Keith Kloor re-tweeted Jaquelyn Gil’s suggestion for handling twitter trolls. She describes it thusly:
So, let’s try something different. The next time someone trolls you, respond with a science fact– and ONLY a science fact (it can be anything, not necessarily related to what you’re being trolled about). No insults, no rational debating, no sarcasm. You can use #TrollScienceFacts* (credit to David Steen for taking this idea to the next level with the tag) to let your followers know that they can join in on the fun, too, which can start an avalanche of awesome science facts cascading through the internet. A science fact is a compassionate act, allowing you to maintain a high ground and not escalate. A science fact is fun, and takes some of the stress out of being harassed. A science fact is helpful, and may actually have a positive impact where attempts at rational discourse would fail.
My first thought on reading it was, “Oh. Yeah. That’s gonna work. For Sure…..”
I then clicked over to the the hashtag and soon found an exchange in which the rather unpleasant Rob O’Sullivan uses the strategy against the likely equally unpleasant Luke Pasarella:
Note: in this exchange Rob
- Is quoted making snide remarks about the sexual adequacy of others.
- When Rob is criticized for making the snide remarks, Rob accuses his critic of sexual inadequacy.
- When asked why he thinks he has has a right to make fun of others responds by using the #TrollScienceFacts/ Science factoid one -two.
Now, I’m not going to dive hunt through either Luke or Rob’s entire twitter history and figure out if one or both are out and out trolls, nor to figure out which one has the greater troll-quotient. I’m also not going to hunt through Lenny Teytelman’s to see if he often resorts to “trolling others by posting a troll worthy quote.”
But I think it’s safe to say that Rob exhibited pretty strong troll tendencies in that particular thread.
Yet he is the one who invoked this new “anti-troll” techniques suggesting that– somehow– Rob is blithely unaware of how trollish he looks. Go. Figure.
My diagnosis so far: Thinking up and indulging in these “anti-troll” techniques seems very “14-years old”. One would hope adults would have outgrown that sort of thing. But perhaps not.
Note that Jacquelyn’s proposed #TrollScienceFacts hash-tag to scientists. Perhaps some scientists will enjoy doing this for a while. To the extent they do so, I think they will look childish. Worse: I can imagine few things that would bring greater joy to a true trolls heart than to make their target look childish. Gladdening the hearts of trolls hardly constitutes “troll-killing” in my view. But then, that’s just me.
What do you think?
My opinion of the exercise is that it has failed miserably. It appears “deniers” have taken over the hashtag.
It also appears the “warmists” only seem to post strange facts about animals, but never with a reference to back up the claim.
The “warmists” also appear to resort to blocking, when confronted with references. Or just simply label them “false facts”.
“Those who object to the hashtag” taking over the hashtag was inevitable and forseeable. That’s what *happens* with hashtags.
Also, the claimed “benefit” of educating people (in any meaningful way) seems dubious both because:
1) As you noted the ‘factoid’ seem to be nothing but odd facts about animals and
2) Scanning the hashtag page, the people posting generally strip out the the tweet handles including that of the “troll”. When this is done, the result is the only people who might learn that factoid are those who already follow the person who is flinging out the factoid. I suspect those would often be people in the same field who have a high probability of knowing the factoid.
3) It unlikely the factoid will be of any particular use to people who are in a different field as it’s not embedded in any general knoweldge. (Perhaps it might be useful for those preparing to win at Jeopardy. But otherwise… uhmmmm huh?)
Oddly, Jacqulyn seems to perceive mere criticism of her proposed strategy as criticism of herself. One would think a scientist would understand the difference. I’m not going to try to summarize what her argument in favor of her strategy appears to be based on Twitter threads because… well… twitter thread. But, it looked bad I read the proposal. And it continues to look bad based on the evidence at the thread itself.
That some scientists may enjoy indulging in this really isn’t a counter argument to my view that it makes those indulging in it look childish. (And often trollish.)
Yes, agreed. It is trollish and childish behaviour, which I also indulged in. And, like chocolate, it is a guilty pleasure.
As the “deniers” seem to have taken over, the hashtag has evolved. Now it is being used to find out who to block. This also seems to defeat the purpose, which I assume was education and communication, however misguided that was.
It is no wonder that AGW is at the bottom of concerns.
