I don't know... it's kind of comfy under this bridge...

I think it's ridiculous that the guy is being locked up. Yea, facebook is a convenient medium to reach friends and family.... but it's a public free service that you do not have complete control over.

Ban his ass? Sure. Jail him? Ridiculous.

 

Sometimes it's hard to recall that outside the U. S. of A. "freedom of speech" is just a concept. It has so many caveats and reservations you couldn't even really deign to call it an implied right any more.

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook yesterday. It's an opinion piece from an Australian newspaper written by a Canadian. It may be a little alarmist, but I think it's thought provoking.

Add into the mix the correlation between "general" and "targeted", and then consider the concept of malice.

If someone trolls to get a kick out of it and just be a dumbass because it's funny, then it's harmless and anyone who gets inordinately upset probably needs to be taken down a peg or two. But what if it's:

- In a situation where a reasonable person should know better? It could be anything from a serious discussion thread to a memorial Facebook page for a deceased baby. That's not the place for trolling.
- It's a repeated and consistent intervention? Then the trolling is just the outlet of something more vicious, akin to stalking.
- Targeted to a particular person or event? The same ticket, it comes into the realm of stalking.
- Genuine malice? A whole realm of wrongdoing potentially opens up.

All well and good, of course, because intent can only be inferred without a confession. And we know how adept trolls generally are at evading the truth.

The outcome is that any country without guaranteed freedom of speech (most of them, if not all but one) will set limits on "good taste". This makes it hard to police, hard to prove and tends to polarise people depending on their particular outlook.

Perhaps this is where I should apologise for trolling this thread with serious concepts...

 

Any group on the Internet that is motivated by ideology beyond the point of reason is, IMHO, fair game for trolling. Politics, religion, drugs, laws you don't like, whatever. If your world admits no shades of gray and all you do is bitch about "the other side" keeping you down (without ever doing anything about it), I have no sympathy. The most masterful trolls are the ones where the troll takes a (slightly or grossly) exaggerated version of the groupthink position (to an absurd result), and then gets the group to argue against its own positions.

 

I have to say, the constant trolling on the internet has had some annoying effects.

I regularly post on Fark.com and I first noticed it there, but I have since noticed it everywhere on the internet. If you post something you honestly believe, and someone else reads it, and disagrees with you, you are automatically trolling to them.

It seems like people are so set in their beliefs, that they don't honestly think that someone could have a different viewpoint, so when they see someone post a view that differs from their own, it is automatically dismissed as someone pulling shit. It really makes having a rational discussion impossible.

 

Just as a small side note, threats are already a crime in the States and I would be surprised if they weren't also a crime in countries that have British derived legal systems like Australia. Generally speaking, threatening someone is assault and then actually attacking them is battery.

That aside, as much as I consider personal insults and many forms of trolling to be extremely distateful and the mark of wretched lowlifes, I do not want to criminalize words that do not rise to the level of threat. I also distinguish harrassment as harrassment has this element, speaking just in terms of how I (not the law) view it, of intruding into a private space or otherwise hindering a person from their business. So yelling hate speech in a public march should be legal, walking into someone's house or e-mail bombing them after they;ve told you to stop should not. Nor should following someone down the sidewalk and screaming at them be legally protected from censure as it crosses that ethereal line from making a public statement to genuinely impacting a person's ability to go about their life. But just calling someone names in general or being mean is something we should have to deal with without the police.

 

I loosely classify trolling into four categories; toying with someone skillfully (and ideally without them even realizing it) to bring the funny, crap that is meant to disrupt everything/everyone (usually with over-the-top stuff meant to invoke a huge reactionary response), and bullying/posturing just to raise shit and be confrontational. The last kind is the "I'm right and I won't let it go until everyone agrees with me", aka KiMaster.

The first kind is the absolute best and the most fun, especially when someone who normally rides the short bus is the target and oblivious. It might be a considered a bit cruel in some cases, but anonymity on the internet lets us indulge in a bit of "wrong" behaviour that we probably wouldn't condone otherwise. I'm sure it's healthy for us in some way... right Dr. Rob? These are the best Wahoo's like from the Max board.

The second sucks and is the product of a bitter or fucked up person who is probably an ostracized "loser" in real life, and likes the attention that their shit brings them... even bad attention. I think that's where this guy from the article slots in.

The third kind of trolls are the ones that feel superior to everyone and enjoy getting away with just fucking with people and being confrontational just because they can, or are bored. Probably a similar mind set as the JackAss crew... fuck with other people because they think it's funny. Kind of like the classic jock-picking-on-nerds scene. I'd say Poopouri falls into that group, from the posts I've seen. They can be kind of funny, but usually get boring after a while. Except for BallSack, who kind of mixes it up a bit. I did find 3.0 better than 4.0 though. And he needs to get his nemesis back... where is Gris?


The KiMaster types troll without even knowing it. I find the worst of these trolls are found in the "is there a God" or racist threads, where there is blind faith or belief involved.

 

On the internet? That's my average work day. Consumer advocates are the trolls of the real world.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with this. My ex-girlfriend was a "feminist" and I use the term in quotes because I don't think she really was. Anyhow, she brought to my attention an article on one her feminist websites calling the Kendra sex tape a borderline rape video.(none of them had actually watched the video) The article was written so poorly and it was riddled with misinformation that I HAD to comment on it.

After my well thought out statement correcting wrong information and reasonably voicing my opinion, I was promptly banned and the mod told the rest of the group to "not feed the trolls".

 

Did you have the same signature from here?

