No offense, but that’s not trolling, that’s stalking. That guy went way past trolling ages ago.
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That’s not trolling anymore though, that’s criminal harassment.
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Regardless of what you call it, this sort of persistent behaviour is what this conversation is about.
It’s definitely extreme trolling, and it would be wonderful if the law considered it stalking and harassment, but most of the time it doesn’t (even when it clearly is).
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As gratifying as that sounds, of course in real life it would be subverted by the trolls themselves to further harass their victims.
However, it does point to an obvious question… how have there not been more murders of trolls? This is America, after all. We shoot people for cutting us off in traffic.
Though, I guess the same question could be asked about Wall Street execs.
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The only effective way to deal with trollies is to ignore them.
No, sorry. That isn’t effective, but people keep saying that because it makes them feel like they can ignore the problem. When you don’t have the problem happening to you, you can ignore it. And that’s nice… for you.
But it’s not nice for anyone else.
Ignoring bullying and harassment doesn’t work anywhere else, and we know it. So why do we keep saying things we really know don’t work over and over again?
You can write "well I sure am glad I don’t have to deal with that and I really don’t give a damn about anyone who does… " and honestly, that would actually be more productive.
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in real life it would be subverted by the trollies themselves to further harass their victims.
Once exposed, there’s ways to make sure they stop. I’ll just leave it at that. There’s some people you just don’t fuck with in this world.
how have there not been more murders of trollies? This is America, after all. We shoot people for cutting us off in traffic.
Most wouldn’t know about it, if anyone. trollies aren’t really the sort of popular people IRL that get missed very much by society. Sales of Cheetos go down slightly and that’s about it.
There should be an area on reddit or 4chan where people can go to post about the abuse that is happening. Then the masses perusing that area can trolley them back in exactly the same way, doxing, posting fake ads in their name, calling 911 as them, etc.
The thing is, people used to do this kind of thing on reddit; I don’t know about 4chan. People would post things like, “This guy tore up my car; go get 'im!” And then, lo, some poor schmuck would get hit with (guess what) death and other kinds of threats, harassing phone calls, etc., and it would turn out, all too often, that the original poster calling for vigilante behavior was lying.
They had to make it a site-wide policy to ban calls for vigilanteism.
Sometimes people lie.
Crazy, I know.
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Because unlike the trollies, the people being trolled have something to lose - friends, family, job, self-respect, etc.
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Uh huh. Which is what we’re talking about. You didn’t read the article that you’re commenting on, did you?
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This makes me think of an exchange I saw on Reddit earlier today, and honestly? I think the overwhelming majority of people who send this kind of crap would never follow through, and further, I’d go on to say it’s largely boys–not grown men–who are doing it.
Parenting fail, IMHO. We parents need to be teaching boys better. How many parents just let their kids watch whatever, play whatever, listen to whatever, who cares I never wanted kids anyway (not me saying that, but it’s depressing how many people have that mindset who have kids.) And then there’s society’s message. Nobody wants to be the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Hell, no guy in his right mind wants to be the 16-Year-Old Virgin, right? So they have this instilled in them, that they have to have sex. They have to.
Then, of course, there’s girls. Girls are getting taught a little better these days, I suppose, though they often have the same parents. But they’re still taught that wanting sex is bad. Many states have laws that say that if that boy who’s frightened to death of being the 16-Year-Old Virgin actually manages to beat the odds, that she’s been raped whether she consented or not. She’s too young and too naive to make these decisions about her body. And the religious right tells her she should be ashamed of her sexuality, and the left sends mixed signals that it’s her body, her choice, but that if she lets the boys see that body, she’s demeaning herself.
Hoboy, Western society. Are you listening? I’m talking to you.
So you end up with these sexually frustrated little dickwads. Seriously, guys, have we forgotten that this is what college is for? There’s people there who will willingly have sex with you, I swear…OK, back to the underage kids. Heck, when I was in HS, I wrote poetry, at school, that will send a principal scurrying off to call the cops. I wrote stuff that would make BSDM enthusiasts cringe. And then? Well, when I got done with that, I did my best to treat my friends with as much respect as my adolescent self was capable of. What, you thought I was going to act out on that? Have you never heard of fiction? But yeah, the Internet! Now these little shits can spew stuff that they think is shocking and new, at random people on the Internet, and sit there and giggle about how clever they are. They’re not clever, but they think they are. When I set up a personal webpage in college, the first email I got in response was “go suck a dick ass hole”. Clever, no?
