BlogHer - Today is is Stop Cyberbullying Day - Comments

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Lauran — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:53:11 -0600

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Great advice!

mamarant — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 11:47:47 -0500

Wish I had seen this years ago:

* DO NOT WRITE AN ENTRY ABOUT THE TROLL OR THEIR WEB SITE ON YOUR BLOG. Youâ€™ve given the troll their DREAM post at that point, AND youâ€™re pouring gasoline on the fire. Or on the troll. Wait, that might be fun.

I would have avoided the trolls from the Childfree movement.

Hi everyone, thanks for the comments..

Lisa Stone — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:56:25 -0500

Just checking back in after yesterday's talk at UT-Austin with two further thoughts:

When the subject of trolling came up, Kyle Poplin, the editor of Bluffton Today, noted that he thinks lots of people on his site just don't realize how their comments appear and/or feel to other readers. I shared our community guidelines and one more opinion -- that this kind of behavior is a societal issue, not a blogging issue. That helps de-personalize it too.

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Koan!

Denise — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:21:58 -0500

Good to see you, that's all I wanted to say. :-)

~Denise
Fast Times @ Homeschool High and Flamingo House Happenings

Great post, points are

ana2271 — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:11:26 -0500

Great post, points are valid. The more attention a stalker, or bully receives, the more larger they become; they're like vampires or parasites. One of the first things to curtail a parasite's lifeline is to remove its food source, or quarantine the parasite in such a way that it can't get to a person.

For me, one mechanism that helped was switching to a blog platform that tracked each incoming IP number via comments, rather than sit there moderating each comment (sometimes there's no time to do that), and then if a person stepped out of line, I could ban their IP number, so they'd be unable to comment therafter. I did this once this year, after a male reader of my blog, crossed the line where privacy was concerned.

I.G.N.O.R.E.

margalit — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:02:41 -0500

Sage advice, Lisa. I'm pretty good at ignoring people these days. It has made my life much less stressful. So when I get nasty comments (just deleted one a second ago), I don't even bother reading the whole thing. Bingo! Gone forever, and I'm still feeling good. Who needs the negativity?

Margalit

I'm almost hesitant to post this...

kperfetto — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:58:54 -0500

About a year ago someone who knows me -- or rather, knows my handle on another forum -- posted a "parody" of me on someone else's blog. It wasn't malicious, per se, more childish and annoying. (Just writing it made it seem more so.) I wasn't threatened, but a few people thought I wrote it myself, and that bothered me. No one came forth and admitted it. (I am still a member of that message board, and don't intend to leave.)

I know that doesn't come close to receiving death threats, but it's made me more aware of the nastiness that happens with an inflated ego and an internet connection.

Five Dollar Camera

Lisa, your post is perfect.

Dana J. Tuszke — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:46:35 -0500

Lisa, your post is perfect. I am so sick of the internet trolls. It seems they have nothing better to do, but why bother bloggers? What sick happiness do they get from it?

Ugh.

I'm so glad you wrote this.

Dana from The Dana Files.

Thank you Suni!

Lisa Stone — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:28:48 -0500

:)
Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

KDPaine, if I were an illustrator

Lisa Stone — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:28:18 -0500

I'd be able to respond with a little drawing of a knobbly troll who has been hit with an invisibility wand. But I have no such skills - instead I'll just say: Nice!

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

NICE Meg! Everyone, read this post

Lisa Stone — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:26:41 -0500

Here's a taster:

If you see a troll at someone elseâ€™s website:

* Your first instinct may be to defend the web site owner from the troll. But unless they have addressed the troll and encouraged you to do the same, ignore the troll. Trolls like attention. They like conversation. Ignoring them is like cutting off their air supply.
* Do not engage in a debate with said troll if the web site owner asks you to stop. Itâ€™s like arguing with someoneâ€™s spouse on their behalf, except theyâ€™re already having make-up sex and now youâ€™re just killing the mood.
* Do not go to the trollâ€™s website and troll them. They will only torture you (or the owner of the web site at which you discovered them) all the more in return.
* Trolls that start out funny can get scary really fast. Keep that in mind before you wave your arms to get their attention.
* All the arguments in the world will not convince a true troll. Assume all trolls are true trolls.
* If the owner of the web site asks you to speak up on their behalf in their comments, stay reasonable, donâ€™t threaten, and donâ€™t match the trollâ€™s tone. Show them that such behaviour is foreign and unwelcome at the site in question. But maybe just stick with not doing it, regardless. Encourage the site owner not to do it, too, if at all possible. Youâ€™re not going to win.
* DO NOT WRITE AN ENTRY ABOUT THE TROLL OR THEIR WEB SITE ON YOUR BLOG. Youâ€™ve given the troll their DREAM post at that point, AND youâ€™re pouring gasoline on the fire. Or on the troll. Wait, that might be fun.
* If you see a discussion heading towards troll territory â€” and it can happen with perfectly decent people who get carried away â€” just donâ€™t engage in it. Yes, you can say whatever you want. But no, itâ€™s not always the right time.

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Koan, I don't think I have an answer either...

Lisa Stone — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:24:33 -0500

I realize the two-part approach appears paradoxical at first glance, but I think it may represent a solution. I do believe that refusing to feed one's individual trolls is the only way to banish them. Unfortunately, however, that means individuals suffer in silence -- and many women I talk with wonder whether they are the only ones who experience this kind of abuse and experience a great deal of additional shame and pain due to the silence required to banish the idiots.

So I hope that waging an organized and vocal campaign against trolling could help the next people who experience this realize that (a) they're not alone, (b) there's nothing to be ashamed of and (c) there's a strong, supportive group of people online (women and men) who disdain this kind of behavior.

In a way it's like having a group of people acknowledge they've been bullied at school or battered at home -- by supporting each other, we can extract ourselves and realize it's them, not us. Whether or not the "haters" ever know it...

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Eleanor Roosevelt's quote...

Lisa Stone — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:13:48 -0500

...is a fantastic fit with this topic. Thanks for the link Stephanie. I like your analogies; they're really helpful.

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Deja vu...

Koan — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:59:54 -0500

I confess, I haven't been online much in the last five weeks (or at all in the last week) and today is the first time I learned about the recent events in question.

While not daring to compare my experience to Kathy's, I know something about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of online hate - ironically, a fair bit of which came about as a result of my involvement with BlogHer.

With my Devil's advocate hat on - saying "ignore the trolls" on the one hand, and then waging an organised and vocal campaign against, er, trolling - isn't that, by implication, feeding (as a group, with organised attention) the "individuals" we seek to deprive of attention?

Don't ask me for an answer - I don't have one.

Hi, Lisa. Thanks for a fine

Stephanie — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:30:57 -0500

Hi, Lisa. Thanks for a fine post. On a related note, here's a post I wrote recently about ignoring snakes and jerks:

http://westallen.typepad.com/idealawg/2007/03/no_snake_consen.html

All best to you,

Stephanie

Today is is Stop Cyberbullying Day

Lisa Stone — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:18:31 -0500

March 30, 2007

Hi everyone,

Today is Stop Cyberbullying Day, inspired by these events: "Hating Hate Speech: Safety for Kathy Sierra and all women online".

In support of this event, and in protest against this latest example of abuse aimed at women online, I'm re-publishing a piece I wrote in October, 2006. This piece was inspired by a few parenting bloggers I spoke with that month, who were targeted by cyberbullies and asked me for advice.

In the piece, I talk about ignoring words that hurt. I also provide resources for reporting threats to police, where appropriate.

Now, after the events of this week, what would you add?

What do you do when you're cyberstalked, taunted or abused online?, posted Oct. 31, 2006

Dear women of the Internet:

We need to have a talk. There's a reality of online life that some of us are suffering through by ourselves, a completely normal but painful experience that every woman I've ever met who goes online has had -- and that plenty of men have had too.

I'm talking about the lovely experience of encountering Internet trolls. And for me, it all boils down to this...

Sometimes people are mean in this virtual Web world. Really mean.

And it's my opinion that there's only one solution: Ignore them.

That's the most powerful thing you can do.

I'm saying shun them, like the Amish, as a friend recently recommended to me via email. This is our virtual world -- we created it. The most powerful thing we can do when we encounter a person who is abusive online is to refuse to acknowledge them. Deprived of the spotlight, their own hateful little lights will blink out.

Buh-bye!

Don't link them, don't talk about them, don't read them. As far as we're concerned, they don't exist. And amongst ourselves, I think it's time to bring the issue out of the closet, demystify it, circle our wagons and learn to roll our eyes about it together, even laugh at it. Who cares?

I can imagine some of your faces -- you're thinking that I don't understand. You're wrong. I already know how hard it is and I do understand. Believez-moi.

If you're lucky, you may not yet have learned that people exist who will use the Internet to come to our blogs or sites and belittle us, call our names and poke fun at us, our beliefs, our races, our religions, the fact that we are women or men or other, perhaps even our kids or our dogs or our sans-serif fonts, for crying out loud. In fact, if we have the nerve to be female, especially someone who is not white, we will attract more mean, hate-filled people than folks who are not female and white. Some of these people even (inexplicably) have enough time and interest in us to start their own blogs and sites to showcase their abuse of us.

Ridiculous, isn't it? You may wonder to yourself, how is it that there can be a war on in Iraq, children starving on the streets of every nation on this rock and the unfolding horror that is Darfur -- and some people have time to spend hours bullying other people online?

Here's how: It's not about us. It's about them. That's why ignoring trolls works.

Please read that last sentence again? Now print it, cut it out, chew it up and swallow it. This is my mantra: It's. Not. About. Me. That's why I refuse to play.

Here's a little perspective that helped me: As Timothy Campbell, who wrote this great article for AOL users in 2001, said: "Trolls crave attention, and they care not whether it is positive or negative. They see the Internet as a mirror into which they can gaze in narcissistic rapture. If you want a deeper analysis than that, perhaps a psychologist can shed some additional light on the matter."

In order to take our revenge, our best bet is "don't respond, don't interact and don't engage," recommends the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line:

"Many serial bullies are also serial attention-seekers. More than anything else they want attention. It doesn't matter what type of attention they get, positive or negative, as long as they can provoke someone into paying them attention. It's like a 2-year-old child throwing a tantrum to get attention from a parent. The best way to treat bullies is to refuse to respond and to refuse to engage them - which they really hate. In other words, do not reply to their postings, and on forums carry on posting without reference to their postings as if they didn't exist. In other words, treat nobodies as nobodies."

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker puts it yet another way:

"But when YOU are the target of an insulting post or sharply-worded email, quite frankly, it can really suck. Today I've got some strategies for dealing with Internet Meanies: those faceless virtual bullies who take pleasure in shooting other people down from the safety of their keyboards....It's easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don't quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are "small" and "weak." "

Today, fortunately, the law and corporate policies have evolved to the point where we can take action in certain circumstances. Specifically:

Currently there are 45 cyberstalking (and related) U.S. federal and state laws on the books, as well as laws in U.K. and India. Read about them here at Jayne Hitchcock's site, Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA): http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/laws/index.shtml

If you need information on child-related laws, WHOA suggests you visit Safetyed

Get their IP addresses from your logs and ban them from your blog. That's what Jenna Hatfield did. She writes:

"what do you do when mocking, name-calling, insulting, ignoring and cussing donâ€™t work? What do you do when youâ€™ve got a persistent little bugger that annoys the bejeebus out of you, sucks up your bandwidth, steals photos and takes things out of context to their own personal spaces? I wasnâ€™t sure this morning. I now know how!"

So - there you have it. That's my approach to online life.

What do you think?

Image credit: Family Living, Hatfield Style

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette