81–90 of 133 posts
It's mental illness folks. We don't accept it because it's abhorrent behavior but these people need mental health help. Getting them to seek help is a nearly impossible task though.
I have no experience in this area, other than having seen trolling on mailing lists, but my guess would be that a face-to-face confrontation with the troll would only give them further ammunition for subsequent enraged outbursts, or serve to make the situation even more dangerous/volatile. Probably the solution is not to react to the troll, and for their outbursts to be met with silence. Don't read their content, and…
It is time to engage: people with patience could engage them in good faith: instead of asking "how do you justify it?" ask "what is your life like that you feel the need to do this?" There are a number of violence-intervention programs that could be adapted. Alternatively, we can drive them to ever-greater heights of rage by armchair psychoanalyzing them and bombarding them with ridicule: laughing at fear can make it go away. We could shun them, alienate them, mock them and otherwise make trolling unpleasant to engage in. Right now the incentive to troll is there and there is no disincentive: we need to create one. In real life, the disincentive is that someone will take a fully-justified swing at the troll or they will be arrested for harassment, stalking and verbal assault. We need to enforce the internet-equivalent of getting punched in the face, since the government doesn't appear to enforce laws against harassment and assault online.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone who's for anonymity or pseudo-anonymity wants an all-or-nothing solution where they are totally hidden. The people who propose making everyone known want everyone to totally put all their information online with no protections. What annoys me is there's a very simple middle solution: You are anonymous to other users, but not the company running the site. If you do something like this, then the company has th…
You use the phrase "outed", which to me implies public exposure, so my post is based mostly on that premise. If that's not the case, please just clarify and ignore the applicable parts. In theory that sounds nice, and to a certain extent there are some similar systems in place already...but I just don't see it working that well overall. We already have a system like this for sex offenders, and it's got some serious i…
Hmm, this is actually an entertaining idea. I'd like to see a Chris Hansen style confrontation, where they track down trolls, confront them with what they've written, and then see how they justify or apologize their way out of the situation.
I can't imagine a 13 year old defending his racist rants behind a veil of tears being particularly entertaining. The fact that this particular guy happened to be an adult is probably a bit of an enigma within the world of trolls.
Then again, I grew up in a place where the local paper's letters to the editor read like a best-of collection of racist trolling (pre-internet, even.) Most of the letter writers were over 70 and still spouting ungrammatical poorly-articulated vitriol.
Commenting on this particular troll is probably beneath the majority of us. However, on a general note, I think it is important to realize that every text message you send, every cell phone conversation you have, every post to the CNN forum you make, every tweet you send ... is directly attributable to your IP whether you use your own name or not. With Facebook and Google tracking everything you do, whether you are l…
...unless one is already a douche, in which case it might be very hard.
The behavior of insulting people for no reason, like bullying generally, seems to transmitted via anti-rational memes.
Which means that the people who engage in it don't understand why they do so; they just know that it gives them some sort of psychological relief.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since facebook allows US users under 18 years of age, don't they have a legal obligation not to host porn?
They could host it behind age checks. It seems like it would be easy enough for them to perform automatically.
coughSteamcough
US has free speech.
Rest of world doesn't. (yeah yeah .. "we have free speech except for obectional material" ... right.
American develop an "idiot filter" and get good at using it: "dude's an idiot. whatever. move on".
Europeans don't and find the need for authorities "e.g. The BBC" to police their brains.
Big deal So what? Some clown is an offensive troll. I'd rather deal with that with big brother smashing anonymous complaints, no matter how off base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I absolutely would make the same argument. The moment you begin to moderate your medium, you accept responsibility for it. I’m not saying anything in this discussion about whether FB is right or wrong to allow hate material, just that they cannot hide behind “We abhor it but believe we should not censor discussion.” UPDATE: I have no idea, but I am curious: Can you write porn on FB? Soft-core? Hard-core? As sugge…
Since facebook allows US users under 18 years of age, don't they have a legal obligation not to host porn?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've run forums for a long time and bullying surfaces frequently. Most trolls use Tor nowadays. Only very rarely do I get traceable IP addresses that can be dealt with in any meaningful way, and that's usually when there is an invasion of trolls for a day or two and some drop their guard. The only time I've ever successfully stopped a troll was about a decade ago when I traced it back to a uni and was able to raise a…
Tor is nice, but how long will it take until textual analysis against a large corpus becomes available to everyone with an interest? We already have fairly advanced plagiarism detection mechanisms and Bayesian spam filters; similar ideas allow author-identification. I would, in fact, be somewhat surprised if nobody has proposed deploying this kind of thing against, say, Anonymous.
From the article, we have a troll writing "Rest in piss" and "Rest in piss, you n*r". I'm pretty sure those won't personally identify anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've run forums for a long time and bullying surfaces frequently. Most trolls use Tor nowadays. Only very rarely do I get traceable IP addresses that can be dealt with in any meaningful way, and that's usually when there is an invasion of trolls for a day or two and some drop their guard. The only time I've ever successfully stopped a troll was about a decade ago when I traced it back to a uni and was able to raise a…
Tor is nice, but how long will it take until textual analysis against a large corpus becomes available to everyone with an interest? We already have fairly advanced plagiarism detection mechanisms and Bayesian spam filters; similar ideas allow author-identification. I would, in fact, be somewhat surprised if nobody has proposed deploying this kind of thing against, say, Anonymous.
Say you use an n-gram analysis at the word level. I can just build a tool that processes a corpus, and then as I type, suggests the most probable next word for me. I can simply accept those words when appropriate and look like a different person.