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Many of the comments there are chastising Kathleen for how she responded, but I sympathize with her. As wonderful as the internet has proven to be with connectedness and giving the masses a voice, I struggle to accept that people like Blythe, who abuse their newfound reach, just happen to be the cost of an open online world, not having to bear any consequences for their actions.

The potential damage that one person can now cause online is real and substantial. All it takes is one malicious individual to rile up the online troops to doxx, smear, and ruin a person and their career. And there's almost no risk involved in participating in such an act -- you are anonymous and not held accountable for anything you do.

So while Kathleen's response might seem a bit excessive, I can certainly understand why she acted that way. She was being attacked by an individual who had all the voice and reach in the world, on a mission to destroy her literary work, using a platform that's frustratingly conducive to mob-creation but not debate. I might have done the same.

I don't know what the solution is, or even if one exists, but this is a real problem. We saw the other week how Twitter was used to volley targeted death threats, and how the individual on the receiving end felt genuinely unsafe for her life. And yet Twitter, Reddit, et al. are very blasé about the severity of it all. You wouldn't want to hurt your growth rate, I guess.

To me, what's really interesting -- and depressing -- about the article is not just how easy it is for a mob to get whipped up by a dedicated troll, but by the (alleged) identity behind the trolling.

We're used to thinking of trolls as teenaged or twentysomething male denziens of 4chan, reddit or Anonymous' IRCs, and yet this article suggests that behind a troll who (again, allegedly) whipped up a hate-mob against a 14-year-old girl could lie a seemingly well-adjusted, gainfully employed middle-aged woman with a couple of dogs and a neatly tended split-level ranch.

In other words, trolling may be more of a universal phenomenon than we usually consider it to be. And if the woman in question was the true identity of the poster, her reaction suggests that she's not the kind of dead-eyed psychopath we normally associate with "swatting," "doxxing" and "the lulz" -- and that trolls may be otherwise normal people who are in thrall to a kind of psychological compulsion occasioned by social networks, pervasive pseudonymity, and the thrill of socially transgressive behavior. Call it something like "electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder."

Yeah, agreed. It's both interesting and quite disturbing to think about.

I have a pretty cynical view on social media and its effects on society. I think Blythe, and many others, do this out of a hatred of themselves and their own lives -- a hatred amplified by social media. She admits to stealing her friend's FB picture to use as her own, and if you look at the accounts linked to here, the picture is of a pretty attractive women. I'm willing to bet Blythe sees herself as unattractive, is constantly bombarded by photos of her attractive friends and their escapades, feels comparatively bad about herself, and reacts by creating a persona of who she wants to be, which would explain the pictures of her nonexistent trip to Greece.

I'm not saying the internet, particularly social media, is the reason these people exist, but I can't help but feel that it has both worsened their pre-existing conditions and equipped them with a dangerous coping method. I know a few people whose depression is proportional to their FB use and who react by either isolating themselves or overcompensating by crafting a public shell of happiness and adventure.

The grim recent story of the "McCann troll" from the UK who had a high-profile exposure on TV illustrates this well: http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/2629697/exposed-mcc... There's another recent exposure from the UK which I can't find a source for now but is another good example: one of the most active griefers on (iirc) Facebook, who when tracked down by a journalist turned out to be (again iirc) an unemployed middle-aged man, basically a career petty criminal. When he was asked whether he was worried by the possible jail sentence for his actions, he claimed to be pretty unconcerned: doing some time in prison was nothing new for him. In venues like FB or Twitter which have userbases which no longer lean youthful or nerdy, I assume that the malicious users no longer lean young or nerdy either. I do assume that the really dedicated online abusers tend to be either bitter and unhappy or happily soulless sociopaths, but those traits aren't exclusive to the young, male or geeky.
Media has distorted the meaning of trolling. You would never outright threaten or ad hominem attack somebody while trolling them because that would be too obvious. This is what trolling actually is (well, was) http://youtu.be/AHqGV5WjS4w

Doxing, also now totally misused. Hackers would drop dox on each other to expose them to all the secret service agents and FBI agents watching. If somebody is not wanted by the feds and using their real name on social media there's no point in telling the world their information, considering there are eleventy billion personal data mining services to find out anybody's complete personal info for under $10. We're all already doxxed.

