TOO MANY IMMORAL PEOPLE are trolling more effectively than ever! This statement is taken from Jenny Pierson’s “Don’t Feed the Trolls: How Outrage Fuels Sickening Careers.” The article is subtitled “The guy who wrote the book on trolling has some tough-to-swallow suggestions on combating the worst of it.” It appeared on AlterNet on February 11, 2017, and I just found it!
This is part of my ongoing series of articles on internet bullies, also known as trolls. This time I am letting Pierson do all the talking: all the text between the two images below is from her article.
I have made changes to the original article: mainly, it is truncated. Pierson’s piece is 1,165 words long; my adaptation below is 440 words, so there’s plenty more to read in “Don’t Feed the Trolls.”
I also made a few small stylistic changes to keep the article consistent with my own pieces on this site.
Combating trolls
In an article for The New York Observer, media strategist Ryan Holiday explains the way a marketing campaign based on trolling works. The more outrageous and offensive the product, ideology, or personality, the more of a duty high-road, moral media has to cover it and call it out. But conversely, all that free publicity helps to amplify the troll’s reach to find more of the otherwise tiny audience that would buy such atrocious ideas
What’s interesting about Holiday’s argument isn’t just the dilemma about whether or not to give free publicity to people making money off hate, but also the proposed solutions.
The media’s first option
The media’s first choice—not to cover the perpetration of hate—doesn’t appeal to Holiday: he thinks it could set a standard of letting horrible things go unnoticed.
The media’s second option
The media’s second option, which Holiday supports, is essentially to give trolls a chance to embarrass themselves and prove themselves either unqualified, unknowledgeable, or just not committed enough to promote the horrible things they’re promoting.
Frankly, it seems like a bad idea to give a platform to people with a history of infringing on the rights of others.
A third option
There must be a third way, perhaps one that’s not as feasible or effective in a landscape where attention is short and subtlety is often wasted. Here are two compromise options:
1. Make public mention of the terrible thing, but give the hate less attention than the context spinning its falsehood or wrongness, and prioritize more valuable news.
2. Let the troll speak, but make sure it’s with a battle-ready interviewer and that it’s simultaneously fact-checked.
The latter presents a challenge: even when an interviewer/opponent is skilled at cutting down hateful language or lies, a dedicated troll can spew more incendiary comments than are possible to expose as fast and effectively as they are spouted.
Fight normalizing trolling
Another key point Holiday brings to the table is that as much as we worry about normalizing trolls when they’re repeatedly successful, it’s not in the troll’s interest to be normalized because then they lose the spotlight and aren’t famous for being outrageous anymore.
Oddly, this creates an unexpected common goal between progressives and trolls: to keep fighting the normalizing of the troll’s behavior.
If there’s anything to learn from Ryan Holiday’s strategy, it’s that all too many immoral people with dangerous ideas are using trolling more effectively than ever before. Both the media and the public have to constantly be on guard with countermeasures to fight it until the idea loses steam, or as Holiday suggests, until the troll is caught abandoning the hateful principles he rode in on.”
FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page was lifted from a poster/meme that I found on an article titled “Predatory Trolls: The Evolution of Classic Internet Trolls” by Michael Nuccitelli, Psy.D., on the iPredator website. The people at iPredator identify themselves as an “Internet Safety Company founded to provide educational and advisory products and services to online users on cyberbullying, cyber harassment, cyberstalking, cybercrime, internet defamation, cyber terrorism, online sexual predation, and cyber deception.”
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
I think before the “media” can provide any useful service in this area they have to rebuild their own brand. Right now their trustworthiness polls on a level with Congress. So if you see a hard-hitting interview between a news star and a high profile troll or politician or whoever, the first question is “who do I trust in this conversation.” If the answer is neither, then it hardly matters the quality of the questioning. Now, as to how they should go about rebuilding “trust”....that would take a book!
Part 1:
To me, “media” and “mainstream media” and “corporate media” are essentially synonymous.
When I use the single word “Media,” I mean the mainstream media that include the major television and radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. Traditional, corporate-owned outlets like ABC and NBC, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, like Newsweek and Forbes.
While they have done a fabulous job of presenting the arguments of Capitol and management and a piss-poor job of representing Labor and workers, their news departments are RARELY guilty of flagrant lying and really shouldn’t have to establish trust in that respect.
So, if someone see a hard-hitting interview between a news star and a high profile troll or politician, if the first question is “who do I trust in this conversation,” that someone a) hasn’t been paying attention, or b) watches way too much FoxNews.
Part 2:
When I see or hear the single word “Media,” I assume it’s being used like above. It it’s not, then the writer/speaker is doing a poor job of communicating.
Part 3:
Almost all of the lying, mis- and dis-information, and fabrications, and come from NON-traditional outlets, starting with talk-radio on AM stations, and now websites on the Internet. No matter how BIG and powerful Limbaugh and O’Reilly may be, they are no not part of “the media.”
They are glorified orators standing on a box in front of a crowd.
This is, of course, changing.
Part 4:
Almost all of the lying, mis- and dis-information, and fabrications come from non-traditional outlets found on talk-radio and websites come from rightwing outlets.
The vert concepts of “alternative facts” and “fake news sites” are associated exclusively with the right.
That the mainstream media does NOT make this obvious is due to their underlying conservative philosophies.