Beware of (Becoming) Trolls
Taking a stand against abusive online behavior
This week a person espousing violent misogynistic, racist, and myriad other dangerous views was widely deplatformed. For all the hoopla about “cancel culture” and attacks on free speech, the deplatforming is newsworthy precisely because it is rare.
What isn’t rare, however, is online abuse — especially abuse aimed at minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ people.
“The vast majority of this assault not only goes unpunished, it is positively encouraged by the very business models of the tech platforms that host abusive users,” says journalist Nesrine Malik in We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom. “Instead of reckoning with the rise in online abuse, hate speech, and hate crime against minorities and women, we spend much of our time panicking about a fictional cancel culture that in many cases is just ‘consequence culture.’”
In Malik’s book (which I highly recommend), she meticulously details the danger of allowing people to engage in abusive speech without consequence: “It corrodes community relations, picks on the vulnerable, and threatens the safety of our fellow citizens. By fixating on the free speech element, we have put sanctity of expression over sanctity of life.”
For too long, we've allowed abusers and trolls to dictate and dominate online discourse, shut down sincere discourse, and bully decent people off of social media by making it an unpleasant (and unsafe) place to be.
We can’t wait for social networks to deplatform people behaving in the most egregious ways. If we wouldn't tolerate behavior our physical spaces, there's no reason to tolerate it in our digital spaces. We need to let people know that violent and dehumanizing behavior isn’t welcome in our feeds, in our online communities, or on our posts.
Courageous conversations only happen when people feel safe to share their experiences and thoughts. To create welcoming digital spaces, we need to implement our own consequences (deleting, muting, blocking, bannning, unfriending) when requests for respect and decency are mocked, challenged, or ignored.
In combating abusive online conduct, though, it’s crucial to avoid amplifying the dangerous content by engaging with it in any way. Commenting on it or sharing it — even to refute it or share it as an example of abusive digital behavior — feeds the engagement-maximizing algorthim, ensuring it will be seen by even more people. Screenshot the content instead. Write a separate post explaining your thoughts and the actions you’ve taken to maintain a safe and welcoming digital space.
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We also need to recognize how easy it is to become trolls or bullies ourselves.
In Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions, researchers from Stanford and Cornell reported that a substantial amount of ugly and abusive online behavior comes from people who aren’t routine trolls. The mere existence of trolling in an online discussion makes people more likely to pile on.
“It’s tempting to believe that all the problems online are due to someone else, some really sociopathic person,' Michael Bernstein, an expert in human-computer interaction and one of the authors of the study, told The Wall Street Journal about the research. “Actually, we all have to own up to this.”
As psychiarist George Markari points out in Of Fear and Strangers: A Hisory of Xenophobia, a riveting exploration of hatred of others, “Normal specimens of our biologic kind commit most hate crimes.” Hatred is “not literally an illness … it is part of the psychic violence of everyday life.”
When we tend to think the problem is other people, we aren't as vigilant about the ways we participate in or contribute to online strife. By remembering that we, too, might become them, we can avoid the temptation to resort to trolling tactics when dealing with online abusers.
The presence of ugly comments begets more ugly comments, as the researchers of Anyone Can Be a Troll discovered. Deleting ugliness and removing people who spread it from our digital spaces prevents us from amplifying it and prevents other people from turning into trolls. Fewer trolls mean safer, more welcoming digital spaces.
ALSO BY LAUREN HUG: Digital Grace: Pouring Benevolence into an Outraged World and Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World.
REVIEW OF DIGITAL GRACE: “I spent much of my time with this book highlighting and rethinking my own role in digital interactions. I agree with the author about the need to give grace in these spaces and open our minds to see the value of diverse perspectives, even if we disagree. We can respect each other without agreeing on every topic.” (Click to read entire review.)
Something being incredibly obvious does not make it less important or less true. "The presence of ugly comments begets more ugly comments." is true in the digital world, the analog world, in every school, every church, and every family. Your consistent message of kindness and grace makes you mission not only important, but you help change conflict into conversations.