The worst thing you can possibly do when a horde of e-cretins is trying to bait you into losing face in public is to acknowledge them by writing "I'm a victim" posts and articles. That's exactly what they want. If you get death threats sue their asses or call the police. Otherwise that horde is just a bunch of meaningless text on a screen you can safely ignore that will quickly move on to a more responsive target.

Ignoring them doesn't work anymore because modern social media and communication tools have given them power that doesn't depend on whether you're paying attention.

They can send shopped nudes with your face on them to your parents, they can call & email your boss at work to try and get you fired, they can threaten to rape & murder your sister. Sure, ignore that, it'll go away.

It does go away, nobody remembers Boxxy/Katie of youtube/4chan fame? The horde went after her worse than threats and calls yet she's still there making vids. She didn't write a big victim blog or appear on Oprah (Jessi Slaughter) and the lynch mob quickly lost interest when denied their reaction prize.

Threats of course should be handled by police and not ignored, but the moment you seek media attention or acknowledge how the horde has "ruined your life" you are throwing gasoline on the fire.

On the other end of the spectrum are people ( teenage girls mostly) who actually kill themselves from the relentless online harassment.

Different people will react differently, just like in an offline setting. There isn't really a solution that works for everybody.

> The worst thing you can possibly do when a horde of e-cretins is trying to bait you into losing face in public is to acknowledge them by writing "I'm a victim" posts and articles.

So, Lennart Poettering's recent post [1] doing exactly that was a sign of a crack in his armor. I can't begin to tell you how that improves my outlook on life. Thank you.

1. https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

> Call it something like "electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder."

That's a nice name for it. Penny arcade came up with a more colorful name 10 years ago: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

I feel like any type of online review site must be moderated. I've seen firsthand the damage it can cause a legitimate enterprise. On the flip side, I've also seen the difference a 3 star to a 5 rating on Yelp can do, and it's not insignificant.
"I troll therefore, I am" : An odd, yet perfectly acceptable lesson on the motivation behind their actions.

As an aside, this is why helbanning exists. To delete a comment or ban an account, (or in the case of the article, block an account) is a response, a different one to feeding, yet a response nonetheless. To deny a response in essence is to deny the troll validation of their existence.

That this started on Goodreads doesn't surprise me at all.

I use the site regularly, but I put it in the same category as most single topic 'communities' - something I'll use (reference), but know better than to engage with.

Basically, I find that such places tend to end up heavily steeped in their own customs and hierarchy which are dominated by the sort of super users and relationship-driven mobs that the author ran into.

At least Amazon finally acknowledged the toxic elements of the Goodreads community [1]. It's surely a tough problem.

What I really wonder is what exactly causes a community to end up that way? Every successful community has a struggle with growth and groupthink, but some get particularly bad. Is it a failure in moderation or are some topics and demographics just more susceptible?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism_and_controv...

Suppose the author had followed the advice she kept receiving from everyone she talked to with experience dealing with book bloggers, and ignored the blathering of the bloggers.

Would would be the likely consequences for the author and her book?

The book's Amazon reviews are fine. The critical reviews there generally seem to be sane and rational, not trollish. As far as I can tell Googling a bit, the intense negativity seems confined to Goodreads and maybe some blogs. Taking a look at a few of the negative Goodreads reviews, it is pretty obvious that they are not legitimate [1] reviews. Most people reading the Goodreads reviews to actually try to determine if they would enjoy the book should have little trouble recognize the troll reviews and ignoring them.

In short, do these people actually matter?

[1] What I mean by "legitimate" is that the reviewer read the book, and is giving their honest opinion of the book itself based upon just its contents.

Someone who's reading through the reviews might be able to figure out which are troll reviews and ignore them, but someone searching through a list sorted by rating or just visually scanning a list with star ratings surely won't, and thus may never make it to the actual reviews to realize there are trolls present.
"Blythe" Goodreads profile if anyone is interested : http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5206717-blythe
Her twitter: https://twitter.com/blharris4

The review distribution in her GoodReads profile doesn't look like that of a troll or griefer. I thought it'd be bimodal with a huge number of one-stars. Instead it's unimodal centered at 4/5. Just like a book enthusiast who likes most of the books she reads.

