myUMBC has a Troll Problem
Don't Feed Trolls
posted about 13 years ago
See this for a particularly outrageous example of how trolling is used to hijack a thread into being completely off-topic for pages. It's also an example of how burying has failed to stop trolling, and how people continue to feed the trolls rather than ignoring them. Although some have hypothesized that anonymity causes Internet trolling, it seems from here that the lack of moderation is what causes trolling.
"Just bury and ignore the trolls" isn't good enough advice because UMBC is large enough that *someone* will keep feeding the troll rather than just burying and ignoring the person. This gives one person the power to completely derail and kill a thread if they don't like the topic or the original poster (OP). The troll can take things completely off topic and no one can do anything about it because clearly burying isn't sufficient to prevent trolls from taking over the conversation here. It looks like burying isn't even used for trolls, just for disagreement in general. I've seen clear trolling and flame-baiting that has been left not buried (and instead replied to, carrying on the trolling for pages).
Something more needs to be done (such as allowing the OP to bury-for-everyone or maybe even delete posts) or else the comment section will essentially never be useful on UMBC. I'd like to have a discussion here for potential community-driven solutions to this problem, but I have a feeling that this thread will be one that is taken over by a flame-war as people simply cannot ignore-and-bury incendiary remarks for some reason (maybe most myUMBC'ers aren't internet veterans). Without effective control over threads (either crowdsourced moderation or the original poster becoming a local moderator for that thread), any controversial thread will descend into chaos. It's just not worth participating in myUMBC anymore if nothing is fixed.
tl;dr: Please paw if you believe that the issue of serious Internet trolling on myUMBC should be given more visibility. Hopefully the myUMBC staff and the UMBC administration will notice if this gets enough paws and provide an immediate solution so that posting threads with comments open is once again a viable option in the future.
*****
Note on a common objection: Yes, yes, yes, free speech. Don't we all love it here in America? It applies to the public at large and is a valuable right for society. Anyone should be able to register their own website to post their views, no matter how insane, as long as it's legal, protected speech (there are some limitations, "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater", etc.). Any particular website, however, can ban or silence whoever they want or make particular subject matter off-topic for the website.
Just because there's free speech in the United States, doesn't mean that particular web forum needs to provide a platform for totally unregulated and unmoderated free speech. Anyone who's been a moderator in the past of even a moderately popular web forum will have heard the "free speech" defense on ban appeals. I'm sorry, the law doesn't work like that. Speech on particular websites are different than speech on the internet in general. Get your own blog for free speech. Violating specific community code of conducts will get you banned from that specific online community.
If myUMBC doesn't do what any active discussion website does and institute some rules, then things like blatant racism will reflect poorly on its website when outsiders realize it exists, even if only one person out of thousands of students is actually the troll. The lack of silencing someone has an effect, and may even be seen as an implicit endorsement.
tl;dr: Free speech applies to the set of all websites on the internet, not any particular element of that set, such as myUMBC. Setting clear limitations to discussion on a university can be a good thing as there are plenty of other avenues of discussion on the Internet.
*****
In conclusion, myUMBC has already developed a notorious reputation among many students after more than a year of ineffective regulation and moderation of simple Internet problems such as trolling. Do we really need completely uncensored speech online on the official UMBC website? It will inevitably lead to criticisms of UMBC as a whole, even though the inflammatory speech is largely rejected by the community (which is why people feed trolls so often). It's not in the best interest of any student to permit something to tarnish UMBC's reputation because reputation is a major thing that people pay for when they pay for school.
tl;dr of the tl;dr's: myUMBC is totally lame if it doesn't have limits on certain things being posted. The first amendment is cool, but is completely irrelevant here. Because myUMBC is part of the official UMBC website, let's not let a handful of people ruin the image of UMBC as a whole. Oh, also, tl;dr's are stupid. Read the whole thing or else you miss out on little points in the argument. It's a fairly important issue.
