Week 7- Digital Citizenship: Trolling and social media conflict
As Web 2.0 has grown, so has the ability for users to contribute to platforms and websites such as social media and forums. Access to user-generated content is richer than ever, but along with the pros comes the cons, like social media misuse such as trolling, cyber-bullying and harassment.
“Trolling is described as the posting of provocative, often deliberately misleading and pointless, comments with the intent of provoking others into conflict and/or meaningless discussion”
According to Bishop (2013, pp. 28-29), trolling is distinguished into two categories- ‘kudos trolling’ which are productive provocative messages and ‘flame trolling’ which are meaningless and offensive messages.
Offensive messages from trollers can produce negative psychological effects on their victims, much the same as offline harassment (Synott, Coulias & Loannou 2017, p. 1) and can therefore be described as a type of cyber-bullying and/or online harassment (Phillips 2015, p. 2).
The video below gives an insight into trolling, the characteristics of the people who troll and what pursues them…
Scroll through any social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and it’ll not take you long to find some sort of trolling within comments on posts. I’m not crazily into all the different social media platforms but I do use Facebook often so here’s a couple of examples that I found while scrolling through my feed…
Both examples are aimed at businesses but I want to highlight the last example… While the trolling comments shown are aimed at outfits worn by models, the models themselves could also feel that the demeaning comments are directed at them, hence, turning the trolling comments into cyber-bullying… Which brings up the question of whether the rise of the internet and social media has amplified bullying or not.
According to boyd (2014, p. 152), the internet and social media has not radically changed the amount of bullying that happens in society, but has made it visible to more people making it seem as if it has increased bullying behaviours. Personally, I disagree with boyd’s view on bullying behaviour not increasing…
I think that the internet has certainly increased the amount of bullying simply because people can connect to broader communities, which wasn’t really an option before other than snail mail or physically changing locations to speak in person. Public content such as news articles and advertising never had the option for people to comment other than physically writing letters to the organisations, and even then, comments of bullying or harassment would most unlikely be published. People who troll or bully through the internet wouldn’t do it if it the content wasn’t readily available to conveniently comment on… and I think a lot of people wouldn’t troll or bully if it wasn’t for the fact that they can remain anonymous on certain platforms because they would be worried about any consequences arising from their victims knowing their personal information.
Above the Noise 2018, Are internet trolls born or made?, 24 January, viewed 19 January 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLggqoPEfJU>.
Bishop, J 2013, ‘ The effect of de-individuation of the internet troller on criminal procedure implementation: an interview with a hater’, International Journal of Cyber Criminology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 28-48.
boyd, d 2014, It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Klyueva, A 2013, in RL Heath (ed), Encyclopedia of Public Relations, Credo reference.
Phillips, W 2015, This is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture, MIT Press, ProQuest Ebook Central.
Synott, J, Coulias, A & Loannou, M 2017, ‘Online trolling: The case of Madeleine McCann’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 71, pp. 70-78.
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