Her Twitter and GoodReads profile are private now, but from what I can tell from the Guardian comments from people who did read them she isn't a troll - she genuinely didn't like the book and really did think that some of the sex in it was rape, by virtue of one of the parties being underage and so unable to give meaningul consent.
Imagine a slightly different version of this story, told from the other viewpoint:

A woman writes a negative review of a book that she feel trivializes underage rape and PTSD. She encourages others to see the book in that same light.

She hasn't used her real identity online, and she's sensitive about rape and trauma. Is she hiding her ID for reasons of safety?

The author then net stalks her, finding out her where she lives and where she works. The author calls her (more than once!) at work, saying she knows who she really is. The author also drives to her home, but doesn't knock and leaves a book with the creepy title A Short Guide To A Happy Life (is it a hidden message? SHORT LIFE?) on the doorstep.

Then the author publishes her real name in a major newspaper, resulting in views all over the planet. Whatever reason she had for keeping a low profile, even if it was for her own safety from a past abuser, it's blown now.

The story sure looks different from that angle. Not saying it's all the way things are, but it's certainly a valid alternate view.

You left out the part where she decides to openly mock, or, I guess the phrase today is cyberbully, the author on Twitter.

Angles are fine, but don't leave out things that happened.

Well, I don't know what the author considered to be ridicule on Twitter. It's not the case that all ridicule is "cyberbullying". I also note that the other person wasn't directly engaging the author on Twitter (via "@"), since the author acknowledges she only found it be searching for her name.

If I ridicule, say Justin Bieber, on Twitter without directly engaging him, am I "cyberbullying" him?

I don't know the whole story here, but what's been presented certainly is open to being flipped around the other way.

Reminds me of the trolls that taunted Zelda Williams after her father died. Despicable.
Popular culture and the mainstream media, as both tend to do, have turned trolling into a meaningless word, and now nobody actually knows what trolling is anymore. Taunting someone whose father has died, however, is definitely not trolling.
Sure it means something, just not quite what it used to. Once upon a time, "trolling" meant going on a Usenet newsgroup, posting something that contained an incorrect statement about Star Trek (for example), and seeing if anyone was enough of a smarty pants to flame you for it. Then you "YHBT, HAND" and scurry back to alt.religion.kibology where you post a recap for everyone's amusement.

To my knowledge, that is the actual origin of the term as it pertains to the Internet (as opposed to the meaning in fishing, which is what it ultimately derived from).

Now it just means being an online griefer. I can accept that. There needs to be a name for it and that's as good as any.

I'm not sure what you think the original meaning of the term was, but most people who complain about mainstream culture getting Internet subcultures wrong think it dates back to the earlier days of web forums, which itself was a dilution of its meaning from Usenet.

The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter. It may matter even less than getting riled up about hacker vs. cracker misuse, which itself is profoundly unworthy of getting worked up over. :)

Once the public adapts a term or practice from an in-group, it is usually futile for members of the group to fight it.

Hacker, troll and inline posting (vs top-posting) are a few examples, and there are many more where specialised crypto / computer science / software engineering terms are given more generalised definitions.

However, this is not specific to the Internet or hacker community, and some other fields probably have it worse. The words lunatic, maniac, retard, imbecile, moron, and idiot were all once psychological terms used by medical professionals to refer to people with mental illness or intellectual disability, but these words continuously get taken up by the public to be used as insults (against people who do not meet the original definition). The hacker community can probably learn from the response of the medical community here, which is to accept the loss of the term with its original technical meaning from the lexicon, and make up another technical term to replace it.

This reminds me of another story by Leo Traynor about troll's victim tracking down and finally meeting the troll: http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/09/meeting-troll.html The massive amount of damage that can be imposed by all kinds of online manipulators to their victims' mental health and career is even more depressing than the complete absence of a solution to the problem. At least I'm glad to hear that breaking the 'Do not engage' rule brought some relief to Kathleen.
Very interesting read.