Tug boats arise, the problem is that trolls kind of ruin those sorts of sites for everyone. Feminist sites get so many trolls that they're weary and super trigger-quick on anything that even sounds a little mansplainy. It is very hard for a guy to disagree on some sites, and part of the blame is that so many people go there to troll and mock feminists. I got accused of trolling once for using the term QED -- which wasn't the annoying part. The annoying part was that I was just saying OED (as in Oxford English Dictionary), which in context should be have been pretty obvious.

I've gotten off-topic, but on sites that get trolled frequently, you usually have to go above and beyond to prove you're not a troll.

 

It was not a message board like this. It was Jezebel or Shakesville or something. I can't remember. It was clear that no matter what I said or how well I said it, a troll is what I was to be classified as.

 

I would think that the problem is more that you're trying to "argue in someone else's voice". Think of those sites like a newspaper, and the mods like the editor. Are they going to continually publish articles that are countering their agenda? Not on your life. For one thing, no matter how liberal their ideas are, their readers don't want to read about it. A site with no readers is really just another ranty blog.

Getting back to the topic, though, what was described was not trolling except in the sense that it was labelled as such. Like I think I said earlier, it comes down to intent. xrayvision's post says to me that the intent wasn't to troll but rather to give a reasoned opinion, and I would expect that it was couched that way. Trolls are just there to cause shit. That's a pretty big difference.

Calling someone a troll just because they have a differing opinion to you doesn't make them a troll, but it might just make you a whiny, intolerable loser. In some respects, it's the internet equivalent of "your mother..."

 

Mmmm-HMMMMMMM. Well said. And all too common. That's one of the prime reason this is currently my only message board.

People also like to let their spurs jingle and jangle a lot more on the internet than they do in real life, as well. Remember the e-tough days on message boards? Dudes actually picking scraps with each other over the most trivial shit? This was/is most common in sports boards:

"What? You're tough on here, but are you tough in real life, faggot? The answer is no. You're HALF a faggot. I could fuck your shit up in an instant. You name the parking lot, pussy. Not up for it? Thought so."

...meanwhile he's probably some Sharp Knees clone sitting in his darkened parent's basement bobbing in a bowl of Cheetos because his hands are never free. It's frustrating that these schmucks can't comprehend that everybody is different. You know what? It's the way it is. Besides, we NEED our opposites, opponents and our enemies or life would be boring. Without Hitler, there would be no Churchill. Without KIMaster, there would be no....member of this board. Without Abercrombie, there'd be no Fitch. And without Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker is just another teenager in jammies soul-kissing his twin sister.

 

It's not that I don't honestly think that someone could have a different view point... It's just that in many cases, I think they're an idiot or an awful human being if they do. And that's true for everyone (Pedophiles are bad. Different viewpoint? you're an idiot or an awful human being.) We all have a line - where we stop being open minded and start being judgmental as fuck. You raped your wife to death with a pick handle, after she made you a sandwich and forgot to cut the crusts off, and you stand by that decision? I'm comfortably prepared to judge you. You fired a staff member because they started an interracial relationship? I still don't have any real issues judging you, and don't give a fuck about your viewpoint. Your girlfriend sucked 27 dicks, possibly in a row, before you started dating, and you're upset about that? I don't see the problem, but I do see that we could have different view points - I probably won't judge.

We all have a line somewhere between 'I understand your view point but disagree' and 'I'm sorry, but murdering 6 million jews isn't something we can agree to disagree on'. The problem is that the internet makes that line fuzzy. It all to often alternates between astonishingly clear insight into our friends that we'd never have in person (Well I never mentioned it because we don't have any black friends Ronald, but as it happens, no I don't consider them people) and fuzzy insights into poorly constructed sentences and badly communicated jokes filtered through our own raging prejudices (YOU SAID YOU LIKE MOUSTACHES YOU NAZI! WE WERE TALKING ABOUT HITLER IN THE OTHER THREAD AND YOU ONCE MENTIONED THE NUMBER88, OH MY GOD, MY MOTHER IS PART JEWISH YOU FUCK!), both of which make that line incredibly blurry on the internet. And the consequences of making those judgements in person that are serious enough to make us pause and think, are absent on the intarwebs. So we treat people who wear hats in ways we disagree with, the same way we treat the guy with the pick handle.

 

To be fair she was given plenty of warnings, I think she was just testing me at that point and I'm not going to let some trollop call me out with no repercussions.

Besides, does anyone REALLY like crust on sandwiches? I thought that was common sense.

 

Can't believe I forgot one of the masters of trolling.

 

I cut my crusts off and put them in the bag next to the sandwich.... just like I cut her fingers off and put them in the bag next to her severed head.

 

The reason this is one of the few message boards I'm actually serious (non-trolling) on, is because people get called on their bullshit here. It's all too easy to sperg without knowing what the fuck you're talking about on other boards. And then, when you call them out, they're all like "Well that's just your opinion, man," or they do this:

Spoiler

I'm thinking specifically of political talk / IR stuff, especially on the Middle East. Banned here for obvious reasons (in a domestic sense anyways), but fair game in other places. I've mentioned the anti-American trend before, and it seems more of a general "Internet user" trend than anything. People need to be reminded that their environment does not define the world.

 

I've trolled before but I'm not as professional. If I'm watching a video from a band I love on youtube, I may throw something in the comments about how Lady GaGa or Linkin Park is better than, for example, Deftones. It's a good laugh to come back a week later and find you derailed the entire discussion into a flame war.

 

Who remembers this guy?

I like trolling only when it's funny and harmless, like that. Otherwise, I need you like I need cancer in my ballsack.