But then there’s those sick fucks who act out on their impulses. I’ve written about a friend being brutally assaulted and murdered before, I won’t go into that again. It’s also why I’ve gotten annoyed at BoingBoing’s vitriol aimed at what they’ve deemed, being all-knowing and wise, to be overprotective parents; her parents were trusting, as was most of that town. No more. If BoingBoing knew what the culture of that town after the incident, and didn’t know about the incident, they’d be red in the face with rage, hoboy.
But it’s because of these bizarre, macabre fantasies spilling out into real life, ending and wrecking real lives, that we have to be cautious. It’s why we have to take things seriously. Does anyone think that a Whovian would seriously harm Neil Gaiman because he didn’t vehemently disagree with the Twelfth Doctor being yet another white man? It’s doubtful, but Neil seems to be troubled by the hate mail. Threatening mail. Over Doctor Who. Oi, Whovians! Allons-y, let’s go outside! Some sun will do you some good!
As much as I’d like to debate Anita Sarkeesian on things like her choice to go after low-hanging fruit like Japanese video games, I can’t, at least not on her Youtube channel. Rape and death threats, alas. I doubt anyone would have done more than be an Internet Tough Guy, but…you know, those times when people give in to those violent impulses.
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That’s how it played out in an earlier article posted on BB.
I think some of it is brought on by the fact that many depressed and angry young men don’t interact a lot with other people in public. They may be dicks to a few people but they’re not doing a whole lot of damage. Having a computer in your room means that you can retreat from public but actually do more damage more effectively than in person. Teenagers’ developing sense of morality and the distance between them and their victim would also make it more likely that they would act with less empathy. In the Traynor’s Eye article, the trolley making threats against him and his family turned out to be a friend’s son, who thought of the incredibly damaging attacks as a kind of game.
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So you get your rocks off by tracking down trolls, people who use words, and threatening them with physical violence. And this makes you better than them, how?
So you get your rocks off by tracking down trollies, people who use words, and threatening them with physical violence.
It’s not always a threat of violence, there’s other methods to scare the living shit out of people. Depends on the trolley and the scope of what they’ve done and for how long, really.
I’m not talking about your average, run-of-the-mill trollies, here. They are best ignored.
And this makes you better than them, how?
You’ve obviously never been incessantly stalked, harassed and viciously trolled for years on end by someone who knows your home address and those of your family (and utilizes it) by threatening your life and your family/friends then does everything else in their power to make you miserable maybe even lose your job, jeopardize relationships all while the police are helpless to do much of anything… have you?
Get back to me when you’ve had a loved one crying because some scumbag is telling them he’s going to rape and murder them and mails a bloody knife (animal’s blood) in a package to their door.
Damn fucking straight I’m better than them. The fact I don’t put them in a hole in the desert makes me especially kind. You can get off your little pedestal now, thx.
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can’t we come up with another name for this sort of behaviour, other than trolling? or just call it what it is, harassment or stalking.
for years i understood trolling to mean a sort of internet equivalent of making prank phone calls, something which can be pointless, juvenile, just plain irritating, or even border on harassment, but can also be a true, even subversive and satirical, artform. lets not forget that anonymous’ first forays into activism were essentially acts of large scale, organised and politicised trolling.
were someone to threaten rape over the phone, you wouldn’t call it a prank phone call, would you?
it’s bad enough that the mainstream media continually misuses the term, i’d expect better from boing boing.
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I think the overwhelming majority of people who send this kind of crap would never follow through, and further, I’d go on to say it’s largely boys–not grown men–who are doing it.
See, this is where it starts to veer from constructive into destructive. If you spend enough time even on the periphery of individuals who engage in nasty, threatening behavior, you’ll soon see how cyclical these issues become. Part of that has to do with the really limiting discourse we employ to discuss these situations. We create zero-sum categories like “abuser” and “victim” and then work backward to correlate those labels with actual identifiable groups. When we define “abuser” as correlated with “male” and “victim” as correlated with “female”, then we begin to naturally categorize on those lines.
