A talk to be held by Harvard university professor, Susan Benesch proposes that the best way to deal with the scourge of online “trolls” is not to ignore them, but rather to engage them with data-driven conversation.<\/p>\n
The Harvard professor’s talk aims to focus on improving online discourse norms to a point where active engagement with “trolls” can change the way they approach posts made on online platforms.<\/p>\n
“Hateful and even violent speech are familiar online – what\u2019s unusual are data-driven efforts to diminish them,” Benesch says.<\/p>\n
“Experiments so far have produced intriguing results including: some \u2018trolls\u2019 recant or apologize in response to counterspeech, and small changes in platform architecture can improve online discourse norms.”<\/p>\n
Typically, online trolls are defined as people who, either accidentally or intentionally, provoke others into emotional response through inflammatory, extraneous or offensive statements.<\/p>\n
The characterisation is similar to, but not exactly the same as online flamers – a term used to describe people who actively make hostile, insulting and often violent remarks directed at specific targets.<\/p>\n
A combination of the two characteristics – flame trolls – describes internet users who knowingly post provocative comments (“flamebait”) to elicit an angry response.<\/p>\n
Separate research, conducted by University of Manitoba, found that that there is a strong relationship between online trolling and sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.<\/p>\n
The study found that of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behaviour.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Boston Magazine<\/a>, however, Benesch indicated that people make the mistake in assuming that “trolls” are a universal, like-minded group of internet users that can be clumped together in one box.<\/p>\n “Instead of just saying \u2018trolls\u2019 as one group, let\u2019s start to understand which sorts of people are posting hate online, and whether there are other ways to influence them to do less of that,\u201d Benesch told the magazine.<\/p>\n The Harvard professor noted that in her research, through active engagement and dialogue on Twitter, she saw instances of so-called \u201ctrolls\u201d actually recoiling from their original hateful Tweets posted online.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat gets reported is all of the hateful speech and not the efforts to counter it. In our very early research, we have been quite surprised to find some cases where people recant and apologize,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Benesch’s talk will also focus on additional experiments in areas where online speech can be linked to offline violence.<\/p>\n In previous research conducted by Benesch<\/a>, the professor marked a rise in “inflammatory public speech” before the outbreak of violence.<\/p>\n “[This suggests] that it is a precursor or even a prerequisite for violence, which makes sense: groups of killers do not form spontaneously.”<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes it sounds like people have given up on fighting this in online spaces\u2014that seems crazy to me. On the contrary, we have greater opportunities to combat it,\u201d she told the Boston.<\/p>\n Online trolls are sadists, psychopaths: research<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Watch out before you harass people online<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore on online trolls<\/h3>\n