Every so often we come across posts, coming from anonymous sources that are downright inflammatory, derogatory and plain objectionable. Often, they succeed in achieving what they seek – angry retorts from the members of the group, resulting in the shattering of the equilibrium. Welcome to the world of “trolling”.
Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group’s common interests and concerns; the newsgroups members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll’s enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.
This obviously gives rise to the debate about freedom of speech in the internet, about the First Amendment, about regulation. The moment a “troller” is fished out, they cry about their inherent freedom being infringed on and the obvious spine chiller follows, “it’s me now and You are next.” It’s about private space and sensitive as we are to whom we let in our clearly earmarked spaces, we tend to jump the gun, even without considering the merits of the case. The regulator is the evil force out to clamp us up, turning us into another brick in the wall.
The whole matter is further complicated by Poe’s Law which postulates: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief. A further corollary, the Poe Paradox, results from suspicion of the first corollary. The paradox is that any new person or idea sufficiently extreme to be accepted by the extremist group risks being rejected as a parody or parodist.
There are “Shills” (or a stooge is a person who publicly helps a person or organization without disclosing that he has a close relationship with that person or organization), people who are master creators of “Sock puppets” (an online identity used for purposes of deception) and the precipitators of “Astroturfing” (political, advertising or public relations campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a disinterested, grassroots participants) out there. What is more, there are compelling cases that have seen many convictions for “crimes” that we forget about acknowledging as mischievous, don’t even understand their true purport and often innocently forward. An example will be the venom laced posts that keep appearing in the social media space praising a particular politician known for his militant right wing, xenophobic posturing, with cleverly woven sentiments of Nationalism. You may be forwarding the post as a “proud Indian” unaware of the fact that you are being used for an underlying sinister purpose; exposing you to the laws of the land where neither the argument of ignorance not that of freedom of speech can offer you effective protection.
The first amendment, as has been famously pointed out, is there to protect the citizens from their own government but can do precious little to protect them from themselves. As the Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy stated in a related case, “this argument that the Internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west.”
In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity … The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter. This effectively means that an individual can, and often does, have multiple identities in the virtual space, “passing” off as people they are not. How we interact with these pseudo identities (often with hidden agendas) and how we engage them in conversations may even define our identities by association, exposing us to acts that brush with the law without our knowledge or intention to commit such acts.
Children of the world wide web, enjoy the excitement, but parental discretion is strongly advised.