I think you nailed it right there. We’ve needed to learn as a society what social shunning and boundary setting looks like online. So far it seems that we’ve learned to moderate comments and deplatform extremists. Here’s hoping that all starts paying dividends soon.
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Unfortunately you would be wrong. Golden Dawn in Greece, the BNP and National Action in the UK have set up (white s only) food banks. That doesn’t make them any less of a bunch of racist fuckwits.
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In my experience, ignoring trollies works very well, when you’re dealing with a trolley. That is, someone who wants to get a rise out of people. If he’s roundly ignored, he gets bored, and goes somewhere else to look for people who will give him the reactions he wants.
But genuine trollies of this sort are just a minority of online troublemakers. There’s bigots and zealots and lunatics and more, and they aren’t going to shut up if they’re ignored. The bigots will take it as a sign of weakness, or passive support, and just get more and more obnoxious and hostile. The zealots and the lunatics won’t be deterred by ignoring them, either; they’re suffering from an excess of motivation already, and in many cases would keep on ranting without an audience.
The only way to deal with those kinds of people is to ban them, and then slap them down again and again when they come back in thinly veiled sockpuppet accounts.
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While I do appreciate at least some government group wants to avoid the 1st Amendment problem that would be defining an official church, I think some better guidelines may be in order.
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There’s a long standing tendency to ignore that sort of thing in an attempt to avoid validating or encouraging it.
And it never works. The respectable approach in science and medicine for a long time was to not engage with or acknowledge the fringe. Not even to disprove and debunk. Which just left it to explode into the mainstream.
And of course when mom told you to ignore the bullies that just lead to getting pantsed in gym class.
“Don’t feed the trollies” goes hand in hand with principled lack of moderation. Because free speech and debate. And I think you’re right that that’s absolutely a clear pathway that helped foster the alt right. It’s definitely the kind of assholery Trump made his name on. The media and the GOPs unwillingness to call him an asshole or push back on the assumption he’d just go away is a major part of how he stumbled his way to the top.
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I think you’re assuming that tr0lls are always a separate category from other troublemakers, and we know that’s very much not the case, since plenty of bigots, etc, use tr0lling as a means to further their cause of chasing people they wish harm off online spaces. We’ve seen that happen to plenty of high profile (usually) women.
Tr0lling is a tactic more than an identity.
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Look to Jehovah’s Witnesses for a salutary example.
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Hamas used to set up community relief too.
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In this case, you are “Born a Crime.”
Born a Crime: Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah: 0889290936097: Amazon.com: Books
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Say, that one is a good read!
Edit: But here’s a better place to buy it.
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