Web Trolls Winning As Incivility Increases

mdsolar sends this story from the NY Times: The Internet may be losing the war against trolls. At the very least, it isn't winning. And unless social networks, media sites and governments come up with some innovative way of defeating online troublemakers, the digital world will never be free of the trolls' collective sway. That's the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting. "As long as the Internet keeps operating according to a click-based economy, trolls will maybe not win, but they will always be present," said Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at Humboldt State University and the author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a forthcoming book about her years of studying bad behavior online. "The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on. They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days."

Comments

She's selling a book

[grasshoppa]

The scope of the problem isn't clear, the goal is ill-defined. What, exactly, are trolls winning?

I think the only one "winning" anything here is the author trying to sell her book by engaging in much the same inflammatory business as the trolls she purported to study.

Devil's advocate view

[sinij]

Trolling is necessary evil and the last line of defense against monolithic group thinking. Humans are hard-wired to seek consensus and to avoid conflict, both are beneficial traits, but when combined can and do lead to worst kinds of groupthink. Our ideas and understanding, be it social sciences, morals and religion, or even hard sciences are only as good as out ability to question it.

For example, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a trolling organization, but almost everyone here would agree that what they do can be categorized as "greater good".