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If you've been on the web for more than a minute you've at least witnessed an attack on a blogger by a troll - usually anonymous. If you're truly lucky, it has happened to you. And if you are a bonafied interwebz superstar - someone like, oh say Dooce (Heather Armstrong) - you've got entire blogs dedicated to hating you. And if you are someone like, oh say Dooce - you brilliantly monetize the hate.
But I digress. This post is about more practical advice for what you can do if you are the victim of a drive-by attack on the internet. First, allow me to share some of my stories with you.
Unlike many other bloggers, I rarely get nasty comments or private email flames. Nope. Rather I inspire bloggers who have a bone to pick with me to write long, rambling attack posts. Helpfully, they generally include my name so that Google alerts me to their odes.
And I am flattered when I find these posts. Truly I am because to write such a post the writer must spend a great deal of passionate time thinking about me. Plus I can sometimes mine them for comedy gold. Awesome!
But after I get my post-attack laugh on I inevitably experience a mood dip. It is not all roses and zen dealing with attacks. I suppose the inevitable flaw in my response is that in making jokes I ultimately violate the cardinal rule of troll club: I talk about them, therefore I let them in my noggin, therefore I've fed them.
In addition to not feeding them, the other supremely important thing to remember is that it is about the troll's issues. Ultimately that is what keeps me sane when someone doesn't like my views and therefore feels the need to disparage my appearance or make up things from whole cloth about me or, best of all, try and slam me with a derogatory description I now totally plan to turn into a tee shirt and wear to BlogHer '10. These people who rant and rave about me don't know me and so I know they aren't really talking about me. They are talking about some fictional person and are using me as a convenient cipher upon which they project their crazy.
I am lucky, though, that my charming haters haven't turned personal or violent. I might have to reconsider if that were to happen. But as long as I continue to just attract your ordinary garden variety of trolls, I'll keep on blogging and keep on doing my best not to feed, engage or otherwise encourage those who don't have the courage of their convictions to stay and constructively engage. And if all else fails, I remember that most of the people I encounter in the blogosphere are decent, polite, often kind and many I am lucky to know and have in my life.
Have you found a strategy that works well for dealing with trolls and drive-by attackers? Has the threat or reality of attacks stopped or limited your blogging?
Related Reading:
Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend: In the thick of it: when fatphobia plays out in politics
When I was asked to appear on CNN for the first time (2007), Mike Rogers blogged about it afterwards and, one of the commenters actually said "I like Pam, I just wish we had a prittier face representing liberals. looks sell, sorry?" Another said:
"I cant believe the talking progressive heads dont go on diets and loose some weight so we can get more people to like us. PUT DOWN THE BIG MAC STEP AWAY FROM THE MAC AND CHEESE JUST SAY NO TO DEEP FRIED FOODS!!!!"
I already was tentative about doing TV, but it has had a lasting effect on my reticence and self-consciousness about doing it. I know it's irrational, but one gets tired of people investing too much of their evaluation on what I say based on what I look like.
BlogHer member Jenna Hatfield chattered: I got trolled today. My old, long-time troll, back out from under her bridge. All I could do? Was laugh. I've come a long way, baby.
Anil Dash: Remembering Brad L. Graham
Before the term "blog" was even coined, the distinguishing feature of the sites that a few of us were publishing was that these were made by real people, individuals with voices who had something to express. Yet the conventional wisdom was that the medium we were working in, the world we were living in, was somehow not
