Episode 7 - Don't Feed the Trolls


1	Episode 7 - Don't Feed the Trolls - Transcript
2	To listen to this episode online click here
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4	Louisa	Hello. This is the Online Resilience Tool podcast with me, Louisa Street and Professor Andy Phippen. Music is by Roo Pescod
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6	Louisa	Welcome to the Online Resilience Tool podcast, I'm here again with Professor Andy Phippen, and we're recording a new series of podcasts where we're going to be talking about various issues that are bubbling up in the media, all to do with online activity and online resilience.
7		The one that we're doing today is all about trolls, so we're going to start straight away and I'm going to ask Andy, what do we mean when we say troll?
8	Andy	So trolls, basically. I mean, it's it's it's a perennial issue online, really trolls, basically, you know, people who are prodding you to try and get the reaction of you or all saying things that are deliberately offensive to try and attract attention.
9		That could be someone you know or equally, it could just be someone you are arguing with on social media. At the time of recording this, there is a. Shall we say, former celebrity former media figure who decided to comment in quite a racist way on the name of Harry and Meghan's new child, and obviously that's triggered
10		an awful lot of backlash on Twitter, lots of people talking about how they're reporting it, and I'm sure we'll pick up on this in a little while. And in terms of how do you go about tackling these things?
11		But the person in particular has achieved what they wish for, which is trending on Twitter, and lots of people are talking about them there. We spoke with. Well, it's kind of interesting someone was asking me about this the other day, it's kind of like, why does it seem to be getting more and more extreme?
12		Well, it has to be more and more extreme, in order to keep on keeping the responses going. And I think sometimes people will knee-jerk a comment they see on a social media platform and rage back at somebody, rather than reflecting on why they might have been doing it in the first place.
13		So I guess the reason we call it troll, it did actually come from the fishing term rather than trolls under bridges, which is, you know, you chuck something at the back of the boat, the boat and you see what you can do with it.
14		Now, obviously, that got adopted into popular culture and then became sort of troll under bridges, and things in that metaphor works equally well. But it was trolling, trolling as in fishing for chucking something out and saying what you get.
15		And that's something you need to sort of like, think about and reflect on when you see these comments.
16	Louisa	Yeah. And I mean, that kind of raises this really interesting issue of is trolling always something that's done on purpose. And I think what you said about, you know, we we do react quickly to things when we see them on social media.
17		It's all very much about the immediacy and you see something, you react to it and you move on. Do you think trolling is always deliberate or is it sometimes sort of inadvertent, perhaps not thinking something through?
18	Andy	I think it's one of those things that we use the term in the same way, you know, like cyber bullying used to be applied to a whole different bunch of behaviors. Now sometimes it will be deliberate. Sometimes you will have people wishing to express their views.
19		You know, you look at something at the moment like people who are anti-vax or something. Some people passionately believe that view and want to get their point across. So they might do it in person. They might do it on social media.
20		So it doesn't always come from a place of I'm going to win these people up and see what reaction I get, sometimes it will be, Oh, I'm so convinced or so sure about my view. I need to express my view.
21		But the question I tend to raise in those situations is really is social media the best place to do that? How often have you seen on social media, two people arguing at some point one person goes, Oh actually, I can see your viewpoint.
22		So yes, I've changed my mind, and I very much agree with you that that just doesn't happen. It's just like two people grandstanding while other people sort of watch. And oh, look, I've got five likes in my comment.
23		Oh, well, I've got follows. one We must be right. You got opposing views. I can do both. You're right.
24	Louisa	Yeah. And I think we can kind of see that escalation as well. When people see that those extreme opinions and views are starting to generate quite a lot of traffic to their page. If that's what they're looking for, then it encourages them to continue expressing those opinions.
25		So people, you know, we can see very clearly that people who started off relatively mainstream and sensible over quite a short period of time can become very extreme in their views because they have to keep saying things to shock.
26		And I can't think of any particularly recent examples, but I think sort of Katie Hopkins and Piers Morgan have both gone down.
