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

Not Government

[StikyPad]

I'm fine with sites regulating trolls. I'm less fine with government curtailing freedom of expression, regardless of how offensive it may be.

Re:Not Government

[jellomizer]

The problem is trying to figure out when a Troll is just a Troll vs. Free Speech of an unpopular idea.

Slashdot is a prime example of this. While a lot a trolls are actual troll, there are times when someone hits a few emotional points to the viewers that will get them flagged as troll.

Pro Religion, Pro Microsoft, Anti GNU, Anti Linux, Pro DRM. Posts unless extremely well explained will get modded down to troll.

But there are other areas where opposing views are considered trolls and meant to be kicked out vs. stated as an open opinion.

My rules for trolls, are posts that are overly negative, without any logical basis.

still

[Ryanrule]

A troll is still a person, and you can beat a person with a sack full of oranges.

Re:Some people...

[cyberchondriac]

I would normally agree that people get offended too easily, but that's only when people express their honest opinion.
Trolls are a different matter; they only do it for the lulz. Their whole purpose is to create discord. It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy.

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".

Re:My 0.02

[gbjbaanb]

Unfortunately that doesn't quite work either - look at the Twitter trolls, who spew forth such abuse that several high-profile twitter users cancelled their accounts. The trolls didn't give up, but simply moved on to another part of the web (or different twitter users). So we can ignore them, but only by ignoring the sites and services we want to use.

Of course, I'd say the trolls did those users a favour by getting them to stop using twitter!