Trolling is a very interesting topic to me because of its extreme prevalence in Internet culture. To me trolling is using inflammatory comments to try and get a response out of someone. My definition of trolling limits the comments to be fairly harmless and while provocative could not be construed as harassment. Trolling to me is not being misogynistic or saying you are going to murder someone. That is just plain harassment. From the Guardian article, they provide a different and more detailed definition of trolling, “There’s a term for this brand of gratuitous online cruelty: we call it internet trolling. Trolling is recreational abuse – usually anonymous – intended to waste the subject’s time or get a rise out of them or frustrate or frighten them into silence. Sometimes it’s relatively innocuous (like asking contrarian questions just to start an argument) or juvenile (like making fun of my weight or my intelligence), but – particularly when the subject is a young woman – it frequently crosses the line into bona fide, dangerous stalking and harassment. “ I agree with parts of this definition but once the actions become more malicious I do not think it is trolling anymore. I think the base root of trolling based on my definition is simply there are a lot of bored people on the Internet. However, the more malicious and hurtful troll definition is caused by something worse. In the Guardian article it discusses how one troll was a spewing hate on the internet because of his own insecurities and this is probably the case for most people who try to hurt and put down others on the Internet.
I think companies have some obligation to prevent trolls, but they cannot begin to overly censor their users or else they will lose them. I think what twitter is doing by improving their reporting function is a step in the right direction. Morally and ethically they are responsible to a point because they are providing a conduit for abuse to happen but their obligation to fixing it is somewhat limited due to peoples’ desire to have free speech.
I believe anonymity is a blessing on the Internet. It provides far more help for people who are in trouble and can’t use real IDs than the cost of allowing some people to abuse the anonymity by sending hate over the Internet. The slate article had some very good points regarding this issue, “‘Real names’ policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people…Among the types of people listed (other than dissidents in a repressive states) for whom pseudonymity is important: people who are LGBT, abuse survivors, “people from small communities,” politically active people or religious people who may suffer discrimination at work if their beliefs became known, etc.” This shows that the anonymity of the Internet has a tangible benefit for a lot of members of society. Most people believe that by using real IDs on the Internet that trolls will disappear but this again is simply not the case according to the slate article, “Research about online identity shows that “real ID” policies are not as effective as their proponents claim. Disqus, an online commenting platform, conducted an informal analysis of about 500 million comments by 60 million users and found that pseudonymous users wrote better comments (and more of them) than those who were using their real names, with anonymous users being responsible for the bottom-feeder-quality comments.” This shows that even with real IDs people still aren’t accountable for their actions. Therefore, I believe that the anonymity of the Internet is a blessing and far outweighs its costs.
In my life I have not really dealt with trolls, but I would follow the common advice of “not feeding them.” Based on my definition of a troll I do not think it is an issue, but once it crosses into the harassment stage where there is stalking and threats of violence I believe this is an issue on the Internet that needs to be addressed.
programming ethics 