100 YEARS OLD AND STILL UNTROUBLED BY TROLLS...

TWO papers in academic journals have caught my attention this week, one about internet trolls and the other about cyber-bats. The troll paper detailed a study on people’s online behaviour showing how allegedly amusing banter can quickly degenerate into insults, harassment, personal abuse and even threats characteristic of trolling. The main findings were discouraging. Trying to combat it with regulations on social media sites has no effect, while “do not feed the trolls” advice, urging people to ignore their comments, was shown to be counter-productive.

This all reinforced my views on how difficult it can be to combat trolls, which originally formed at a very young age when I first heard the old Norwegian tale of the Billy Goats Gruff.

As you probably know, this featured a family of goats who wanted to cross a river to reach the rich grassland on the far bank. The only way across the river was a rickety bridge under which a troll was known to lurk.

First to try crossing the bridge was the youngest and smallest billy goat, who saved himself by suggesting to the troll that instead of eating him, he should wait for his mum, because she was bigger and more succulent. Mummy Billy Goat employed much the same trick, convincing the troll to wait for Daddy Billy Goat who would make an even bigger meal.

However Daddy Billy Goat was big enough to charge at the troll with his horns and toss him into the river, after which the troll was never seen again.

I have always thought that trolls would learn from such a tale that a Billy Goat in the stomach is worth two on the bridge and would eat any little ones that followed. I also have great doubts about the later family life among the Billy Goats Gruff, with the Daddy goat trying to explain why he endangered his wife and offspring instead of going first and tackling the troll at the start.

Fortunately though the second paper that attracted me suggests a way forward to tackling trolls though it doesn’t actually mention trolls at all.

Featured in the journal Science Robotics, it reports the invention of a robot that flies like a bat. Apparently this has proven very difficult. Robots that fly like birds are relatively simple but the 93-gram BatBot has needed dozens of articulated joins to simulate bat flight.

Now that it has been done however the path is clear for the ultimate anti-troll device. First, we can cross the BatBot with Robocop to produce a crime-fighting RoboBatmanBot. Then we’ll need some miniaturisation.

The internet is already crowded with WebBots which can buzz through billions of pages reading everything and performing tasks for their makers but adding their technology to our miniaturised RoboBatmanBots will produce WebRoboBatmanBots which will find all the trolls and toss them off the edges of the web. Or bite them and give them rabies or something.

I leave the details to the scientists, and look forward to an age of glorious trolllessness (one of the few English words with a triple l, incidentally).