27	Andy	Laurence Fox is a great example of that. Laurence Fox became famous for having outspoken right wing views on question time and decided to turn that into or convert his acting career into a champion of free speech. I think it's quite a good example.
28		And you know, he was on Twitter yesterday raging about football, was taking the knee and had a supporting Marxist organizations.
29	Louisa	Right?
30	Andy	I can't think of an industry less Marxist than football, but there you go.
31	Louisa	Yeah. And so we we sort of even if we react with outrage or anger, we're sort of feeding the trolls by reacting to it.
32	Andy	If you're like if your career is a social media personality for want of a better word, getting yourself trending on Twitter is a result, regardless of whether that's because people are agreeing with you or whether people are like being abusive and saying you're a complete idiot, the end result is the same.
33		You're trending on Twitter. If you if you got tons of followers, then you end up getting endorsements and stuff or you end up getting approached by people to to maintain your views. You know, there are other celebrities that have strong opinions in newspaper columns and similar as well paid strong opinions.
34	Louisa	Yeah.
35		So we can kind of see relatively easily with celebrity culture or perhaps knowing those things we can see with celebrity culture when those things are all being said for effect. And it's something that I quite often say to my liberal friends, like when you get angry with Piers Morgan, you're giving him what he wants.
36		So the best thing to do is just ignore it, just avoid it. Because, you know, he he sort of thrives from that anger and self-righteousness that he creates and more sort of left-leaning people. And I'm sure people are more right leaning, have similar responses towards those more like a left wing vocal people.
37		How can we tell the difference between someone that is just doing it for attention and reaction and someone who actually genuinely believes that who we might want to engage in a more sort of nuanced political discussion with?
38	Andy	I mean, my my view of those sorts of things is these are public social media platforms the place to have those nuanced discussions? You know, I already said I rarely see on those public platforms someone you really, you know, you've really changed your mind.
39		You know, if if it's online, you might use a more private channel or a group chat or something with it's probably a more civilized way of doing it. You have to raise questions on why do you want to do this on a public platform or even if it's, for example, to people on Facebook with their friends, so
40		it's still going to be in front of a few hundred people? It's almost like you're asking people to pick a side. And I think one of the somewhat toxic things about social media is there is that empowerment the a few people like you comment you are empowered.
41		You know, if I always go back to the the old man in the pub shouting how he used to be prime minister, now, you know, very few people would take much notice of them, but someone does that on social media that probably attract the following, and people start going oh this guy's hilarious.
42		Follow them. So they end up escalating with the sorts of things they do. So I think, you know, it's always worth reflecting upon whether the platform is the place to have that discussion. If you think this person, I'm going to have a serious discussion with that person is, is that the best
43		Way of doing it, because you are, you know, you are essentially grandstanding. Both sides of the debate, because there are lots of people sort of watching and following unless it's done in a private space, in which case it's probably probably more constructive doing it that way.
44	Louisa	Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think something that, you know, we've sort of talked about more and more as a society is this idea of echo chambers on social media because it's very easy to see a view that you disagree with and block that person and then slowly sort of create and curate
45		a platform where you only see people who agree with you. So I think that's sort of a really interesting point of like actually, if you do see those opinions you disagree with, maybe if it's someone who's in your life, the best approach is to talk to them in a more sort of face-to-face or more private setting about
46		that and sort of discuss what their actual views are and find out whether it is them just doing it for a bit of a reaction or whether it is genuinely what they believe.
47	Andy	Mm-Hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think, you know, it's almost like the pressure you have online is that everyone has to have an opinion on everything. You know, if you look at the stuff like the vaccine debates, which you know, they're not really a debate, it's a bit like climate change.
48		All of the people who know about it say this is the right thing and someone else goes, Yeah, well, in my view, that's not right. Well, great. Well, you're allowed to have that view. But but should we be, you know, it's a bit like when you're looking at a TV show and you have the most extreme positions
49		for balance, really, you need those.
50	Louisa	Is that balanced?
51	Andy	That's not really balanced. Is it just giving voices to the mouthpieces? But the other thing I think you know that I see quite a lot of my friends do on social media when they're responding to stuff like a post by BBC News or the Metro.
