In this week’s talk regarding online trolling and cyber bullying, there were many things that were of interest, but two things stood out to me the most. The first thing I learned was that people are taking internet trolling far more seriously than they did back then. As mentioned in the article, Online trolling used to be funny, but now the term refers to something far more sinister from an edition by The Conversation, they mentioned replacing the word “trolling” and associating it with cyberbullying. Honestly to me, I couldn’t have agreed more to this. When you decided to assign someone commenting vulgar words as “trolling”, it takes away the victim’s experience and voice. It labels victims as sensitive or “snowflake” as some may call it. It’s time we name it for what it is which is cyberbullying. It’s not funny to comment hateful speech to anyone online or offline. Thus, to see researchers proposing in framing it in a different setting greatly showed that change are being made.
The second thing that stood out was how only 19% of the total surveyed population mentioned that social media will involve less harassment in the future. From the data gathered by the Pew Research Center on their article “The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online”, that 19% made me wonder just how many people were and continue to be impacted by online trolls. Additionally, if so many are impacted by online trolls, why aren’t there more resources out for everyone to utilize? It made me wonder how we can provide more support to increase that 19% to at least 40 at the minimum for a positive outlook on our future.
Moving on, everyone has been impacted by some sort of online trolling or harassment. I included have also gone through it during my youth days when I was still young and naive. Without going into much detail, one of my friends thought it was funny to comment vulgar stuff on my social media pictures. With my naive self, I didn’t say anything but went along fully knowing that it greatly harmed me internally. Those vulgar comments soon got others to think that it was okay to say it to me online and offline. It got to the point where I didn’t feel welcome to my friends or want to engage online. It took sometimes for me to realize just how toxic this friendship was that I decided to tell this friend to knock it off. After I put my foot down, that friend stopped and apologized for their rude behavior. We lost connection after middle school, but I learned that you need to address things while it’s still small. Of course, you can avoid all this headache by carefully choosing who you befriend and also interact with online. If you let in positive people, you will only be met with mostly positive things.
In thinking about my situation, the platform that it happened on was Facebook. With so many users on Facebook, it’s easy for trolls and other people to get connected to each other. Thus, you can imagine how easy it is to conduct trolling activity online. Through google scholar, a well credited site made for research purpose, I came upon this article, “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online” by Whitney Philips. As Phillips mentioned, Facebook is a buffet for trolling. Users can easily create a profile and simply scroll through comments of trolls and befriend them. This allows them to gain fast access to nationwide trolls to form a group. In regard to death and the victim’s facebook profile, it was impossible to delete a user’s profile back in the earlier days according to Philips.
Thus, it allowed these internet trolls to steal pictures of those victim’s and create nasty post/meme out of them. To combat this, facebook then decided to allow the deletion of a deceased person profile and only allow close friends and family can still see the user’s profile for their own grieving space. As we can see, with how easy it is to sign up for a facebook account and instantly be connected to millions, trolls can rapidly form and take over spaces online that are made to remember or help find others.
