An interesting piece from Sam Harris:
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Wrestling the TrollThe Internet powerfully enables the spread of good ideas, but it works the same magic for bad ones—and it allows distortions of fact and opinion to become permanent features of our intellectual landscape. Consequently, the migration of our cultural discourse into cyberspace can injure a person’s reputation in ways that may be impossible to remedy.
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I have not shied away from controversy and that many of my views defy easy summary. However, I continue to learn the hard way that if an issue is controversial, and my position cannot be reduced to a simple sentence, my critics will do the work of simplification for me. Topics like torture, recreational drug use, and wealth inequality can provoke outrage and misunderstanding in many audiences. But discussing them online sets your reputation wandering like a child across a battlefield—perpetually. Anything can and will be said at your expense—or falsely attributed to you—today, tomorrow, and years hence. Needless to say, the urge to respond to this malevolence and obfuscation can become irresistible.
The problem, however, is that there is no effective way to respond. Here is a glimpse of what it is like for me to sit at my desk, attempting to write my next book, while persistent and misleading attacks on my work continue to surface on the Internet.
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I receive a stream of emails demanding to know why I continue to ignore Theodore Sayeed’s demolition of me on the website
Mondoweiss. The answer: I’ve never heard of Theodore Sayeed or Mondoweiss. A subsequent glance at his article reveals misrepresentations of my views and tendentious maneuvers that seem to have been made in very bad faith. Engaging with this sort of thing only gives it greater currency—or so I like to believe, given that I have no time to engage with it. Strangely, my commitment to safeguarding my time doesn’t stop me from spending half an hour writing personal emails to a handful of readers explaining why I think a response to Sayeed is beneath me.
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Another flurry of emails arrives alerting me to a very personal and misleading attack on me (along with a few friends and colleagues) now lighting up Alternet—a website that has distorted my views in the past. Many readers want to know when they can expect my response to
“The 5 Most Awful Atheists.” I read this poisonous and inane concoction written by a deeply unserious person who has made no effort to understand my arguments, and I decide that the best thing to do is to forget all about it.
Predictably, this article refers to the fact that I have discussed the ethics of torture in the past—and it does so in order to brand me as a moral lunatic. From reading this piece, and hundreds like it, one would never imagine that my position on torture is more or less identical to the one prescribed in that handbook of evil, the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Read the entry on torture there, especially the section entitled “The Beating,” and then tell me that being categorically “against torture” is a morally uncomplicated stance to adopt.)
However, I then hear that the article has been
gleefully endorsed by that shepherd of Internet trolls PZ Myers, amplifying its effect. Soon thereafter it appears on Salon, under the slightly more restrained title
“5 Atheists who ruin it for everyone else.” Will I now respond? The temptation is growing. But I have 5,991 unread emails in my inbox and a book to write...
More: www.samharris.org 
Topic: Wrestling the Troll: Sam Harris