52		Or something like that is, they end up having a big ol row when you know, you know, that's your argument. I think, you know, there is there is a great deal of work was traced back a huge amount of social media accounts to politics for particular countries and political motivations for doing this.
53		And and yes, the destabilization of the West is a real thing. And then there are lots of people in certain countries who spend a lot of time on social media trying to, you know, wind those sorts of things up, there's a very famous case where after the Westminster Bridge attack was a very famous photograph of someone in in a
54		hijab walking past while other people are trying to to help the person who'd been knocked over. And that was retweeted a lot on a number of what were viewed as right wing conservative US channels on Twitter and similar.
55		And then they were all tracked back to a completely different country and completely different parts of the world. But obviously, trying to create civil unrest and disturbance and political extremity are important. So they think about sometimes if you don't know this person, how do you know if who they are, who they claim they are because it's just a
56		profile picture and a short description of them. Anybody can do that. Yeah, it's something to bear in mind.
57	Louisa	And I think that brings us very close to the reason that we're kind of talking about trolling today, and it's to do with these very shocking things that we read, like things to do with the Blue Whale Challenge and Momo.
58		And more recently, the Roro challenge that we read about as professionals work with young people. And a lot of people just fly into a blind panic and think, Oh my gosh, we must do something about these terrible things that are out there online.
59		And do you want to give a little bit of an overview of those sorts of memes?
60	Andy	I wouldn't call them memes. I call them digital. Ghost Stories is something that I've I've been referring to them for a while now since the moment I say. So this is one of the things that I think, you know, it's very much been the focus of work in head start is we talk about people online and people
61		doing this stuff online. But but equally, we need to be thinking as professionals about our own responses. Another term I think be using more and more is digital unconscious bias, so you bring your own experiences online to your professional situations.
62		Now that's kind of interesting. What other parts of your professional life would you do that with kind of like, Oh yeah, yeah, I put a plaster on a kid once I can do this operation, you know? So really, I use Facebook.
63		Therefore, I can make the judgments on the capacity of this individual to engage with the social media properly. You know, I see it quite a lot in a lot of court protection stuff I look at in the so-called expert witnesses.
64		are making completely unqualified comments about these sorts of things. But going back to these digital ghost stories, what happens is it's normally as a result of a story from a far off country where some kids have died. And as a result of that, we're all panicking and going, Oh, there's this thing on social media and people are
65		sharing it and it's making kids self-harm or it's making kids engage in dangerous behaviors, whatever. And at that point, what we should be thinking is, Hmm, let's go and check this back and see what evidence there is this, and let's go and see the original sources for this sort of thing.
66		And the Blue Whale Challenge, which was a very famous one a few years ago, it occasionally comes back to the haunt us once more. Blue Whale challenge, but it was basically, well, supposedly it was an online game where there were 50 instructions.
67		It was run by this shadowy figure who connected with people on online platforms and gave them 50 instructions. The escalated aspects of self-harm and the. Final instruction was to take your own life on this had gone on and it was in Russia.
68		The original story came from a local news source in Russia, like a local paper, and it escalated and escalated and escalated. Still, to this day, I have never seen a screenshot supposedly of a blue whale challenge right now or whatever it's called.
69		There's no evidence whatsoever that it exists.
70	Louisa	And we can assume that you've looked for that.
71	Andy	Oh, I've I've looked and I work with some folks at Cambridge University who are quite good at trawling the internet to find stuff that they're looking for, and they can't find any evidence, either. But if you look at a recent Law Commission consultation on harmful content they cited, the Blue Whale Challenge is evidence of harmful content.
72		So you'd hope the Law Commission would like to take a step back. But you know, oh yeah. Have you heard about the Blue Whale challenge? Well, that's terrible. You go online, you second Blue Whale Challenge. You see a few news articles about how it's terrible.
