Salon.com > Trolls

Does reading the comments affect your judgment?

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Epic fail – a new study has revealed that rude Internet comments warp the way you feel. As two of the report's authors reveal in the New York Times, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication recently decided to explore what it refers to as "the nasty effect." And if you've ever read the comments beneath a feature story or a YouTube video, the phrase needs no explanation.

The researchers showed 1,183 readers a fictitious technology story, then had them read the equally fictitious comments. Though both groups' comments featured equal measures of criticism, skepticism and enthusiasm for the piece, one group's was "civil" while the other's was "rude" – peppered with cursing and epithets. And as the results showed, "Those exposed to rude comments … ended up with a much more polarized understanding … Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought." In other words, the "this sucks" chorus becomes the voice in a reader's own head.

Captain Kirk takes on the Reddit trolls

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:38:00 +0000

People of the Internet, your nerd lord is displeased. James T. Kirk himself, the man who, at 81, is still in the game enough to have a vibrant Twitter presence and his own app, would like you to know he's pretty grossed out by what goes down on Reddit.

In January, William Shatner joined Reddit, and soon after posted a fairly innocuous question about turning off private messaging, the better to filter out those "I can choose to ignore." What followed has been a lively and often contentious conversation about the nature of Reddit itself, and the line between freedom of expression and being a plain old jackass.

Right-wing press happily allows itself to be trolled by made-up “video game”

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:16:00 +0000

Have you heard about the SHOCKING new left-wing video game? The one where you actually shoot the president of the NRA in the head? It's been all over the conservative press, because it is a very real thing meant to be treated seriously. Here's Katie Pavlich writing about it in Townhall: "A new online video game is taking political discourse to a whole new level. We already reported the death threats being received by NRA executives and now, a video game which allows users to shoot NRA President David Keene in the head, has been released."

Here's Daily Caller "political reporter" Alex Pappas writing it up. Here it is in the Blaze. And Examiner.com. The National Review's the Corner also finally took the bait. And it was, of course, on Hannity, as an example of "LEFT-WING VIOLENCE":

Even a rocker can be bullied

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:03:00 +0000

It doesn't matter whether you're a lonely high school student or a successful, Billboard-charting star. One thing is certain: The trolls are going to find you. So what are you going to do when they come for you? More to the point, what are we all going to do, together?

That's a question musician Amanda Palmer, in her typically candid, crowd-sourcing way, got at in a blog post over the weekend, with revelatory results. In her post, she admits that while "ego surfing" for stories about herself one night, she found a different Amanda in her Google search. She hadn't heard of Amanda Todd before. She didn't know about the teenage girl who'd become a viral star for making a YouTube video about her struggles with "bullying, suicide, self harm." She didn't know that a month later, she committed suicide.

As Palmer notes, she shares more with Todd than just a first name. Both of them had been inspired by Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to tell their stories via a stream of note cards. And they both experienced the relentless viciousness of bullies.

Anti-blogging hackers attack Tumblr

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:41:00 +0000

Deviant hackers operating under the purposefully provocative title GNAA (which stands for something we cannot publish) waged war today on Tumblr bloggers. The group claimed to have propagated a worm through 8,600 blog sites -- including those of the Observer's BetaBeat, USA Today and the Daily Dot -- replacing content with the following expletive filled message:

Dearest Tumblr users,

We have taken the liberty of upgrading your (rather tasteless, we must say) blog to our premier GNAA Deluxe Gary Niger... Signed Edition! This is in response to the seemingly pandemic growth and world-wide propagation of the most... WORTHLESS, CONTRIVED, BOURGEOISIE, SELF-CONGRATULATING AND DECADENT BULLSHIT THE INTERNET EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF FACILITATING.

I’m never reading the comments again

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:12:00 +0000

On Jan. 1, I made a resolution I never thought I would. I took a Sharpie and a Post-it and wrote the words "DON’T READ THE COMMENTS" in big letters and stuck it on my computer. I've been so much happier ever since.

I'm a person who believes strongly in online communication. I began my career as an online moderator back in the early '90s, and spent 14 years managing the community section of Salon, Table Talk. I've seen it all, read it all, been called it all, and made some of my closest friends via the invisible world of Internet community. And I don't ever want to read another comment again. Well, let me quantify that: I'll read them on other people's stories or YouTube channels if it's for research. And I did chime in on the comments for my story of my cancer treatment, because I felt that was a conversation I'd already been involved in for a year and a half. But otherwise, I'm done. I won't read my comments and I won't read anybody's else's unless I have to. I'm in agreement with the great Caitlin Moran, who describes the comments sections as the place where all the unhappiness in the world dwells.

Internet trolls can’t help themselves

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:00:00 +0000

In the year that I wrote for a blog about Brooklyn real estate, I was regularly plagued by "trolls"--online commenters who write inflammatory or derisive things in public forums, hoping to provoke an emotional response. These commenters called me, and one another, everything from stupid to racist, or sometimes stupid racists. And that was just when I posted the menu of a new café.

The most infamous and offensive of these commenters was a man (we assumed) who called himself "The What." His remarks ranged from insults to threats. "I know where you live and I'm coming for you and your family," he once wrote. The intrigue around The What's identity warranted a cover story in New York magazine. What kind of person would spend so much time, and so much energy, engaging in virtual hate?

The consensus among sociologists and psychologists who study online behavior is that all kinds of people can become trolls--not just the unwound, the immature or the irate. See your perfectly pleasant work neighbor, furiously typing next to you? He might be trolling an Internet site right now.

Ill Doctrine: Feed the trolls

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:45:00 +0000

If you think “don’t feed the trolls” is always the right answer, that might just mean you haven’t been trolled hard enough.

Ill Doctrine is a video blog on music, politics and culture, launched in 2007 by Jay Smooth. We will be premiering two episodes a week on ANIMAL. Older episodes can be found atIllDoctrine.com and you can follow Jay on Twitter here.