so way back in 2012 I finished my thesis on trolling (or in its sunday garb it's about online deception, manipulation, and aggression)

and wildly, i'm going to summarise the trolling strategy from §6.2.5.—Endangerment, because of this dettol moment:


1/11

the Endangerment strategy capitalises on an (alleged) emergency, crisis, or situation of danger or concern and involves either:

1) asking for advice about an inflammatory or patently obviously resolved scenario (cf many of the @AITA_reddit posts), or, more pertinently...

2/11

2) intentionally providing bad advice under the guise of being innocently unaware that it's bad

(DING! DING! DING!)

the ostensible motive is to help, but in reality, the troll is trying to cause harm and/or create a situation that forces others to respond to prevent harm

3/11

nb. in case you're under the illusion that i'm some sort of mastermind genius, this strategy was first codified in academia, to my knowledge, by Donath (1999: 30) who called it pseudo-naïve trolling, and it was further developed by Utz (2005: 50), then i gnawed at it a bit

4/11

anyway, what's my point? and what's the problem?

i mean, aside from people injecting bleach into their eyeballs and shining lasers up their butts because a world leader thought these might be good medical trials to suggest to the public

5/11

the problem is it causes a massive fucking singularity in the fabric of our collective moral conscience

why? well, you have roughly three options, and to borrow twitter parlance they are: reply (fight back), mute (give up), or report ("censor")

so let's go through each

6/11

1) you respond, screaming into the void about how bananas this is, but then (a) people accuse you of amplifying the misinformation, spreading it further than it would've gone otherwise, and (b) now you've hit your reply out there, the opposition has something to hit back

7/11

or

2) you ignore it and assume, hope, PRAY that everyone will recognise its idiocy, but then when people come into contact with that content, they look around for dissenting voices, and seeing few or no contradictions, they think, "huh! who knew?! i should give this a try"

8/11

or

3) you try to remove the content, silence the stupidity, cease, and desist the entire clusterfuck into the depths of hell, and guess what

people now accuse you of censorship, and of nannying, patronising, or otherwise infantilising the population

9/11

so, is trump *deliberately* pseudo-naive trolling us about injecting dettol? i doubt it, but the problem is, the outcomes ARE EXACTLY THE SAME no matter his intentions

what, then, is the solution?

reader, i don't have a fucking clue

this one has plagued me for a decade

10/11

see the three options again

there is no easy answer, *especially* when trust in journalism AND politicians is currently so low, but i can tell you that whether you ignore, engage with, or try to suppress dangerous advice, you will find that it is a deeply thankless task

11/11

incidentally, this is just one of the reasons (amongst many) why anti-vaxx discourse is so difficult to challenge

respond, and you're going to get dragged into a "debate"

ignore, and the lack of dissent will be seen as validation

suppress, and you're the bad guy

nb: in the same thesis i also summarised counter-trolling strategies and one of the two most devastating was responding with well-executed humour/ridicule/sarcasm

you still hit the ball so there's still something for the opposition to engage, but it's a tricky cross-court slice

so yeah

in times like these, thank god for comedians

final tweet: more broadly, there is an astonishing degree of overlap between trolling strategies and the ways that politicians respond to scandals, crises, and opponents

[narrator: literally no one was surprised at this revelation]

but i'll save that thread for another day

bonkers update

trump: so, like, disinfectant, injected, into, you know, the body…

everyone: what

trump: i was mocking you sorry you're too stupid to get my jokes

he's now trying to retrospectively reframe his behavior as… actual trolling

https://twitter.com/channel4news/status/1253748936491372544?s=21

i feel like i'm gonna have to pull THAT bit out now on how people use the "actually i was trolling" defence, because given the choice of "i'm deliberately being this awful" vs "i'm fundamentally this awful and can't help it" most people will opt for the former to save face