73		And at that point, you share it. Same with Momo. Momo was based upon a quote, an upsetting image of a Japanese improvement character, which is a sculpture of a folklore character in Japanese culture. And some of the less scrupulous parts of content providers were starting to put this upsetting image into kids videos and similar
74		so the kids would be happily sat there on YouTube watching Peppa Pig or something. And then all of a sudden, this shocking image would appear, and then they decided to start putting some voices over the top of it, saying, Momo says Go kill yourself and stuff.
75		But then all of a sudden, it wasn't just a few nasty trolls who were putting this stuff into upset kids. It was again a big suicide game, and it's encouraging kids to self-harm. There's a wonderful, very famous, massively shared comment on social media about how it waits for parents to be out of the room.
76		And then it appears in front of kids, and it tells kids to harm themselves, and it says you can't tell anyone about it or I'll kill your parents. None of that was true. It's just, you know, the the rumor that escalates online and stuff and that we we spent quite a lot of time trying to dampen down
77		a lot of the excitement around Momo. But the work we did on it and this is publish, its published work on South West Grid for Learning. We've also published it academically as well. We could demonstrate that there was a 45000% increase in searches for Momo by children in school of the week, where everyone was talking about how
78		shocking and terrible Momo was. No evidence that exists as what was claimed. It was just a few upsetting images in a few YouTube videos, but Kim Kardashian shared a comment about it. Stacey Solomon shared comments about the Northern Ireland Police Service, shared comments about lots of other people who claim to have the safeguarding of children at their
79		home and shared their stuff without checking it back. And the other day, the Ro-Ro thing came along, which is exactly the same modus operandi it's a bunch of instructions where people are given more and more dangerous stuff to do.
80		Again, no one can provide evidence of it. And there are a couple of media reports that talk about, Oh, it was online, but it's been taken down now. Hmm. Well, show me the tweet showing me the post. Show me the video, but no one seems to.
81		It's just it's just one of those things. And rather than seeing it and go, Oh my God, I need to make everyone aware of this. Maybe have a think back. And do your fact checking and check back from a professional perspective?
82		That's kind of what we would expect.
83	Louisa	Yeah. And I mean, the Roro one was interesting because I was sent some information about it and there was a link to her online article about it, which was with a fairly reputable online news site. And I read the whole article looking for the evidence of young people doing this challenge, and they couldn't even verify that
84		the person who the challenge is named after actually died or even attempted suicide. And I think because of that, we need to kind of. Reflect that if there was a young teenage girl who had committed suicide live on social media, there would be a lot of ways of confirming that the authorities, for one, would be able to
85		confirm whether or not this happened. Plus, the original case was sort of seven or eight years ago, which doesn't mean that it isn't going to surface again. If it's a real trend. We kind of see that with trends on social media that they'll come and go and you know, a new generation will discover something and then they'll
86		all be, you know, playing whatever old fashioned game or that doing whatever dance that you kind of thought had died a bit of a death. But actually, like if it's been eight years since this person died and there hasn't been any news coverage of it and there isn't any way verifying it, it sort of adds to that
87		ghost story element. It's oh, it was a friend of a friend. It was someone that I knew whose brother's girlfriend found this out university 15 years ago. The further away it gets, the harder it is to be sure of the truth of it.
88		So what should we do as professionals when we get these emails telling us about these horrible, really shocking and quite triggering things? How should we respond to that?
89	Andy	I think first of all, they're very happy to get in touch with us. You know, we do this thing. This is the day job for us. You know, people and there's a number of schools and colleges I work with now where it is really good relationship.
90		I think finding out the trying to fact check it, I guess, would be, you know, as with any piece of misinformation, I think that's a really important thing. But not just a knee jerk, and immediately share it.
91		I think that's that's one of the biggest problems. The problem is sometimes there is an element of truth in it. So there was a comment a while ago about how there was a video on Tik Tok of a person taking their own life and that was being taken down and reposted.
