Great read from the NYT.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Notable Quotables:

"If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

"Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others."

--> This is the great online mirror. Hold yours up for others to see themselves in, while returning the favor in like kind.

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quote:

He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”

“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”

“What do you mean? What did I do?”

“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

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quote:

Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.

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quote:

In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

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Now, the noodler:

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quote:

At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.”

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quote:

In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.

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quote:

All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

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quote:

“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”

Which prompted this:

“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”

And this:

“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”

There were echoes of antiquity:

“good: pleasure; bad: pain”

“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

And flirtations with postmodernity:

“good and bad are subjective”

“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”

Books were prescribed:

“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”

And then finally this:

“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”

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I don't think that this is a new problem. There were many parallels to this in the world of CB radio.

As I understand it, the chaos that CB radio became in its later years started when getting on the air became very easy and accessible to a large part of society--that is when licensing requirements were dropped and CB equipment became relatively cheap. Likewise, getting Internet access today has become fairly trivial: telephone and cable companies have been trying to outdo each other in providing low-cost Internet service, and Internet access can now be had free in many libraries, restaurants, coffee shops, and workplaces.

In CB radio, people created "handles" and sometimes presented themselves on the air as they wished for people to see them rather than as they were in reality. The same behavior has carried over to the Internet.

In CB radio, people sometimes went over the line on what they said over the air under the assumption that they would never meet the person whose voice was coming out of the radio. Likewise, people have written hurtful or abusive things online, assuming that they would never meet the person to whom these words were directed. In either setting, the illusion exists that when the radio or the computer is turned off, the person on the other end vanishes.

With both CB radio and the Internet, on-air or on-line taunting has led to tragedy or destructive behavior. Several years ago, a Vancouver man was killed in a fight that started with an argument carried out on CB radio. More recently, a girl (Megan Meier of Missouri) committed suicide over the humiliation that she suffered when she became the target of an online hoax.

I don't know what the best solution is to these problems, other than to use existing anti-slander laws. Banning the use of handles and fictitious identities seems a bit over-the-top to me. I consider people who hide behind fake personas while launching insults or accusations to be--to put it nicely--chicken.

"use existing anti-slander laws."

To even have a chance of winning a slander case, you have to show that you were harmed financally. This almost always means showing you were deprived of substancial income that you were earning prior to the event that caused the loss.

I say, if winning slander cases takes a stupendous amount of proof, so be it. I certainly would not like for it to become very easy to sue somebody because of comments on an Internet message forum. Among other things, fear of potential lawsuits would scare a lot of people away from participating.

"I say, if winning slander cases takes a stupendous amount of proof, so be it."

I agree.

By the way, libel is just a wee bit easier prove because, well, ink is kinda hard to erase and anything deleted on the internet is never really deleted.

Agreed here too.

Also, if these cases were easy to do, that would contradict the first amendment.

It's not a shield. I don't mean that. I do mean there is a chilling effect when litigation is out of balance.

Pissing somebody off just isn't criminal. It's bad form sometimes, no question. Other times it's just an artifact of what is otherwise a rational and valid discussion.

And that's what we need to be careful to protect. If we limit that, then we limit social pressure that is necessary for people to improve and grow in good ways.

It's a tough road, but a very effective one. I don't think we can legislate these things. They just happen as a result of people interacting.

Here's that guy featured in the
NYT article that 'Missing_kskd' posted:

http://www.komonews.com/news/26326529.html

Looks like a total douche to me.

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quote:

In an an eight-page motion seeking to dismiss the complaint, Fortuny wrote "I am frequently rude, unsympathetic, unempathetic, and politically incorrect, to put it mildly. But there's no law against that."

Fortuny is representing himself in the federal lawsuit and said he had no means to afford a lawyer.

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Can't someone protect them self from something like this by posting a disclaimer on their site that if the reader doesn't like the content, they can leave and not visit that website again?

I don't think so.

It's not any particular reader being unhappy with the content, but the idea that readers in general could have both their awareness of the target of the content and their perception of the reputation of the target altered by the content that is at issue.

You are pretty safe if you post up factual stuff, and support it. People act like asses all the time. Documenting that isn't a crime really.

(though you still may have to endure a suit)

What this guy did was encourage people, or lie, or misrepresent the situation, then post that.

On one hand, probably the men who sent replies in poor form shouldn't have. On the other, this guy was baiting.

Not sure how it's all gonna go down, but I think personally he asked for it and is now getting it.

Jason Fortuny is not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. He says that he can't afford a lawyer, yet if he loses, he is looking at having to pay about $75,000.

The place where I think that this crossed the line from being just a prank or social experiment, as Fortuny claims, was when he decided to post the identities and contact information of the men who responded to the ads. At that point, one could say that Fortuny was promoting the harassment of or deliberately humiliating these men.