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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?

#91

Post by khedoros »

toyg wrote: post #84
zorpner wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I mean is that "there will be consequences" is a thought that should cross one's mind before doing or saying anything in a public forum. Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public? Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point? (Btw yes, that sort of reactionary persecution can happen and does indeed happen in all sorts of places. It's p…

> Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public?

Why should the consequences be so completely out of proportion to what was originally said? "In public" covers more situations than it used to, and the size of your audience isn't always intuitive.

> Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?

Probably not. Will you be roughed up by thousands, be followed home, and be stalked and harassed for years? Probably not.

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

#92

Post by toyg »

khedoros wrote: post #91
toyg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that "there will be consequences" is a thought that should cross one's mind before doing or saying anything in a public forum. Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public? Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point? (Btw yes, that sort of reactionary persecution can happen and does indeed happen in all sorts of places. It's p…

> Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public? Why should the consequences be so completely out of proportion to what was originally said? "In public" covers more situations than it used to, and the size of your audience isn't always intuitive. > Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point? Probably not. Will you be roughed up by thousands,…

Proportionality is "in the eye of the beholder", unless you enshrine a measurement in law.

The fact that "in public" situations might have expanded (and sometimes replaced more private ones) is a problem that can (and should) be fixed with education. NBD.

Just because some people seem unable to comprehend the (massive) scale of internet space, it doesn't mean that we can magically make it a paradise where real-world behaviour honed in thousands of years simply does not happen. Internet space is a new all-encompassing dimension, the scale of which we've never seen. One should think carefully before acting in such an environment. It's not like interacting with press or peers in a given niche; it's like broadcasting on all channels in all countries at all hours. The chances of getting reactions you might not like are higher than with any other media or venue; but on the positive side, the chances of getting reactions you will like are also disproportionately higher than anywhere else. Continuously complaining that the glass is half empty will just provoke someone in smashing the glass to solve the problem -- because "you didn't like it much anyway, always complaining".

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

#93

Post by beeboop »

apozem wrote: post #88
beeboop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you leave out some extremely relevant points in your comment and have mischaracterized the situation. Lindy West is one of the poster children for the "fat acceptance movement", a self described activist, cofounded a social media campaign called "Shout Your Abortion", and just released a book titled "Shrill" whose subtitle includes "Feminists don't have to be nice". She has extremely controversial views that…

I don't especially care what she endorses. I've never read one of her articles. However, if you disagree with someone, you owe it to them to do it without death threats and faking their dead father. Also, you are absolutely blaming the victim right now. Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma. Saying her writing is equally as complimit in online toxicity…

Death threats are already illegal, so that's beside the point.

The line between "voicing an opinion someone disagrees with" and "harassment" is pretty vague, especially when from one person's perspective, thousands of people voicing disagreement to you sure looks like harassment, despite no single person necessarily being harassing.

Her opinions that she voices publicly are just as traumatic, if not more so, than someone pretending to be her dead father. She literally had a "Shout your Abortion" social media campaign. Possibly one of the most traumatic things a woman will ever go through, and she's encouraging people to discuss it as much as possible, even implicitly (or explicitly) suggesting it be discussed with pride. I think you'd have to be pretty delusional to not understand how that's extremely traumatic to a lot of people.

>Endorsing left-wing opinions or writing opinionated books does not merit that level of emotional trauma

People aren't being mean to her because she's a liberal or writing books, they're mean because she's saying and writing things that are offensive and traumatic to them. She's essentially thrown the first punch and getting upset that they're punching back. This isn't victim blaming anymore than it's victim blaming to say she shouldn't attack someone bigger than her if she doesn't want to get her ass kicked.

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

#94

Post by javajosh »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #72
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.

Sufficient pedantry can make any solution seem unworkable.

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

#95

Post by Qub3d »

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…

As a younger internet participant, I'm starting to see this in Reddit (ironically, backed by Y-combinator, which i've now moved to). It seems as a site gets more and more popular, Sturgeon's Law takes effect and the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.

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

#96

Post by ross-life »

mdip wrote: post #34

I've wondered about this for a while. There's no shortage of dicks [1] on the Internet. It's too easy to spout off and attack someone online in a way you'd never do "in person" and there's plenty of people who make a sport of it. For the former, there's not much that can be done, for the latter, I think there are a few solutions (variations of which I've seen tried). Personally, I think it starts first with community…

one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it

Shadowbanning does work well but requires (somewhat obviously) fair admins/moderators. Otherwise it becomes something like a censorship tool.

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

#97

Post by st3v3r »

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…

"The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person."

No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

Qub3d wrote: post #95
mdip wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a younger internet participant, I'm starting to see this in Reddit (ironically, backed by Y-combinator, which i've now moved to). It seems as a site gets more and more popular, Sturgeon's Law takes effect and the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by stegosaurus »

Journalists seem to make a habit of misunderstanding the term 'troll'. Trolling is a joke. Harassment is not.

Joining a dungeon in World of Warcraft and wiping the group is trolling.

Sending someone genuine sounding death threats on twitter isn't.

There's a spectrum there somewhere, but more often than not it feels like we've lost another useful term to hyperbole.

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

#100

Post by woodandsteel »

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…

No, no, no, no, no.

What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses.

Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.

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