Mattathias Schwartz’ Sunday Magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us, covers the Craigslist “str8 brutal dom muscular male” “experiment”, the Epilepsy Foundation web forum flashing images hack, the Megan Meier MySpace suicide, and the Kathy Sierra harassment, all from the troll’s perspective.
Schwartz concludes that, “To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.” He wonders:
[E]ven if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.
Mike Nizza of the Times’ The Lede Blog follows the diverging threads of two lessons that have emerged on avoiding trouble online and off based on the simple act of doing nothing:
Every day people are encountered with difficult questions — and not just from trolls and cops. But should you answer them? As they say, shoot for a Socratic dialogue, and you just might reach a decent discussion.
Xeni Jardin says, “the [Troll] piece is a really good read” and digs up some really good relevant links. Among them — Fox 11 News video investigates anonymous “hackers on steroids,” and “Craigslist griefer” Jason Fortuny’s very sound advice on the “only two ways to deal with a troll.”
In a separate post Schwartz answers the question, do you troll? “…yes, I think we all troll from time to time, most often in person. We’re just not always aware of it”
So do we blame the Internet? Or Free Speech? Or is it just us? Schwartz again, from the magazine piece:
Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?
One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.
Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well