This article was interesting.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100105478/troll-hunting-a-look-at-the-dark-side-of-the-internet/Troll hunting: a look at the dark side of the internet
The word “troll” no longer conjures up a dumpy little plastic figure with brightly coloured hair: nor a monster from The Lord of the Rings. If you live even a part of your life online, you’ll know that trolls today are better known as the angry and usually anonymous commenters on web forums, whose aim is to shock, offend, annoy or upset fellow users.
Trolling made headlines this week when Sean Duffy, a young man from Reading, was given 18 weeks’ imprisonment for defacing Facebook tributes to four dead teenagers whom he had never met. The abuse was vile: on a tribute page to Natasha MacBryde, who had committed suicide, he added: “Natasha wasn’t bullied, she was just a whore.” About Lauren Drew, who died after an epileptic fit, he wrote: “I can’t get out of my coffin, I have scratched my nails to the bone.” And “Help me Mummy, it’s hot in Hell.”
Duffy led a “miserable existence” and, according to his lawyer, suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that can make it hard to empathise with others. But his behaviour – while extreme – is similar to that of certain commenters on sites across the internet. Another notorious case, in 2008, saw a young American girl, Megan Meier, driven to suicide, it was claimed, by bullying on the social site MySpace.
India Knight, the novelist and columnist, wrote some years ago of the abuse meted out to Gerry and Kate McCann, the parents of Madeleine, who, as a three-year-old, went missing in Portugal in 2007.
“If you haven’t read what is on the internet about the McCanns, you wouldn’t believe it,” she writes. “Trawling through the sites to find these quotes is like a trip through the darkest recesses of people’s most ungenerous minds.”
Anyone who has written for the web will have some experience of trolling. Women seem to suffer especially harsh treatment. Kat Brown, a broadsheet journalist, remembers one incident in which a troll “ripped into me as a human being – my very existence, apparently, was damaging”, while blogger Heather Taylor, while working for the discussion forums of a major online financial service, found herself targeted by a man who investigated her background. “It was scary,” she says. “He had looked me up online, and found about previous jobs and personal details. I’d always been open about who I was, rather than remaining anonymous, and I found it very unpleasant.”
The definition of “trolling” varies. Strictly speaking, it is the hijacking of an online discussion to add provocative messages, whether abusive, extremist or simply distracting. More recently, says Shane Richmond, The Daily Telegraph’s Technology Editor, it has come to mean "any obnoxious behaviour online”.
The practice has existed as long as the internet. The academic Clay Shirkey tells a story about a US messageboard called CommuniTree, set up in the 1970s, which had to be shut down after being taken over by a bunch of "fart joke-obsessed’’ Californian high schoolers.
The combination of anonymity and a sizeable audience is, it seems, hard to resist. Some people who, perhaps unfairly, fall into the “troll” category are genuinely trying to make a point, but in disagreeing with the prevailing view in the forum in question, are unaware of the aggressive or offensive tone their comments take on.
Joanna Geary, a web journalist, interviewed a regular commenter while working at The Birmingham Post. “Clifford” had, she wrote, “quite a reputation as a curmudgeon” and she was “a bit scared” of meeting him. But, in person, Clifford was a likeable and articulate man, who was genuinely surprised to find that his postings had upset and angered journalists. He said that the encounter “made me realise that some of my posts were unnecessarily combative and negative”.
But what Clifford did – and what thousands of argumentative commenters do – on websites is far removed from Duffy’s campaign of hatred, which was more akin to vicious playground bullying than what internet users of the old school would recognise as trolling. Richmond draws a distinction “between bullying, like abuse on Facebook, and trolling, which is just an attempt to get a reaction”.
He points out that someone abusing the family of a dead teenager would be arrested for harassment if they did so offline. “Society has a responsibility to deal with cyber-bullying,” he says. It is a sentiment echoed far and wide as the force of law was brought to bear this week.
But while any web forum has its share of unpleasant behaviour, it is – mercifully – rare for it to reach a level where court proceedings are involved. Instead, trolls indulge in a low-grade unpleasantness that makes it harder for other users to enjoy the forum.
The question for other users – and for those who run the sites – is how to stop them. Richmond says banning them is largely pointless: they will simply create a new account and return under a different name. The only way to beat the trolls is to ignore them, he says. "Do not feed the trolls. It’s not very satisfying, but works over time.”
As with playground bullies, ignore them, and they’ll go away.
Topic: Man Jailed for Trolling