August 15, 2014 5:40 pm
The trouble with online trolls is that they be right
By Christopher Caldwell
Uncivil rantings are not as uninformed as one might assume
For a long time, online trolling has seemed like the signature annoyance of the information revolution, much as air pollution was the signature annoyance of the industrial revolution. The word “troll” is most often applied to ill-tempered contrarians who pour out pointless abuse on the comment pages of websites. But trolling covers a variety of scurrilous behaviour. There are political hacks who descend on political discussions and reduce them to propaganda, speculators who talk down stocks, and “griefers” who wreck online games. There are abusers such as the ones who last year made rape threats to the activists trying to convince the Bank of England to put Jane Austen on the new £10 note; and bullies such as those who used Twitter to harass a contestant on the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off over her weight. It is because of to the cruelty of trolls that many US newspapers accept online commenters only if they sign in through Facebook. The Huffington Post has cut anonymous commenting. Other publications have put an end to online commenting altogether.
But signs are emerging that trolling is not a total loss. A study of incivility in cyberspace by scholars at the universities of Utah and Arizona has been published this month in the US-based Journal of Communication.
Looking at all the comments on the Arizona Daily Star website over a three-week period in 2011, Kevin Coe, Kate Kenski and Stephen Rains came to a mixed conclusion. Online abuse is indeed rife – more than a fifth of comments were uncivil in one way or another. But these uncivil comments are not as uninformed as one might assume. In fact, Professor Coe and his colleagues found that, contrary to stereotypes, online ranters are just as open to facts as other commenters. “Incivility,” the authors write, “is not linked to limited use of evidence.”
Looking at all the comments on the Arizona Daily Star website over a three-week period in 2011, Kevin Coe, Kate Kenski and Stephen Rains came to a mixed conclusion. Online abuse is indeed rife – more than a fifth of comments were uncivil in one way or another. But these uncivil comments are not as uninformed as one might assume. In fact, Professor Coe and his colleagues found that, contrary to stereotypes, online ranters are just as open to facts as other commenters. “Incivility,” the authors write, “is not linked to limited use of evidence.”
Over a somewhat longer period an even more optimistic sign has appeared; Ken M, a person often described as a troll, has emerged as perhaps the funniest personality on the internet. Ken M collects his online gags at horseysurprise.tumblr.com . They also appear at collegehumor.com under the rubric “The Troll”. They are an American-inflected, cyber-age equivalent of the prank letters mailed by “Henry Root” (William Donaldson) to prominent Britons in the late 1970s. Like Donaldson, Ken M’s creator has a gift for feigning cluelessness. Where Root would ask Conservative party finance director Major-General Sir Brian Wyldbore-Smith “What’s the going price for getting an honour?”, Ken M will go on a comment page to spout false information. “if the Internut get too fast,” he writes, “folks wont have time to read the articals.” (Ken has trouble spelling and punctuating.)
His assumptions are often paranoid. He responds to a picture of an eclipse in Hawaii on Space.com with the comment: “another eclipse that happen on a cloudy day, thanks nasa.” He worries about global warming, especially on the day of a meteor shower (“too bad the atmosphere is barely able to protect us from meteoroids anymore gee I wonder why”). He does not think that dogs should be allowed to walk around naked, perhaps because he is scared of germs, even at the Millennium Hotel in New York (“our daughter worked there for two years and she said they only clean one side of the sheets”). He worries, too, about Italian restaurants that “rip off their customers” by using “extra long spaghetti so they can fill a giant plate with only two or three noodles”. Sometimes his illogic is beautiful in its simplicity: “Ron Paul 2012,” he writes, “says most of our tax dollars go to the govt.”
Other internet users calumniate Ken M. They call him “dumb”, an “idiot”. They swear at him. While most are more intelligent than the persona Ken M has taken on, they are no more self-knowing. You can elicit a lot by appearing clueless, but rare is the person who will make the sacrifice.
Comedians are as eager as anyone else to appear the smartest person in the room. As Descartes wrote: “Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it . . ” What Ken M’s humour exposes is people’s smugness about their intelligence and judgment. That makes him less a troll than a baiter of the troll in all of us.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario