Don't Feed the Trolls by Amy Binns

1. Amy Binns
University of Central Lancashire
Cyber Hate and Bullying Conference
Don’t Feed the Trolls: Challenges
and responses of online behaviour

2. Research Background
 Don’t Feed the Trolls!
 Managing difficult behaviour on magazines’
websites
 Facebook’s Ugly Sisters
 Abuse and Anonymity on Ask.fm and Formspring
 Twitter City and Facebook Village
 Teenage girls’ personas and experiences influenced
by choice architecture in social networking sites
 Fair Game?
 Journalists’ experiences of online abuse

3. Some common threads....
 Anonymity is always an issue
 Deindividuation reduces responsibility
 Virtual vs reality
 Easy to treat as a game
 Not all sites are the same
 Look at happy places for best practice
 Design out abuse triggers

4. A word about Ask.fm
 Allows importing of offline contacts through
Facebook friends etc.
 Allows anonymous questioning of offline friends.
 The evil twist
 Questions aren’t public on your profile until you reply,
but....
 You can’t reply privately, only publicly.
 This leads to escalating abuse and a strong streak of
victim blaming.

5. Anonymity and Deindividuation
 Anonymity is discursive not binary
 Anonymity can be default or opt-in
 Online disinhibition can be valuable in a
supportive environment
 But such places are targets for pure trolling

6. Virtual vs reality
 “Ordinary” users don’t experience being online
ordinarily as “real”.
 This is partly positive – young people feel more
confident.
 But they experience abuse as real.
 They are strongly judgemental about fake
behaviour.

7. Not all sites are the same
 For teenage girls, Twitter is happier than
Facebook or Ask.fm (but my instinct is instagram
is better)
 Quora and Vimeo are supremely happy in a
grown-up way
 Actively managed sites are expensive but
valuable
 Designing out abuse triggers may have a
commercial cost

8. Discussion questions
 Much of my research has been about girls and
women. Do we know where the problems are for
men?
 Do we know of any really happy or disastrous
sites?
 Can we think of ways to make online feel real?