The Dark Side: Trolling

Trolling is a term that I’d heard my brothers talk about but I never really knew what it meant. This week in class we discussed the dark side of communication including trolling, spamming, and flaming. Trolling is defined as posting inappropriate, malicious, or inflammatory messages in an online group with the intention of disrupting the community or causing emotional responses in its members.

This act of online communication has causes issues of bullying and even death. Trolls will attack a tribute site, causing grief and emotional trauma to families. Hannah Smith is a prime example of this. She was bullied relentlessly on ask.fm, a question-and-answer site. Users encouraged her to kill herself and posted comments such as “drink bleach” and “bitch”. The horrible messages and bullying drove Hannah to kill herself. According to the DailyDot, Hannah was the seventh teenager to kill herself after being bullied on this site.

The trolling took on a new level when obscene messages from anonymous users started popping up on Hannah Smith’s Facebook remembrance page. Her page has 47,000 likes and dozens of inappropriate comments. “Stupid attention whoring bitch deserved it anyway...” is an example of a comment on her tribute page. The 4chan imageboard behind it all, /b/, is behind some of the most sadistic pranks on the Internet. Their other pranks include rigging a poll so that Kiim Jong-un won TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year and putting names like “Hitler did nothing wrong” on a flavoring poll for Mountain Dew.

Reading this article, and others about trolling and bullying, has left me astounded at what people do on the internet. Sure, I can understand wanting to poke fun at people and leave silly or inflammatory comments. But posting atrocious, obscene remarks on a page that drives a teenager to kill herself? This I do not understand. Do these people have no remorse? And continuing the comments on her remembrance page is just wrong. A response to “We all miss you princess. Sleep tight.” was “I’m sure she’ll sleep very tightly while Satan is molesting her.” What?! How could someone write that! It is so wrong on so many levels.

I think this is a great example of the dark side of communication. It demonstrates how communicating through a media depersonalizes messages. It makes it easier for people to send nasty messages because there are no consequences. It’s easier to do this when you don’t have to look a person in the eyes and say it to their face.

I wish that these people could be held responsible for their actions. They drove a teenaged girl to suicide. However, it is difficult to determine if their actions were the only cause behind her death. It is also difficult to censor online activity. How do you determine if something is obscene or lewd? There are no real precedents for laws surrounding cyber bullying. Hopefully in the future there will be some control over it so no more teenagers die.

http://www.dailydot.com/news/4chan-hannah-smith-suicide-facebook-trolls/