeing something, you'd be asked if you want to see "An advertisement for a home care product." Or "An angry personal attack" (Maybe with some indication of who it's against.) This solution allows…

>An advertisement for a home care product.

How do you know I want to be exposed to a consent related question?

Kinda like how asking certain questions about consent can be classified as harassment if you have already been told no, even if the actions of which consent was being requested for were never carried out.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#73

Post by bornwithabeard »

CPLX wrote: post #60
DanBC wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.

A person who is not comfortable with an anonymous, fictional, and harmless interaction with someone who uses curse words or claims they will rape them can avoid this problem by not engaging in the specific components of internet usage where that may happen. Browsing their favorite news sites, shopping on Amazon, or booking airline tickets will likely be unaffected, meaning your comment is obvious hyperbole. Some onli…

but see, this is the issue with it happening today - back when it was all random IRC channels, ICQ chatroom or worse, if anyone was trolling you, it was easy to switch off and walk away and continue your life unabated, because it was just the internet. Even if it was real life, it was easy to avoid - you just don't go to wherever it was that these people hung out. It was easier for us to have (and I hate myself for using this word, but) a "safe space", it was usually at home.

For younger kids today, a overwhelming majority of their lives are online, so it's so much harder to escape - both for work/education purposes and entertainment, so it's so much easier to keep up the waves of harrassment, so simply saying "just ignore it" doesn't really work these days.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#74

Post by beeboop »

fixermark wrote: post #40
beeboop wrote: post #18

If you're so sensitive that your day is ruined or you feel uncomfortable by what a random, anonymous idiot says on the internet, you need to either A. Stay off the internet or B. Only participate in communities where you control who has the ability to post content you see (i.e. facebook). The world doesn't owe you a safe-space hugbox. Trying to censor people for being mean is just as shitty as trying to censor them f…

You're missing the outsized effect of mass-coordination allowing for thousands of people to harangue someone else on the Internet. Additionally, (A) isn't really an option in the interconnected world where (1) if you want to do business, you're probably doing it online to some extent and (2) trolls will now step up their 'game' to target people physically (in ways that are still asymmetric and hard for real-life law…

I am a web developer, my entire livelihood would not exist if not for the internet, and it would be effortless for me to avoid anything online that is offensive to me, even if the entire country knew my name and wanted me dead. I am not sure you have a valid argument unless your business involves tremendous social media presence that only you personally can manage, which is both unlikely and still surmountable (just post stuff, don't read what others reply).

Your second point is a bit of a slippery slope. Yeah, you'll have people trying to SWAT you, but that's more an issue with our legal system than it is with bullying on the internet. The instances of someone, even on a national level of negative publicity, getting actual real world physical violence against them, is incredibly rare.

Your comparison to a riot doesn't really hold up. Riots are bad because they cause property damage, interfere with the normal functioning of a city, and get people physically hurt or killed. A fat acceptance advocate getting called names on Twitter hurts his/her feelings, which doesn't in my opinion justify having laws created to protect his/her feelings.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#75

Post by mdip »

qb45 wrote: post #19
DanBC wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.

Those people you report to the police and if the police ignores you, that's the problem that needs fixing. In the good old days, people used to send you such threats by anonymous snail mail instead of twitter.

And in the good old days almost nobody was trolled because the energy required to send a message via snail mail (starting with "do I even own stamps any longer"?) is several orders of magnitude higher than composing a one sentence death-threat on twitter.

It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#76

Post by zorpner »

toyg wrote: post #65
khedoros wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One scenario: A celebrity with a million followers says something. A non-celebrity tweets an opposing response. 0.1% of the celebrity's followers take that as an attack on their idol and start heaping abuse on that person. (numbers sourced from rectal data repository, for illustrative purposes) In that case, it's not really "organized" by anyone in particular.

The real-life equivalent of that scenario is a random Joe showing up at some political rally shouting "you're WRONG!". Of course shit will fly; the best realistic scenario is being corteously manhandled out of the venue. Why would you expect it to be different on teh intertubes?

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the issue is that the scale of these phenomena on the internet produces emergent qualities that don't exist in real life, which makes attempts at analogy particularly fruitless.

For example, in your analogy, they're not being manhandled out of the venue. Someone at the venue is taking their picture and following them home, distributing that information, then random people are showing up at their house for the next eighteen months or more. Then people are showing up at their family's house with threats, and their boss's house demanding that they be fired.

Is this the type of "shit [flying]" that you think people should be prepared to expect when they post things online?

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#77

Post by dguaraglia »

dominotw wrote: post #49
buckbova wrote: post #11

Remove all perceived anonymity. Of course that sense of anonymity is what makes the experience richer and safer. I'd rather just live with the trolls. Is it that bad?

Nice try NSA. Seems kind of insane that people are willing to dox themselves on the internet.

If you read the OP comment carefully, you'll notice he actually is saying the opposite: he'd rather live with the trolls, than have to give up anonymity.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#78

Post by chris_wot »

mdip wrote: post #69
CPLX wrote: post #8

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters. The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your…

These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site. At a higher level, though, sites a…

Yeah, it was also what led to the death of Kuro5hin.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#79

Post by chris_wot »

DanBC wrote: post #64
qb45 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's called DDoS, not trolling. Who is targeted by that and why? Who organizes that - I mean, why would thousands of people suddenly have reason to hate you?

Caroline Criado Perez noticed that UK banknotes were changing. Bank notes have an image of a notable person on one side, and the monarch on the other. Criado Perez noticed that the new designs didn't include any women (apart from the queen, and she's only there through luck of birth). Criado Perez started a petition to ask Bank of England to consider including a woman on the notes, and to remember to include women in…

Agreed. There needs to be a point where authorities step in, identify the individuals and arrest the one making the threats.

Re: What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

#80

Post by astrodust »

rwj wrote: post #70
CPLX wrote: post #8

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters. The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your…

At an individual level, I agree. At the community level, I don't think it will be that easy. If trolls can destroy the SNR, the community will also be destroyed.

Exactly. If your solution is to "ignore trolls" then eventually you have to upgrade your ignore to the entire community.

USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.

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