Long-time
readers of this blog know that we have had a more or less steady procession of
trolls who have inhabited these precincts. They lurk. They come and go. Some
are grumpy. Some argue; some take a thread and take it off point.
Some are
annoying. I leave them alone so long as they live within the rules of the blog
(no insulting your host because you are in my living room, no cursing, no
conspiracy-mongering, a basic level of civility—and no monopolizing the
comments section).
I
have never asked others who blog what they do with their trolls. I just play it
by ear. On severe; occasions, I have banned them when they broke the rules.
Sometimes I put them in a queue to moderate their comments before they are
posted to make sure they don’t continue their bad behavior. I give them a
warning before there are consequences. But I am generally very tolerant.
It
turns out that there are people who actually study troll behavior and offer
advice about how to deal with them. The New York Times recently published an article on
“the epidemic of facelessness.” This is a phenomenon new to our age, in which
people communicate without having face-to-face contact.
Much online interaction
is between complete strangers. Online interactions can sometimes allow
people–in their anonymity–to unleash a level of rage and hostility that they
would never express in a face-to-face encounter. Some people have received
death threats or rape threats online from total strangers, which happens to be
criminal activity.
Stephen
Marche writes:
What
do we do with the trolls? It is one of the questions of the age. There are
those who argue that we have a social responsibility to confront them. Mary
Beard, the British historian, not only confronted a troll who sent her
misogynistic messages, she befriended him and ended up writing him letters of
reference. One young video game reviewer, Alanah Pearce, sent Facebook messages
to the mothers of young boys who had sent her rape threats. These stories have
the flavor of the heroic, a resistance to an assumed condition: giving face to
the faceless.
The
more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage.
Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that demand
confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in everyday
digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a vampire with
your own blood,” as the comedian Andy Richter put it. Ironically, the Anonymous
collective, a pioneer of facelessness, has offered more or less the same
advice.
Rule
14 of their “Rules of the Internet” is, “Do not argue with trolls — it means
that they win.
Rule
19 is, “The more you hate it the stronger it gets.”
Ultimately,
neither solution — confrontation or avoidance — satisfies. Even if
confrontation were the correct strategy, those who are hounded by trolls do not
have the time to confront them. To leave the faceless to their facelessness is
also unacceptable — why should they own the digital space simply because of the
anonymity of their cruelty?
There
is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion. The
original trolls, Scandinavian monsters who haunted the Vikings, inhabited
graveyards or mountains, which is why adventurers would always run into them on
the road or at night. They were dull. They possessed monstrous force but only a
dim sense of the reality of others. They were mystical nature-forces that lived
in the distant, dark places between human habitations. The problem of
contemporary trolls is a subset of a larger crisis, which is itself a
consequence of the transformation of our modes of communication. Trolls breed
under the shadows of the bridges we build.
In
a world without faces, compassion is a practice that requires discipline, even
imagination. Social media seems so easy; the whole point of its pleasure is its
sense of casual familiarity. But we need a new art of conversation for the new
conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to
remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that
you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people
wouldn’t say to your face.”
Given
the national reach of the blog, I won’t be inviting any trolls for dinner. But
there is an important point here: face-to-face contact tends to dissipate the
rage that anonymity and facelessness promote. There is no way to make that
happen, unfortunately. So we should just bear with one another, listen to those
who join with us to argue every last point, be patient, be civil, and don’t
jump to judgment.