Les
Funny. Mind you, I don’t think there is much wrong with blocking people. People have a right to limit conversations to those they like. I can’t say I mind one way or the other if someone does block me. On occasion I’ve discovered I was blocked by reading the ‘threads’ under ‘view thread’, and mostly I’ve laughed that someone I don’t follow and can’t even remember tweeting to/about/ etc. has blocked me!
That said: if the hashtag page is being used to decide who to block, I would suggest that is evidence the strategy doesn’t “work”. Or at least it doesn’t “work” in the sense of being an alternative to “ignore, and hit the block button ” or “report”. It appeared to be proposed as a alternative.
But perhaps “working” means something else. 🙂
Yep
https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/648807752316358656
Jaquelyn Gill herself was tweeting
“Unsurprisingly, #trollsciencefacts is getting trolled. It’s a handy way to find people to block!” at 5:33 AM – 29 Sep 2015.
So, in fact, this has “failed” as an alternative to blocking by the time I posted this blog.
Rob comes across not so much as a troll but rather as an oddly fixated creep.
It is interesting that a climate kook would think posting random out of context facts and blocking people is a way to make their obsession look more credible.
hunter,
Creepy and Troll aren’t either or.
Yes. Rob seems creepy.
I also think his posting “I respect your choice to be sexually inadequate” on an entirely public board like twitter nestles pretty well inside
“One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument “, and so evidence of “troll”
Lukes actual response was rather tame– and Rob responded with the “#TrollScienceFacts/fairly unimportant science factoid”.
Whether Rob is always or often trollish I can’t say. But in this exchange he looks like a creepy troll.
I saw this a few days ago and thought it was dumb. What’s really dumb though, is the person behind it. I came across this because a person had tweeted:
So I responded:
Now, in one fork of the conversation, this led to the exchange:
Showing I clearly didn’t support the idea global warming is a scam, or that she should be criticized for believing global warming is a real thing. But in another fork, I apparently was labeled a troll to be publicly ridiculed:
So Jacquelyn isn’t just wanting to troll trolls. She’s wanting to troll anyone who says anything that she dislikes, regardless of what it might actually mean.
Huh. I just had another comment land in moderation like I was a first time commenter. I clicked the link to verify my e-mail address, but I don’t see the comment.
I wonder what’s going on that causes me to trip that.
“Oddly, Jacqulyn seems to perceive mere criticism of her proposed strategy as criticism of herself.”
This is odd? Gotta say that in my experience this is pretty much the default setting for life in general, let alone the Twittersphere.
As far as the rest of it is concerned, I’m unclear why blocking isn’t a reasonable strategy (not a Twitter user). Unless the idea is to try and make the trolls look foolish in the hope they’ll go away, heads hung in shame. It’s probably going to fail because trolling and obsession tend to go hand in hand. Experience with the rest of the internet would indicate that, often, the trolls have more patience, time and determination than those they are trolling.
Blocking still looks to be the best approach, though not using Twitter would also work…
Steve Crook
I tended to imagine making them “go away” was the goal. But if so, the strategy has clearly not worked. She managed to attract people she considers trolls to her hashtag.
And she ended up using her strategy twice at the thread Brandon linked:
https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/648101326925246465
In that case, she “#TrollScienceFact” bombed Brandon and Tom Nelson (Brandon for asking Tom a question. ) Then she hash-tag bombed another person.
Not sure why everyone doesn’t reply with ‘(twitter handle). Did you know NaCl is table salt?’ Or ‘(twitter handle). Did you know Kangaroos are marsupials.”
I’ve done that to those who drop the bomb on me. Based on reactions, it seems those who drop the bomb tend to really dislike that sort of response.
Here’s an idea: stop tweeting.
From what I see secondhand (I choose not to participate) twitter messaging rarely fails to devolve into schoolyard squabbles. I know of nothing of value that can be adequately discussed in 140-character bites hampered with a time delay and a social clue filter. Maybe its real function is to let people misbehave in a semi-permissible way. It certainly doesn’t advance knowledge or understanding.
Gary,
I’ve had interesting and engaging twitter conversations– or at least both I and the other parties involved find them so.
But I agree that twitter often doesn’t work so well. Blocking/banning/muting are all useful control features. (Muting helps if you realize you want to drop out but find interacting too tempting yourself. Later you unmute. )
Certainly if someone is claiming to have too many bad interactions on Twitter, they can opt out of twitter. I suspect the difficulty is they want to *use* twitter to achieve some goal that Twitter is unsuited to. You can’t force those who disagree with you to stop criticizing your views, positions, tweets or blog posts on Twitter. They have as much a right to tweet as anyone.
