I’m not sure if we are talking about different things or not. Agency is very much at the root of things as I see it, but thats probably obvious by now. The people who tricked the bot into repeating “bad words” will have had different levels of intent in doing so, but I already covered that in my examples above.
How “bad” is it that some people would do this with complete understanding of their words and full intent of spreading hateful words? Somewhat bad. But again when weighed against the possible risks to life and limb I might deal with next week when I’m in Europe, the fact that hateful words are spread is pretty minor.
Consider the above in the context of something I’ve probably said here before: when I was a bit of a wild youth, I sometimes had people threatening to shoot me (or firing warning shots) for what I did but in example 2 above the talk of shooting me was for what I am. This may clarify why I’m not so concerned about online trollery.
I’m not sure if you are saying I’m not normal for not being very offended, but I see this as a PR stunt gone wrong and MS pulled the plug rather than risk further bad publicity.