92		And I've been contacted by a couple of colleges about that. But the message is still the same. You know, you don't go, Oh, I've heard about this thing called Blue Whale Challenge. Don't go searching for it equally. You don't go oh
93		There's a video of someone taking their own life on take the what you say is if you see something upsetting online. Talk to us about it. Block it reporting. In the case where there was the video of the first thing there, another tick tock we're incredibly responsive in taking it down and flagging up accounts where it was
94		being posted. And when people were trying to repost, those accounts got blocked as well. They they were very, very proactive about it. So if people report this stuff, then it does dampen it down quickly. And if it is legitimate, then the platforms can investigate it.
95		It was amusing somewhat with the Momo Challenge that YouTube, after massive media pressure, did a press release saying, Well, we investigated this and we can see no evidence of it on our platform, which amused me greatly. But you know, I was speaking to a college a couple of weeks ago where they had an issue where there's a
96		young man in the college who was a tick tocker who is putting up increasingly offensive content. And there's loads of students in the college who are getting really upset by the fact that this guy putting up increasingly offensive content and we just said, Well, why don't they report the account then?
97		And that seems to be quite a... 'Oh yeah, we hadn't thought of that'. What can we do to stop there as well? Someone needs to do something right? You know, pretty much all platforms these days do provide the tools to do this sort of thing.
98		But but going back to how do you as professionals or how do we as professionals respond to it? Fact check it. Check it out. Encourage young people to. Don't tell them about the thing, but apparently is really going to encourage young people to to disclose and report things if they are upsetting.
99	Louisa	Yeah, I think sort of the the addendum to that, if you like, is have those conversations with young people about their online lives because whether it's blue whale challenge or not, if you say, Oh, have you heard of the blue whale challenge to a young person, that's a very closed question.
100		And if they say no, then you might say great. I don't need to talk to this young person about, you know, pro self-harm websites. Whereas if you talk to a young person about their online life, if they're a self-harmer and you talk to them about, do they go online for support, where do they access that support
101		? Is that support actually sort of encouraging them to continue self-harming? Because we know those sites exist? We know that there are pros self-harm, pro anorexia type websites. I'm just asking about those individual named challenges. It doesn't open up the question with that young person so
102		Certainly having that more detailed, more in-depth conversation about their online world is a great way to start with that. And you've kind of touched on the the sort of last point around trolling that we're kind of going to discuss in a bit of detail is how can we support young people to deal with trolls, whether that is
103		in comments and games through different social media platforms?
104	Andy	Yeah, I think one of the one of the myths is that there's no point in reporting nothing gets done. I think there's actually... that would have been the true about ten years ago. But but you know, these days, you know, a lot of folks and I was like, Oh, I just got a racist banned from Twitter.
105		Oh, well done. You know, everyone piled together and report the tweet that works. And companies are doing that because obviously with increased government pressure and similar, they need to be showing that they are responsive to complaints and criticisms. Now government do come out with some utterly cracker stuff as well as like, Oh, you need to take
106		down everything that's anti-vax. It's like, Well, if you can define what anti-vaccine law with, some algorithms might stand a chance, but you can't really, because you know, it's very broad. Someone questioning a sage report might be considered antivax perspective when you get into massive discussions about cultural relativism, I get very, very complicated about.
107		The platforms will provide tools so you can block people, so if someone is constantly having a puppet, you will be joining in with the game and swearing and generally just being horrible and blocking to in the first instance, block them, get everyone else in the gaming community to to report them as well.
108		Those accounts will get blocked. Same on Ticktock, it's the same on Twitter, they are responsive to various degrees, I mean, tick tock are quite censorious in terms of what they will allow on their platform and very quick to do.
109		Which is why when this college was saying about this, this young man who was posting up loads of offensive content and when he was challenged on it, he said, Oh well, I've got to keep my followers up because I actually have income as a result of this.
110		And the way I keep my followers up is to say offensive things. Funnily enough, going back to what we're saying at the start. But if a whole bunch of people of that college reported his account, given what I saw in that account undoubtedly be taken down.
111		But so, so use the tools that are available to you and also be confident that you can disclose to professionals. And hopefully professionals will help and not just go, Have you heard about the blue whale challenge? Because, you know, if you say that to a young person, I know, but now I'm going to go and google it and
112		find out about it. So you either use the tools are available. It's not like you can't do anything. Platforms. Try to take stuff down automatically, but obviously that's very difficult to do from a technical perspective. And sometimes they get that wrong, so they can't be too aggressive in it.
