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Trolling Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better, Study Says (mashable.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

If you thought that the internet had a chance of becoming a nicer place at any point in the near future, it might be time to give up hope. From a report: "Harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust" will stay the norm on the internet over the next decade, experts told the Pew Research Center in a new report. The Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University surveyed about 1,500 technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders in July and August 2016 for the study, and the results are pretty demoralizing. Forty-two percent of respondents thought the internet would stay the same sometimes less-than-pleasant place over the next 10 years, while another 39 percent said they thought the internet would become a more negative environment. Just under 20 percent of experts thought the internet had any chance of getting better over the next decade when it comes to harassment and trolling.

2 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. The future of trolling by lucasnate1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I suspect the future of trolling is something like this: https://sonichu.com/

    Entire wikis created on people, documenting every mistake they ever did on their life, allowing online collaborations between thousands in phishing/harassing. AI and data mining will probably make this much easier as they improve.

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    Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
  2. Trolling and Fake News = same by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The basic problem is that we have not realized that Internet's anonymity's lets people say anything they want to.

    It is compounded by humanity's innate trust, and the misunderstanding of exactly how full of garbage the internet is.

    The existence of valid news sources on the internet make it worse - they give the appearance of validity to the general internet.

    To make it even worse, Pravda, the Soviet Union's old ministry of propaganda, changed it's name to RT, and hired a bunch of anonymous posters, making it one of the single most effective propaganda organizations the world has ever seen.

    Their stated goals of disrupting the US, breaking the European Union up, and retaking the Ukraine are having an unprecedented success.

     

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    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com