And what ends up happening is that the framework of the discourse moulds itself to the stereotype while at the same time employing that linguistic framework to define things like “abuser” and “victim”. It’s self-replicating. When two individuals, one a man and one a woman, get into a spat and both start hurling nasty shit at each other, we become blind to anything aside from the context of the discourse and make the jump to assume that in any argument/driving trollies that there is a clear line between “abuser” and “victim”. We end up condoning one behavior and rejecting, often viciously, the other when they spring from the same font of nastiness and where the actual behaviors are far closer to symmetrical than lopsided.
And then we employ this linguistic framework to make claims that the “victims” are always women and the “abusers” are always men. We can do this because the framework is self-justifying because it’s the framework. It’s just an endless spiral of nastiness where one side is blamed and the other is completely needing of protecting and sympathy.
You have, of course, the justification that because of the worst of the worst who go that extra mile to actually harass and stalk others with ill intent, then we should “do more” to help them. And I agree. But it’s impossible to even have this discussion when it’s so convoluted and when the language employed to describe these situations is endemic of the simplicity of the categorizations and the stereotypes inherent within.
Because it all breaks down if you are confronted by the fact that there is a bit of both category in each side of the argument. If there exists no clear “abuser”/“victim” and when both parties are causing the argument to reach the point where people start throwing off charged “You should kill yourself”, then who is to blame? Do we get micro-specific and just wait for that first serious threat to determine who is in need of protection and who needs to be stopped? What happens when that “victim” turns around and engages in a pattern of behavior that is very aggressive and designed to provoke and mock others? Because that’s something that has been demonstrated to me over and over again: that when we get zero-sum and support the identification of terms like “victim” and “abuser” in such a casual way, we’re just giving people a free-pass to be assholes because the discourse (per above) lacks any real depth of structure.
It’s like, many years ago when this was all beginning to become a conversation, when a teacher stated in a comment that her experience with the concept of “bullying” which became a big deal within the last decade was that, “Whoever cries ‘Bully!’ first wins.” Except that here we have already decided, based on identity, who the “victim” and “abuser” actually are without any actual engagement in the full spectrum of interaction.
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I could possibly agree with your opinion, in general, but the specifics of the article do address the females who were victimized. I would argue that it’s highly unlikely that a female is going to threaten to rape another female. I imagine it’s not completely unheard of, but most definitely rare. Further, I’d suggest that females would rarely threaten to rape males. It just doesn’t elicit the same kind of fear nor threaten to violate in quite the same manner due to anatomy, amongst other things like strength, comparatively.
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Thumbs up to that article for both its nod to Usenet trolling for humor, as perfected by alt.religion.kibology, and also for mentioning disemvowelling, something BoingBoing’s comments were one of the first to implement.
The problem with this is that there have been several high-profile cases recently where trollies were sending women threatening letters at home, calling their houses, and basically making it impossible for them to function online (not just in one community, but following them all over the internet). How the hell are you supposed to ignore that? Especially if your work is online and you can’t just shut off the computer for a while?
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My working model is that trolls are, essentially, masochists. They are so desperate for attention that they’ll take any kind, negative or positive – and negative is a lot easier to provoke.
Refusing to hit them remains the most effective way I know to make them go elsewhere. Tools that make that easier – from killfiles to “hellbanning” – are a Good Thing.
There’s kind of a big grey area between the two. The Dennis Markuze/David Mabus case is an example of that: For over a decade, he turbo-spammed skeptic blogs and made email and online threats to hundreds of bloggers and other members of the skeptic community. The police refused to treat him as a real threat until he started including them in some of his Twitter threats. There’s a good discussion of his case here: http://skeptools.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/case-study-notorious-spammer-brought-down-twitter-tumblr-social-media-mabus/
That probably wouldn’t count as “stalking,” since it wasn’t directed at one particular person, and his M.O. was more what you’d see in a particularly dedicated troll, but he certainly wasn’t trolling just to be a minor annoyance.
