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Civilisation vs the trolls: Will the abuse stop, ever?

Civilisation vs the trolls: Will the abuse stop, ever?

Earlier this week, Twitter dramatically changed its abuse policy to a much stricter format, making it far more difficult for abuse and cyberbullying to take place without consequences. Will this have a knock on effect for other social media? And what’s the deal behind trolling, anyway? By MARELISE VAN DER MERWE.

If the internet and all that lives on it has not yet made you deeply cynical – and you would be unusual if it has not – you may be surprised to learn that until earlier this week, Twitter took virtually no steps at all to protect its users from threatening behaviour. That is, it technically protected users from threats, but the definition of a threat was so easy to contest that it may as well have had no protective measures in place at all.

All that changed this week, however. The social media platform has taken the bold step of including a far wider range of threats in its definition of abuse, which could set the precedent for a far harsher line on cyberbullying across various platforms.

According to the BBC, Twitter has finally acknowledged that its previous guidelines were too vague, having previously demanded that a threat needed to be “direct” and “specific” – giving details of a planned attack – which ultimately meant that unless someone threatened to actually come to your personal abode and hack you apart with an axe on a Monday, for example, you could not classify abusive tweets as threats.

In February, the report adds, Twitter’s chief executive Dick Costolo highlighted the issue when he sent a memo to staff telling them that “[w]e suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years”.

Now, any tweets inciting violence or even promoting violence can result in a user’s account being monitored, frozen and the user being forced to verify their phone number, which would of course result in their identity being verified too.

This change of heart has followed a string of high profile incidents of abuse, as well as a study of cyberbullying that delivered shocking results among teen users, in which broadband provider Europstat found that more than half of over 1,000 teenagers surveyed had been sent abusive or violent messages. The Pew Research Centre, meanwhile, reports that some 73% of adults have witnessed online abuse and 40% have personally experienced it, with 25% saying they had seen someone be physically threatened and a whopping 24% saying they had witnessed sustained abuse of one victim and nearly a fifth saying they had witnessed stalking. A total of 65% of young internet users have been the target of at least one of the six elements of harassment detailed in the survey. Among those aged 18-24, the percentage rises to 70%.

The change is a bold step from Twitter, and will hopefully set the precedent for other social media to follow. Facebook’s abuse policy, for example, is improving but remains problematic; Google+ doesn’t notify users of decisions made regarding abuse at all. And with all social media, the danger is of course that abusive users will simply set up a new account and pick up where they left off. (It is here that Twitter’s verification of phone numbers will come in handy.) Most social media have the added complication that users are multilingual, although tracking has not yet caught up. Although Facebook use is moderated in 24 languages, there are over 7,000 languages in the world. (Some 90% of these are not commonly spoken, but that still leaves one with another 700 that are.) In the case of Facebook in South Africa, for example, hate speech and threats of violence are rife on a number of right wing groups, the most recent of which is singer Sunette Bridges’ page, which was reported to the Human Rights Commission – but because the offensive material is largely posted in Afrikaans, reports can be difficult to follow up for site administrators, and it ultimately falls to the disciplinary bodies of the country in question to take the necessary steps where possible.

The same applies to news and current affairs sites – as the wry Halloween joke on Twitter went in 2014, “I’m dressing up as the News24 comments section because it’s the scariest thing I can think of” – but on a practical level it is difficult for site administrators to keep track of the hundreds or indeed thousands of comments coming in. Many platforms such as Disqus have a flagging option, but statistics on abuse reporting, and the success thereof, are thin on the ground.

Another problem: the staff charged with maintaining users’ safety have a job so vast it’s almost laughable. Facebook in particular is at pains to convince users that there is a deeply caring human on the other end of the “report” button, and perhaps there is, but the reality is that – as explained by Facebook Ireland’s managing director Sonia Flynn – staff have to deal with everything from spam to terrorism. As of the third quarter of 2014, Facebook had 1.35 billion monthly active users. Twitter had 288 million. Instagram had 300 million. Pinterest had 40 million. YouTube’s statistics aren’t as recent, but at the last count, they had a billion monthly users. Take a moment to contemplate these numbers, and you have an idea of the magnitude of the challenge.

YouTube remains particularly vulnerable to abuse, with its top user PewDiePie – who had 30 million subscribers – having suspended comments on his account owing to the number of abusive comments received. PewDiePie, real name Felix Kjellberg, complained that YouTube failed to address the abuse, too, in a refrain that has become common to social media users over the years. The level of abuse on his channel in itself is telling: if the most popular YouTube account of all time is being trolled to this extent, one shudders to think what is being said to the less popular ones.

Unfortunately for PewDiePie and others in the social media realm, it’s a toss-up between the pressure to maintain visibility and the abuse that comes with that. PewDiePie’s subscribers dropped dramatically after he disabled comments – and for digital marketing purposes, the pressure to engage with social media remains high for journalists, celebrities, and businesses too.

