What is an Internet troll?
To me, an Internet troll is anyone who puts up posts, pages, or comments (a) unsupported by evidence, (b) openly hateful, and (c) specifically designed to generate an emotional response in a small subset of readers (often a specific individual). Hence the three central pillars of trolldom are: fake, hate, and bait.
Unfortunately, from the point of view of a comment moderator, the “fake” part of this trio is very hard (and extraordinarily time-consuming) to judge, given that roughly 90% of what gets posted on the Internet is already fake, imagined, or outright misinterpreted.
As a result of this, all I can reasonably do (as a moderator) is try to reduce the “hate” and “bait” parts. And goodness knows there’s plenty of both of those about as well.
This policy is just about as good as it gets for a blog that has already had 13,000 or so visitor comments to moderate and for a blog moderator who has just a single lifetime in which to moderate those comments.
Moderation Policy
Hateful: if (in my judgement) a comment is openly abusive and/or hateful, I moderate it out, full stop.
Sexism: I include sexist and homophobic comments in the category of “hateful”.
Racism: I include racist comments in the category of “hateful”.
Religion: I include anti-religious comments in the category of “hateful”.
Swearing: note that I tend to replace blasphemies (particularly multiply-strung-together blasphemies) with “[swear]” or similar, mainly to send a signal to the commenter about the futility of swearing.
Response Policy
In the unlikely case that you (the reader) think I have moderated / allowed a comment that is abusive and/or hateful, please email a link to it to me (nickpelling at nickpelling dot com) straight away, and I will – almost always – remove that comment. However, what I will definitely not do is what Pete Bowes recently suggested on his site:
If you (Pelling) would take the trouble to research your own site and collect the IP addresses of the trolls who collected every time Xlamb made a contribution to one of your threads I would be in a position to match them with the IP addresses of the abusers who have threatened me (online) and those who threatened Xlamb through the email system.
What is wrong with this? Simply that individuals such as Pete Bowes are neither the Internet police nor even Chuck Norris: the task of cross-referencing IP addresses should always fall to the police, not to individual online vigilantes.
So once you have opened a case with your local police force, please email me the case reference the police give you and I will happily pass on IP addresses, dates and any other details I have relating to that/those commenter(s) directly to them.
Wouldn’t think a site like yours would attract much “trolling”, especially since Donald Trump has no interest in ciphers although he certainly is a mystery.
Rick: trolling is definitely in the Top Ten Internet Olympic sports, along with cyberbullying, hacking, identity theft, TEH LAEM memes, cybersquatting, pretending you’re running an Internet startup, DDoS attacks masquerading as cyberterrorism, and finding ways of inserting “John Cena” or “Chuck Norris” into otherwise nondescript paragraphs.
A site like mine is on the Internet, ergo it attracts trolls like flies to… pants.
Nick, I would think that using the phrase “individual online vigilantes” borders on baiting. I have no idea of the history between you and Mr. Bowes but that phrase definitely gives me the impression that said history is not altogether pleasant or professional. I would appreciate any clarification you feel fit to provide.
Fred: in recent days, Australian novelist and blogger Pete Bowes has made a number of posts and comments openly naming me and accusing me of encouraging trolls. He specifically blames Cipher Mysteries’ moderation policy for physical threats that were recently made to him by people coming to his door, causing him to take down his blog while distressing both him and his 75-year-old wife. He believes that the people who came to his door were “trolls”.
He has clearly had a bad experience, and the point of this post is to make it clear that I am perfectly happy to support the police in responding appropriately to this and any other similar situations. But I don’t think that handing out commenters’ IP addresses to anyone who asks for them would ever be a good idea.
I have occasionally been surprised at some of the comments that have crept through – but having occasionally managed a blog (and worse yet, a forum) I can understand the difficulties in catching every numpty.
I respectfully disagree a little on the ‘fake’ part above – or rather I think there is a difference between ‘fake’ and ‘wrong’ (and in my view you define ‘fake’ as ‘wrong’). The nature of the internet is that everyone has an opinion, and many of them are wrong (some demonstrably so). In any topic such as most of the ones here where everything is about ideas there will be a lot of posts that are ‘wrong’, but I think that’s different to the posts that are outright BS (and I think the Beale Ciphers in particular attract some spectacularly fake posts (not just here, everywhere on the interwebs)). They are nonetheless difficult to immediately classify as trolls, simply because there’s a fine line between malicious crazy and just plain crazy. The definition of a troll differs everywhere you go, but I think most people agree that trolling is always malicious – that is, it’s a deliberate statement of “false facts” (I know, it’s an oxymoron) as opposed to just the ravings of a lunatic – and without knowing the person posting you never really can tell (until they become offensive).
The baiting is hard to judge too, sometimes. Another bug in the internet is that two people who believe they are absolutely right will butt heads (quite agressively sometimes) with the conviction that they might be able to sway the other person’s opinion and change their mind. It is a difficult skill to master to walk away from posts where someone is saying something you think is blatantly wrong. People’s views will differ from my own, and despite my logical reasoning behind my stance there are people who disagree who will never see it my way, no matter how angry I get with them. Of course, all of that gets complicated by the fact that we visit these sites to discuss and challenge our knowledge – so we’re basically actively seeking out people we disagree with, and then trying to temper our disgust that someone could be so stupid (while they feel exactly the same of us).
tl;dr version: Fake is impossible; bait is not far from it; all you can really focus on is the offensive.
One thing I do often notice, however, is that the troll is often the one yelling TROLL the loudest….
Milongal: the core problem as I see it is that ‘fake’, ‘hoax’, ‘misunderstanding’, ‘delusionary’, and ‘imaginary’ are in no obvious way either-or categories on the Internet. 90% of the cipher-related stuff I see contains miscopied or missummarized accounts of things that, while correct in places, overwhelmingly suffer from an unhealthy dose of (typically hopeful) delusion. If I deleted every comment here that was not grounded on solid evidence, I’d probably lose 10,000 or more of them: no great loss, some might say, but it’s a tiring boundary to police. And I certainly didn’t start blogging to become some kind of moral and/or evidential policeman.
You’re right about the butting heads business: and would agree that the Internet is full of stags, looking to lock (virtual) horns with others. As to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is something moral philosophers of the future will perhaps debate interminably.
Sturgeon’s Law most definitely applies to the content of the Internet, and arguably to the remaining 10%.
So if you run a blog, I guess you can expect 90% of your clicks and comments to be, well, crud. But I assume that most bloggers want as many clicks and comments as possible, because they also want to have an active and high-profile site.
At the risk of adding yet further to that 90%, I’d just make two points from the perspective of a blog reader. Firstly, if there’s too much crud which interrupts the flow of what I’ve actually come to the site to read, it does actively put me off. There have been occasions when I’ve seen the same name appear six times in a row in the Recent Comments section, and have given up and left. And secondly, I have learned that people who appear to be harmless eccentrics for most of the time can turn into fairly obnoxious and spiteful ones occasionally – and that must be a real problem for a blogger to police.
SirHubert: the issue genuinely isn’t about wanting more clicks and comments (I hope, somewhat idealistically, to achieve that particular goal by writing good posts about good research), but about finding sufficient time in the day to decide which comments should go in the bin and which should go on the blog. And even then I’d need to find a way to explain that policy to people-who-don’t-believe-that-they-themselves-are-trolls-yet-do-things-in-a-way-that-is-practically-indistinguishable-from-trolls.
You almost certainly maintain your own mental list of the >50% of commenters who fall into this category. 🙁