There’s no good way to deal with trolls, so you might as well tattle to their mums
WASHINGTON: The insults and violent threats had been appearing on her screen for weeks when Amanda Kleinman decided to fight back.
She scrolled through hundreds of aggressive messages, searching for the one that troubled her the most. Her online accounts had been inundated since “Pizzagate,” the viral fake-news conspiracy theory that linked Hillary Clinton to a non-existent child sex-trafficking ring. Because Kleinman’s band had performed at the Washington restaurant at the center of the bogus claims, she, too, was being called a paedophile. Conspiracy theorists had publicised her address, sent messages to her employer and threatened her with words so vile that there is no printable euphemism to describe them.
She had called the police. She had talked to the press. She had ranted on social media. Now it was time to tattle to their mothers.
Click. She landed on the Facebook profile for the most vile of her harassers. Click. She was viewing his friends. It took only a few minutes to find the woman she was looking for.
“Dear Lamia,” she wrote. “I wanted to know if you have a son named John?”
For people targeted by Internet “trolls,” the absence of a clear solution is often the most frustrating part. If you retaliate by speaking publicly about your plight, you are likely to make yourself a bigger target. If you stay quiet in hopes that the stalkers will move on, you may feel like you’ve let the trolls silence you. Kleinman was tired of this lose-lose situation.
“I have never met John and it makes me terribly sad,” she wrote to his mother. “I only tell you in case this is your son and maybe you should speak to him.”
Kleinman’s alternatives were, she felt, limited. Socialmedia platforms are typically reluctant to punish trolls for fear of violating free speech. On Twitter, for example, users can block a troll; but that only means the troll’s comments will be removed from their timeline, not from Twitter completely. Victims can file complaints that might get a troll banned from the platform. Yet even as one disappears, dozens of others may pop up, like a nightmarish game of Whac-a-Mole.
People being harassed can alert the police, but law enforcement has struggled to identify and prosecute anonymous online harassers.
Of the millions of people who were stalked and harassed online between 2010 and 2013, only 10 cyber-stalking cases were filed in federal courts during that time, according to a review by “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace” author Danielle Citron. These situations nearly always involve not one harasser, but dozens or even thousands threatening or spreading a false rumour about their victim.
“Every single individual who promotes (the rumor) is part of the problem, but none of them are actually criminally responsible,” explained Mary Anne Franks, the legislative policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which advocates for laws to protect online victims.
Franks said there is no “one size fits all” approach for dealing with trolls, but she doesn’t recommend trying to reason with them.
“There is nothing you can say to them that won’t give them more to work with,” Franks said.
Satirist Vic Berger learned that lesson shortly after “Pizzagate.” Berger rose to Internet fame by creating bizarre videos about the presidential campaign for the online video network Super Deluxe. He started a Twitter feud with Mike Cernovich, a socialmedia personality known for spreading false rumours about Clinton and her supporters during the election, along with the false theories about Comet Ping Pong, the pizza parlour in Northwest Washington.
As Berger mocked him on Twitter, his followers also engaged, and Cernovich claims they tweeted offensive images at him. So in return, Cernovich repeatedly accused Berger of being involved with a paedophile ring.
Berger tried reporting him, but Twitter wouldn’t shut down his account. He tried calling out Cernovich for inciting death threats against him. But the attacks just became more heated.
“These guys do sort of know how to work the system and bendnot-break the rules, so it’s really difficult,” Berger explained in an email. “After awhile you just get sick of looking at that kind of sick/hateful/negative content and you just kind of have to move on for your own mental health.”
After a man armed with an assault rifle stormed Comet Ping Pong to “investigate” the Pizzagate claims in December, Berger realised that it was entirely possible for the threats against him to become real. So after calling lawyers and the police, he quit Twitter, at least temporarily, until there is some sort of resolution to Cernovich’s attacks.
“It sucks to have to sort of ‘back down’ from a guy like that,” Berger said.
Backing down might be an effective solution, but it’s a wholly unsatisfying one. And so comes the urge to reach through the Internet abyss and metaphorically - smack the trolls back.
After a troll impersonated her dead father on Twitter, writer and activist Lindy West penned a powerful essay arguing that the Internet treats women like “subhuman garbage.”
The next day, a man claiming to be the person who created the fake account wrote her a heartfelt apology and donated US$50 (RM225) to the cancer hospital that treated West’s father. — WP-Bloomberg