Web trolls winning as incivility increases

The Internet may be losing the war against trolls.  That’s the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting.

“As long as the Internet keeps operating according to a click-based economy, trolls will maybe not win, but they will always be present,” said Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at Humboldt State University and the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a forthcoming book about her years of studying bad behavior online.

“Troll” is the fuzzy term for agitators who pop up, often anonymously, sometimes in mobs, in comment threads and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, apparently intent on wreaking havoc.

In recent years the term has become a catchall label for routine, graphically provocative online speech of the sort directed this week at Zelda Williams, the daughter of actor Robin Williams, and posted on the website Jezebel.

Scholars note that one of the primary motivations of trolling is to titillate other trolls. This sets up one of the central difficulties in confronting trolling: Shedding light on trolling may only encourage it.

“As more high-profile cases come to light, more people will view trolling as a way of having an effect on these otherwise apparently untouchable figures from the safety of their own smartphones and homes,” Claire Hardaker, a lecturer in linguistics at Lancaster University in England who has studied trolling.

Williams decided to quit Twitter recently after being hounded by trolls who posted doctored images purporting to show her father’s body with bruises around his neck. “Look at what he...did to himself because of you,” one of the trolls tweeted shortly after Williams’ suicide Monday. After trying to confront the trolls, Zelda Williams admitted defeat: “Deleting [Twitter] from my devices for a good long time, maybe forever. Time will tell. Goodbye,” she wrote.

Jezebel, the popular feminist news site run by Gawker Media, disclosed that it had been overrun for months by anonymous people posting violent, pornographic pictures in its comments section.

To weed out such messages, Jezebel’s staff waded through the worst posts and manually deleted them - only to find new images from new anonymous posters at every turn. “It’s like playing Whac-a-Mole with a sociopathic Hydra,” the staff wrote.

A celebrity’s quitting Twitter and a blog’s staff having to delete a few terrible images may not sound like one of the most alarming problems the world faces. But trolling does not happen in isolation, and the routine, collective path of emotional damage left in trolls’ wake can be devastating.

But combating trolling is a fiendish problem, like the cat-and-mouse fight against hackers. Both Twitter and Facebook have ways for people to report abuse, but the features are frequently described as inadequate.

Gawker Media said it was setting up a system in which only approved commenters will be allowed to post to the main comment section. Comments from the unapproved will be relegated to a “pending” section that readers will be advised to avoid.

Others have called for more far-reaching efforts, including reducing the possibility of posting anonymously on many online forums, or of posting at all.

If there’s one thing the history of the Internet has taught us, it’s that trolls will be difficult to contain because they really reflect base human society in all its ugliness. Trolls find a way.