My first inclination was to post this in Everything Else, but after a second reading I figured this was the right place. It's about the phenomenon of internet trolling and and how it proliferated in Washington. But a common denominator that makes regular appearances across the three Thai board quickly emerged. This board is unique because the moderator is quick to act when he detects an emerging troll. He understands that it may restrict traffic but it succeeds in establishing a framework for civil discourse.
Excerpts from NY Times magazine
Trolling isn’t just about manning an unhinged Twitter account. It describes an ethos. The troll is a figure who skips across the web, saying whatever it takes to rile up unsuspecting targets, relishing the chaos in his wake and feasting on attention, good or bad. For Trump, that means inciting political panic with glib news conferences, all-caps tweets and made-up terrorist attacks, shifting his beliefs to suit his whims.
Troll culture was forged in the primordial ooze of the internet, in a time when online social interaction took place in rolling walls of text. In 1993, LambdaMOO, a popular virtual community, was besieged by a user called Mr. Bungle, a character dressed as a clown in a semen-stained costume. One evening, Mr. Bungle used a programming trick to make it appear as if other users were performing violent sex acts on one another. Later, when his targets demanded an explanation, Mr. Bungle typed: “It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL” — real life — “existence.” He was just messing with people, delighting in the power to provoke reactions from a remove. And because everyone involved could just log off, those left shaken by words on a computer screen were made to feel silly. As one commentator said during the ensuing controversy, “I think that freedom would be well served by simple toughening up.”
Internet trolls work by exploiting the gap between the virtual and the real. They float, weightless and anonymous, across the web, then reach out and rattle people who are pinned down by fixed ideologies, moral codes and human emotions. Any attachment to principles — even really basic ones like “don’t torture grieving parents” — gives the troll an opening.
Stretching back to Mr. Bungle, trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost. Often, they were counseled to detach as much as the trolls had: to withhold their outrage, to not “feed the trolls,” to pretend there was a real distinction between doing horrible things and meaning them. So the trolls scampered on to their next targets, amassing more followers along the way.
Trolls work through abstraction, leveraging the internet and irony to carve out a space between actions and consequences. Becoming president has blown Trump’s cover: There’s nothing more consequential than this. Trolls are typically outsiders, and sad ones: They don’t fit into the dominant group, so they terrorize it from the sidelines. Part of what makes Trump’s administration so alarming is that the troll sensibility now dominates. And when that happens, it’s reminiscent of what Sartre described: No reason, no principle, just the pure exercise of power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/magaz ... ington.htm