Don’t overreact to the naughty netizens
A few bad apples are found in every basket, and netizens are no exception – as China well knows.
With countless millions of netizens posting comments about the news and relaying information via social media, even a small percentage of bad apples is a large absolute number. And it’s all too easy to overreact.
Of course, that’s what they’re looking for – a reaction. They want to stir things up. Like a naughty kid teasing a sibling, naughty netizens win when somebody gets upset. I prefer not to give them the satisfaction.
A few Internet trolls deliberately try to mislead. Others are insensitive to human tragedy or just plain meanspirited. Still others, like jackals, seem to hunt in packs to savage anyone who doesn’t conform to their prejudices.
Take, for example, the case of Christine Fan, the singer from Taiwan who was viciously upbraided last week for posting pictures of her babies during — gasp! — the Victory Day celebrations on Sept 3. The ill-mannered message was that nobody should be doing anything but stiffly watching the parade and dabbing a patriotic tear now and then.
Never mind that a mother’s ability to experience a moment of joy with her babies is the very reason good people go to war in the first place. They fight to save their homes and families, to secure the blessings of peace, to establish justice, to raise life to a higher plane, above the bestial struggle that has been mankind’s lot for most of recorded time.
On seeing those baby pictures, it was the nattering netizens who should have been dabbing tears.
As editor of a daily newspaper in the United States just as social media was emerging, I became well-acquainted with natterers. Their vicious comments ranged from the ridicule of a man’s suicide to unconscionable jokes about rape victims and children born with deformities.
Judging from the sheer number of their posts, some couldn’t possibly be gainfully employed. They had to be sitting in front of their computers and trash-talking virtually all day long.
One day I met one of these trolls in person. He came to my office angry that I had blocked all of his coarse online comments. My suspicions were confirmed: He had been unemployed for years because of an injury, and posting comments was indeed his primary pursuit in life. By contrast with journalists — who are interested in vetted accuracy — this brand of netizen is interested only in appearing clever (at least in their own minds) in the vast, anonymous ocean of the Internet.
Like weeds, such individuals crop up in China as well, variously exposing private information, passing judgment without knowing all the facts or posting deliberate fabrications.
In the US these days, we’ve grown past worrying about them. We mainly just roll our eyes. The more important thing is that people have learned which information sources they can trust. News often breaks on unreliable social media. But it’s only confirmed via professional mainstream journalists whose livelihoods depend on credibility.
The best remedy for bad information is good information.