113		So, you know, again Facebook at the moment. If you use a particular if you use a swear word that is directed at somebody, you're going to get a warning for cyberbullying these days, which isn't helpful either, but use the tools that are available.
114		Well, yeah. You know, this a typical thing with some of my friends on Facebook. Oh, I've just got a warning because it's called you a whatever. Yeah. Or actually, one of the more amusing things is if you quote lines from the movie Withnail and I which which some people listening might know about.
115		It's it's it's a classic of my generation. You will get an automatic ban from Facebook from using that line because in one of the lines, they threatened to blow up a place, you know? So if you're if you're quoting from a movie, so that's why ultimately it doesn't necessarily work but use the tools that are available.
116		All the platforms provide know you have blocking approaches for blocking approaches for reporting. They will ask you to specify why you're reporting it. So it's not even like you, just you. Actually, I think this is a racist comment.
117		Well, I think this is abusive or I think thi is homophobic. And you know, they do work. It takes it takes a little while, obviously, because, you know, in terms of how many people use these platforms and how many content moderators there are, that's quite disproportionate.
118		But if if sufficient numbers complain and make comment, they will respond.
119	Louisa	Excellent. And I think something that adds up to that is, you know, if a young person comes to you and says that they were experiencing nasty comments in a particular game or on a platform that you've never even heard of, it doesn't matter that you haven't heard of it.
120		That information should be really easy to find. So you should just be able to google the name of the platform and how to block and report content. And you know that, generally speaking, should be really easy to find.
121		And I think, as you say, sometimes they're not so great at it. And recently, I read an article about how Omegle are not very good at moderating their users. Well.
122	Andy	Why would you go into a line unless you wanted to watch naked men masturbating?
123		You know the need to clean up their act. Well, what else do you do? Well, yeah.
124	Louisa	Yeah. And I think having a little bit of again, it's about having those conversations with young people. So if they say, Oh, I've been going on Omegle and I keep saying these upsetting people, then maybe having a conversation about, well, maybe Omegle isn't the right platform.
125		It's what you just want to do is chat to people about games. Maybe you'll be better on Discord or.
126	Andy	Discord server or.
127	Louisa	Something else. Yeah. And I think, you know, you can you can find that information you don't need to know. You don't need to know what Discord is. You can kind of say, OK, well, where do you think you might find that information better?
128		And let's have a look together and let's do some research together and redirect them where possible.
129	Andy	I think the other thing as well is the classic stuff about if someone is being abusive and it's somebody you do know someone you think,you know, screengrab it, keep it. Don't, don't shut it down. Don't engage with it, just screengrab it and then share it with an adult.
130		That's another thing as well, particularly if it's people you know or group chat or someone saying something offensive in a group chat or similar.
131	Louisa	Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose we have all of these sort of trolling things. We do need to take a moment when we read it and we experience that shock and outrage and rage. To actually say, hold on. Has this been designed specifically to make me have this reaction so that I then share in outrage?
132		Oh my God, this is an absolute, you know, this is this is absolutely shocking. These young people are being encouraged to self-harm or these men are talking about sexually assaulting women on this specific date or whatever it might be like if we sort of question all that, that causes me to have quite a strong emotional reaction.
133		Is that what it's intended to do? And if so, am I helping by sharing it?
134	Andy	And, you know, just take a step back and go. So would there really be an app that waits until the parents are out of the room and then appears in front? You know, it's kind of like, take a take a deep breath.
135	Louisa	I just think, yeah, excellent. Do you want to say anything else about trolls?
136	Andy	I don't think so. I think if we didn't keep that brief now.
137	Louisa	That was about half an hour.
138	Andy	I don't think we rambled on too much. Yeah, yeah.
139	Louisa	And so that brings us to the end of the of this podcast about trolling. Look out for our next podcast about end to end encryption, which should be online soon. Thanks, bye.