In any case, looking over the viewable “infractions” that result in the #TrollScienceFacts/ factoid bomb, aren’t objectively trollsish. While writing htis, I visited the hastag, and took a screenshot of one. I’ll show in a minute. You can decide if Tindakan’s is obviously “trollish” or whether Adam P. Summers throw the bomb out there just ‘cuz.
Gary: Here’s the most recent example.
Maybe Tindakan was “trolling”, maybe not. I think it’s pretty clear he doesn’t sahre Adam P. Summers POV on something to do with fish. But it’s hard for an outsider to detect what’s “trolling” about this.
Evidently, TindakanOrg and Fishguy_FHL were disagreeing over
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-bekoff/ridiculously-gorgeous-rar_b_8201720.html
TindakanOrg thinks researchers should not kill extremely rare birds for the purposes of research. How rare? It’s described as: “identified and photographed the first-ever male mustached kingfisher.“.
Many people share TindakanOrg’s views. But evidently such a view is worthy of having hte #trollsciencefacts bomb shot at you. Go figure.
As for who really is the troll, we can find earlier parts of the conversation.
https://twitter.com/search?q=Lack%20of%20knowledge%20kills%20species&src=typd
.
Who’s the troll here? Summers who jumps in, accuses others of being ‘shallow and intellectually adolescent’? Or the ones who criticize him for his behavior? I should think it’s the former.
hunter:
“Rob comes across not so much as a troll but rather as an oddly fixated creep.”
This is also how you come across. #trollpersonalityfacts
Boris,
I would suggest a guy who accuses those he disagrees with of sexual inadequacy is objectively creepy.
Here are a couple of telling tweets from Gill:
Jacquelyn Gill â€@JacquelynGill 20h
@lucialiljegren No, I’m saying you came out of left field and we appear to be on the same side. Or maybe you don’t know how you come across?
Jacquelyn Gill â€@JacquelynGill 5h5 hours ago
@lucialiljegren FYI, I’m blocking you. I get enough crap from deniers; I don’t need it from the home team.
Jacquelyn Gill â€@JacquelynGill 5h5 hours ago
@lucialiljegren FYI, I’m blocking you. I get enough crap from deniers; I don’t need it from the home team.
I saw those. The final one is shown in context here:
https://twitter.com/lucialiljegren/status/649178013188378624
Not sure whether it was my showing that one of her ‘supporters’ had suggested hashtag not useful, or my replying to his “#trollsciencefacts/ factoid” combo with a “#trollsciencefacts/factoid” combo of my own.
I do think I completely understand “the point” of “#trollsciencefacts/factoid” strategy. In fact: I’d say there are a number of “points”, some mentioned direction in her post and others and I’m pretty sure I know what they are.
FWIW: Some will notice this in the post where Jacquelyn announces her new troll handling policy.
That looks suspiciously like someone whose strategy in re-tweeting is an attempt to “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip [her] dogs of war”. One might suspect she has a tendency to harbor that sort of motive. Or not. Who knows?
I am more astonished that the (largely) intelligent people inhabiting this forum bother wasting time with something as trivial, inconsequential, and fundamentally egocentric as Twitter.
Derek,
To each his own!
NOTE: this comment was heavily edited because I prematurely posed the previous version before I was done typing/previewing it.
– – – – – –
So, if a commenter/tweeter tends to like a person personally and intellectually then the commenter’s/tweeter’s motivation isn’t to initiate troll name calling at the person. That seems reasonable behavior. On the other hand, it seems almost always the case that dislike or fundamental disagreement with a person is a necessary and sufficient motivation for initiating troll name calling against that person. That doesn’t seem reasonable behavior. It seems troll name calling is just garden variety name calling. My mom told me not to call people names.
I do not understand the troll name calling frequency and popularity on climate science focused blogs that are critical of the theory that there must be significant AGW. Likewise I do not understand it on blogs uncritical of the IPCC consensus.
John
John
Yep. To me, one of the features of the #TrollScienceFacts strategy is to propose some cute, coded way to “name call”, in this case the “name” being “troll”. The strategy was ‘designed’ to collect all the cute-coded ‘name-calls’ under a hashtag possibly so every could see the coded name-calling. That strikes me as a silly childish features.
