Gurmehar Kaur is the new raging Twitter trend. People have indulged in trolling her, whatever their intention, whether it is to justify their position, react to the outspoken Delhi University’s thoughts on war, “clear the air” like minister Kiren Rijiju and or just pass comments.
Trolls — those unfriendly neighbours in Twitterverse or other online social spaces who post deliberately provocative message with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument, deviating from the topic. The word invokes, as it is meant to, the image of an ugly cave-dwelling creature (the original meaning of troll) as the comments and memes posted by these anti-social activists can indeed get ugly.
It’s no more just a fight between people of opposing ideologies like communists and right-wingers, or rationals and bhakts. In the post-truth world of “alternative facts”, Twitter trolling also brings up the graver problem of lack of authenticity. But mostly, it’s abuse, as we have seen the likes of Gurmehar Kaur, Barkha Dutt, Kavitha Krishnan and others face. And women invariably are the worst targeted — threats of rape and explicitly horrifying sexual acts.
To deal with the viral spread of the troll menace, a Google offshoot called Jigsaw, lat Thursday, released a new piece of code called Perspective, an API that gives any developer access to the anti-harassment tools that Jigsaw has worked on for over a year. Enter a sentence into its interface, and it can immediately throw up an assessment of the phrase’s “toxicity” level more accurately than any keyword blacklist. Basically, the machine is learning to automatically detect insults, harassment and abusive speech online. Apart from perspective, there are also a few bots and filters that put sense to our twitter feeds.
But until those become easily accessible, there are some things you can do to help yourself when you’re up against trolls. Here’s five ways to do that:
1) It doesn't really matter: Think about it, there are close to 7.4 billion people in the world and assuming just about half have access to the glorious internet, a troll's opinion can easily be filtered and ignored. All you need is a macro perspective. Even if you feel infuriated at a troll's tweet, compare the magnanimity of it to the size of the earth. The troll is a peanut!
2) Sexism vs sexism: Never counter a sexist snarky remark by expounding knowledge about gender rights, or male-bashing.
3) Cat fights shouldn't be goals: Listen to the other person's opinion and even if a suspected troll is trying to draw you into a war of words, stay calm. Social media is all about maintaining zen and moving on.
4) Everyone loves proof: The world's online IQ keeps dipping by the day. Why not slam some data in 140 characters and spread some knowledge? The best way to shut trolls is by slamming evidence they can never counter.
5) Dislike, unfollow, block, repeat: Last but not least, shut out trolls by reporting the online abusers. That's the least you owe to sanitizing the online space.