Some celebrities have removed themselves from social media altogether, such as Nicky Minaj and Trent Reznor (Complex.com joked that he lost the plot when a fan sent him a message saying “I want to Tweet you like an animal”). Others take the trolling with a pinch of salt, such as the celebs who take part in the Celebrities Who Read Mean Tweets series. But the fact remains that trolling is not just a harmless pastime where bored or lonely people vent their anger after a long day at work: it has real consequences and, in some cases, is indicative of a genuine pathology. The problem lies in separating simple vitriol from threats with intent.

It’s tempting to think that trolls are just normal folks who need a better hobby, a study published in Personality and Individual Differences last year found that, in fact, trolls are horrible people: they have a far higher incidence of the “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits. These are Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, extraversion, disagreeableness and sadism. The study defined trolling as the “practice of behaving in a deceptive, destructive, or disruptive manner in a social setting on the Internet with no apparent instrumental purpose”.

It’s worth looking at trolling in a bit more detail here, because the definition is broad. Wired.uk defines it as having an extremely wide range – from the extreme example of a Reading man who was jailed for the crass jokes and offensive comments he posted on the tributes page for a 14-year-old suicide victim to people who just “mildly wind up others”; in other words, trolling could be anything from rudeness or attention-seeking to sociopathy. (Urban Dictionary’s rather earthier terms define it as “Being a prick on the internet because you can”.) Broadly, it is defined as any level of antisocial behaviour online, exhibited either as deliberate offensiveness or simply a lack of self-censorship.

Therefore, it is one thing to say that there is a higher incidence of antisocial personality traits, as satisfying as that may be to point out. But there are other factors at play, too – firstly what we all recognise in the phenomenon of road rage – the anonymity – and secondly, the sense of validation, or a false feeling of validation, that comes from breaking down others in a fairly cosseted online community.

The first – the issue of anonymity – is raised in a study at the Univeristy of Haifa, where researchers found that those who had to maintain eye contact were half as likely to be hostile as those who had the eyes hidden. The lead author of the study, Noam Lapidot-Lefler, argues that this is because eye contact “helps you understand the other person’s feelings, the signals that the person is trying to send you”. Where this feedback is absent, such as in online platforms, or in the one-way communication of a comment section, it is that much easier to forget there is a human on the other end, and respond in a feelingless manner or without compassion.

In Wired.co.uk, Alan Martin quotes professor of sociology Gerry Crawford, who adds that trolling is “the digital version of a poison pen letter” but that the difference lies in that “the speed at which people spit out their venom online doesn’t allow time for reflection or self-censorship, and even less time to consider the consequences or who might end up reading their heat-of-the-moment remarks”. Technological advances mean that there is more room for instant gratification and less inclination for reflection.

The second issue, that of a sense of validation, was articulated in Kierkegaard’s diaries, writes Maria Papova in her refreshing take on the psychology of trolling. Kierkegaard writes, “Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence… They show me respect by disrespecting me.” Kierkegaard also writes of mockery as a person presuming to be “a tool of public opinion” and as demonstrating a desperate desire for “participation in greatness”; but that this also belies an uncertainty of that same public opinion, and how quickly that same person might become “pliable and obliging” if given positive reinforcement.

This insight by Kierkegaard is echoed in the haunting story of journalist Lindy West, who took the brave step of confronting her cruellest troll. West, as a writer and regular participant on social media, suffered the same trolling that many journalists do: regular death threats, insults, and other related pleasantries that come up when one writes things with which the public disagrees. West writes, “Being harassed on the internet is such a normal, common part of my life that I’m always surprised when other people find it surprising. You’re telling me you don’t have hundreds of men popping into your cubicle in the accounting department of your mid-sized, regional dry-goods distributor to inform you that – hmm – you’re too fat to rape, but perhaps they’ll saw you up with an electric knife? No? Just me? People who don’t spend much time on the internet are invariably shocked to discover the barbarism – the eager abandonment of the social contract – that so many of us face simply for doing our jobs.”

But one troll sought out West in a particularly cruel way. After the death of her father, to whom she was particularly close, he set up a fake Twitter account pretending to be West’s deceased dad, and sent her cruel tweets saying he was ashamed of her. West found it devastating, and said so publicly. To her amazement, he sought her out and apologised. They talked it out. What she learnt astounded her. Firstly, she said, “He hated me because I don’t hate myself” – an idea echoed in Kierkegaard’s oxymoron of showing respect through disrespect. Further, West’s troll explained the reasons for his behaviour, his frustrations, his anger; the latter which – for some reason – he never quite managed to articulate, although he tried. But, she found, in much the same manner as Kierkegaard, that once she gave him recognition, and met him human to human, his animosity vanished. And, as Lapidot-Lefler found, the face-to-face contact greatly reduced the chance of blind venom.

West’s story ended powerfully. “I didn’t mean to forgive him,” she writes, “but I did… It has made it easier for me to keep talking in the face of a mob roaring for my silence.

Keep screaming, trolls. I see you.”

I see you. Therein lies the crux. Online abuse is, after all, simply a failure of sight: a failure to see the human being on the other side, and a failure to feel seen. This is the great paradox of trolling: the desire to be recognised, while still under the veil of anonymity. If more cyberbullies felt that they were seen – for better or worse – perhaps the desire to abuse would disappear altogether. DM

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