Trolling. It’s a modern term most baby boomers wouldn’t even recognize, but nonetheless is very close to the heart of every generation afterward. Yes, close to the heart and clogging the aorta. Trolling is a verb that became popular after the rise of the Internet and refers to someone who acts to deliberately offend others and start arguments. While this general definition has found some informal usage outside of computers and in the real world, its origins and use has spread much deeper and farther for decades within Internet culture. People who actively participate in trolling are negatively labeled “trolls”, and are often looked down upon by the rest of the Internet community as being immature and selfish. Trolls are assumed to find some twisted form of entertainment in their harassing and upsetting of others, leading to the spread of the popular Internet phrase: “don’t feed the troll”. Essentially, this practice boils down to ignoring trolls completely to deny them any satisfaction from their own work. While some attribute the destructive behavior of trolls to some sort of real-life escapism, others doubt the validity of this victim card. It may be that the Internet simply acts as a convenient outlet for a troll’s already sadistic tendencies, not just as a form of escape.
If one thinks about it, trolling is just a kind of harassment through a digital medium. By that logic, companies have just as much (or as little, depending on your personal opinion) responsibility to prevent and respond to online trolling as workplace harassment. Think about it: physical stalking and harassment is not an ignorable offense and cannot be publicly tolerated by any self-respecting company. Online stalking and harassment, however, is treated very differently. Facebook and other online social services provide means to communicate between users, but they are extremely limited in their power to filter the actual content of messages. Infringing upon people’s First Amendment right to free speech isn’t taken lightly, even on the Internet, and because the term “trolling” was originally coined in a casual setting, people often undermine its causes and effects. Nowadays trolling has even gained the reputation of ultimately harmless online harassment. While this is fine by itself, it’s important to make clear that not every form of online harassment can be waved off as trolling. More serious forms (see: online bullying) are very real with very real consequences.
In my personal opinion, anonymity on the Internet is a good thing. While there will always be groups of people that will abuse anonymity to take advantage of others, I have faith that the majority of the world is comprised of good-willed people (if it weren’t, society would fall apart as we know it). Anonymity allows this larger group of good-willed people to express themselves without fear of being judged, and in my opinion the creative repository this gives man/womankind far outweighs the potential damage of anonymity abusers. While “real name” policies have always been toyed and experimented with to prevent this, the reality is there is still no practical way to enforce such strict rules. There is even less of a way to make sure abusers can’t still find a way to be anonymous in the first place. Until law catches up with technology (and it may never will), maintaining “real name” policies seems almost impossible at the moment.
Personally, I agree that the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. Any sort of interaction with trolls, whether to correct them or reason with them, will most likely end in a one-sided argument and frustrated feelings. The best advice I can give to others is to develop a thick skin through their experiences online, and to help people understand that trolls only have as much power as those around them are willing to give.
dzaragoz 