There were other features of the hashtag. But I find it difficult to believe that any intelligent person thinks there is much benefit to a thread that contains mis-assorted free-floating science factoids like
Do I care if Neoceratodus forsteri has 0, 1, 2 or 3 lungs? But perhaps someday I will need that fact when I’m playing Jeopardy!
Evidently, Gill advocates several hashtags:
Few of these are being taken up.
lucia (Comment #139410) on September 30th, 2015 at 4:11 pm
– – – – –
lucia,
ditto “Yep”
John
Lucia:
“I would suggest a guy who accuses those he disagrees with of sexual inadequacy is objectively creepy.”
Really? Isn’t the “sexual inadequacy” thing just a standard insulting meme? (e.g. Guy with Porsche is “compensating.”)
OTOH, The hashtag #NoHymenNoDIamond is more than a little creepy.
“To me, one of the features of the #TrollScienceFacts strategy is to propose some cute, coded way to “name callâ€, in this case the “name†being “trollâ€.”
This seems correct. But that’s disappointing because I am a huge fan of non-sequitors as a tactic for getting people to leave me alone, which explains why I like almonds more than pecans.
Boris,
If “standard” is considered to include “creepy”, then I guess it’s standard.
Also creepy. But I’ve heard similar before. Perhaps that makes it just as standard. Still, I suspect nearly any woman can tell you, ‘standard’ doesn’t mean “not creepy”.
Empirical evidence suggests this particular version of non-sequitor does not cause those who use it to be left alone.
Anyway, if you want to be left alone, it really doesn’t make sense to be singing and dancing all over twitter. If you use the bullhorn of twitter to broadcast your views to all and sundry, you should expect people to feel free to comment. And they do. And tweeting a science fact isn’t going to make them stop.
Boris,
From you I take that as a compliment.
By the way, your clever posting reminds me of this interesting factoid:
The technical term for a hairball is “trichobezoar“.
Lucia,
Your example illustrates a couple of my points. Tindakan asks for elaboration and gets two simple statements (both coherent, at least). Then he replies “so much that could be said in response” — implying the obvious that twitter is unsuited for discussion in any depth. Then he asks if Jane Goodall is “intellectually adolescent” which may refer to a previous comment or may be the start of flaming, but at any rate could be provocative. It’s hard to tell what emotions may be starting to boil with just a snippet.
I’ll certainly concede that twitter has some usefulness and can be productive. I’d like to see a sociological analysis of it, though.
Gary,
One difficulty analyzing twitter is that unless one sets up a tool to collect statements real time, you can only review “view conversation”. What is revealed can skip things already viewed by the parties.
Note that in the other screen capture, Summers called Berkhoff ‘intellectually adolescent’ right off the bat and Summers did the “period@name” which broadcasts. That appears to be Summers first volley and so he was “flaming” right out of the gate.
Also, owing to the “period@name”, Summers made sure all his followers would view that tweet. So it’s rather likely most readers had already seen Summers introduce this even if they clicked ‘reply’ to a comment that had ‘fallen out’ of what Twitter considered ‘the string of responses’. (This happens all the time and is a reason Twitter can be confusing).
Anyway, it seems rather likely (though not certain), Summers was the first to flame and Tindakan is only engaging the claim Summers made in the first place. The most that could be said is Tindankan “fed a troll”, with the troll being Summers.
It is possible that Tindankan happened to pick up on Summers ‘intellectually adolescent’ accusation independently without reading it in the first place, but rather unlikely.
But yes, you are correct that it is difficult to determine who initiated the trolling. But I’d suggests there is quite a bit of evidence Summers did so.
I would suggest anyone who thinks Twitter has no valuable uses is hopelessly naive. People like to point to “horror stories” and say nobody should use Twitter, but the reality is most Twitter activity is not like that. Twitter is as popular as it is because many people find it very useful.
The same sort of reaction could be had to any other form of social media. We could use the same mentality to dismiss the value of Facebook, or even blogs. I bet you could find a lot of parallels in people’s reactions to the rise of texting, something now widely embraced for its practicality.
I mean, I can’t imagine why people would follow me on Twitter, but I have no doubt there’s a lot of value to be had from Twitter. The amount of information you can keep up with thanks to it would make it worthwhile on its own.
So trolls are: “people (usually men) who spend a large portion of their time seeking people out to harass (common favorites seem to include climate scientists, women, social justice advocates, evolutionary scientists, reproductive rights activists…” – in other words trolls attack ‘people like us.’ And so, by definition, ‘we’ can’t be trolls.