*****
EDIT: If you do have an issue, you can use the Gmail interface to UMBC mail to send me an email (all you need is someone's real name). It's private and direct, so no one will be able to hijack the line of communication and we can hopefully have a rational dialogue to discuss our differing opinions!
"Just bury and ignore the trolls" isn't good enough advice because UMBC is large enough that *someone* will keep feeding the troll rather than just burying and ignoring the person. This gives one person the power to completely derail and kill a thread if they don't like the topic or the original poster (OP). The troll can take things completely off topic and no one can do anything about it because clearly burying isn't sufficient to prevent trolls from taking over the conversation here. It looks like burying isn't even used for trolls, just for disagreement in general. I've seen clear trolling and flame-baiting that has been left not buried (and instead replied to, carrying on the trolling for pages).
Something more needs to be done (such as allowing the OP to bury-for-everyone or maybe even delete posts) or else the comment section will essentially never be useful on UMBC. I'd like to have a discussion here for potential community-driven solutions to this problem, but I have a feeling that this thread will be one that is taken over by a flame-war as people simply cannot ignore-and-bury incendiary remarks for some reason (maybe most myUMBC'ers aren't internet veterans). Without effective control over threads (either crowdsourced moderation or the original poster becoming a local moderator for that thread), any controversial thread will descend into chaos. It's just not worth participating in myUMBC anymore if nothing is fixed.
tl;dr: Please paw if you believe that the issue of serious Internet trolling on myUMBC should be given more visibility. Hopefully the myUMBC staff and the UMBC administration will notice if this gets enough paws and provide an immediate solution so that posting threads with comments open is once again a viable option in the future.
*****
Note on a common objection: Yes, yes, yes, free speech. Don't we all love it here in America? It applies to the public at large and is a valuable right for society. Anyone should be able to register their own website to post their views, no matter how insane, as long as it's legal, protected speech (there are some limitations, "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater", etc.). Any particular website, however, can ban or silence whoever they want or make particular subject matter off-topic for the website.
Just because there's free speech in the United States, doesn't mean that particular web forum needs to provide a platform for totally unregulated and unmoderated free speech. Anyone who's been a moderator in the past of even a moderately popular web forum will have heard the "free speech" defense on ban appeals. I'm sorry, the law doesn't work like that. Speech on particular websites are different than speech on the internet in general. Get your own blog for free speech. Violating specific community code of conducts will get you banned from that specific online community.
If myUMBC doesn't do what any active discussion website does and institute some rules, then things like blatant racism will reflect poorly on its website when outsiders realize it exists, even if only one person out of thousands of students is actually the troll. The lack of silencing someone has an effect, and may even be seen as an implicit endorsement.
tl;dr: Free speech applies to the set of all websites on the internet, not any particular element of that set, such as myUMBC. Setting clear limitations to discussion on a university can be a good thing as there are plenty of other avenues of discussion on the Internet.
*****
In conclusion, myUMBC has already developed a notorious reputation among many students after more than a year of ineffective regulation and moderation of simple Internet problems such as trolling. Do we really need completely uncensored speech online on the official UMBC website? It will inevitably lead to criticisms of UMBC as a whole, even though the inflammatory speech is largely rejected by the community (which is why people feed trolls so often). It's not in the best interest of any student to permit something to tarnish UMBC's reputation because reputation is a major thing that people pay for when they pay for school.
tl;dr of the tl;dr's: myUMBC is totally lame if it doesn't have limits on certain things being posted. The first amendment is cool, but is completely irrelevant here. Because myUMBC is part of the official UMBC website, let's not let a handful of people ruin the image of UMBC as a whole. Oh, also, tl;dr's are stupid. Read the whole thing or else you miss out on little points in the argument. It's a fairly important issue.
*****
EDIT: If you do have an issue, you can use the Gmail interface to UMBC mail to send me an email (all you need is someone's real name). It's private and direct, so no one will be able to hijack the line of communication and we can hopefully have a rational dialogue to discuss our differing opinions!
(edited about 13 years ago)
