DEALING WITH TROLLS

Carla97 wrote:It is waste of resources even bothering with this, but good to keep in mind a person like that, researching people´s identities, pictures, following them obsessively can be a real threat and not a troll at all.

I find it a bit alarming VFF and tight security was mentioned on person´s posts. Probably the last side anyone who ever went there would bring up, as it is expected and normal procedure. It means, it is or has been an issue of interest.

Ignore, block, what else. Maybe something should be done.

playfuldeb wrote:Sorry - my bad - I didnt know the ettiquette in troll behaviour so I was trying to get her to burst. Again - apologies

Carla97 wrote:My point was and is that what happened yesterday is illegal.

Carla97 wrote:One ordinary girl living in London has a very popular blog, where comments started to get nasty (nowhere near what has been seen here) 3 people got fined. It really hurt her blog readers went from thousands to tens, so did her income from the blog.

it's me wrote:Oh ....
Ok

Maggy wrote:I couldn't stop laughing when I saw it,
I just had to use it  

Dior wrote:OMG, haven't been online for a few days and missing out the best things!

what would he say wrote:Katie...is there some way you can stop US from replying....I just could not help myself last night, and God knows I had better things to do.......I HAVE NO SELF CONTROL....

Carla97 wrote:Online anonymity is no sure thing in libel cases anymore in either way.

Carla97 wrote:Growing number of people have web pages, blogs, twitters under pen name, same with artists, writers and people running their businesses. They all have rights even though their own birth names are not exposed.

Katiedot wrote:Trolls in general are easy to spot. They come to a website as newbie posters and write something inflammatory, often insulting other members of the site. They're looking for an argument and nothing delights them more than getting a response. They behave this way because their real lives are empty so this kind of attention, even though it's negative, is better than the nothing they usually get. Small and powerless in real life, the anger they generate from their posts gives them a sense of importance and strength. These kind of trolls are easy for everyone to spot. Best to ignore them.

Our own troll (aka the IMDb nutjob) is another type of troll altogether. She's an obsessed fan who's convinced herself that she's George's soulmate and will be marrying him. She tells herself crazy stories in order to convince herself that he's not cheating on her with Sarah/Elisabetta/Stacy/Amal/whoever, such as he's being forced to do this or that photos are photoshopped/greenscreened and so on. Her ramblings are that there's a secret reason behind why he's fake-dating these women (and now fake-married to).

The IMDb nutjob posts under a number of names here and initially comes across as convincing and plausible, and even likeable.

However, please remember that not every conspiracy theorist is our nutjob and it's possible for perfectly normal posters to share some of the nutjob's opinions. I'm not interested in starting a witch hunt or creating an atmosphere of distrust or paranoia between posters.

Scientists create algorithm that ‘identifies future trolls from just five posts’


Alex Hern, The Guardian
17 Apr 2015 at 11:24 ET  

It is possible to tell comment trolls apart from other users simply from looking at the way they write, researchers have found.

Studying the comments on three sites – CNN, Breitbart and IGN – over an 18 month period, the researchers at Cornell and Stanford universities found that users who went on to be banned wrote differently to other users in the same comment thread, using fewer words indicative of positive emotion.

Future banned users also tended to write comments that were more difficult to read than typical users, the researchers found.

“We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users,” the researchers add, in a pre-publication paper titled Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities.

“Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community.

The researchers also discovered that antisocial behaviour was exacerbated when moderation appears to be overly harsh.

The researchers studied more than 35m posts sent from almost 2 million users on the three websites under investigation, and found nearly 50,000 individual users who had been banned over the 18 month period. They also examined the number of individual comments that had been deleted or reported to the site’s moderators, with all the data provided to the researchers by Disqus, the commenting platform used by all three sites.

They focused their investigation on the 50,000 users banned over the period under examination, and attempted to find tell-tale signs in their prior posts that acted as an indicator for their later behaviour.

They discovered that users who would end up being banned from the site often wrote noticeably different to the main bulk of commenters. “Users can stay on-topic or veer off-topic; prior work has also shown that users tend to adopt linguistic conventions or jargon in a community … and that they also unconsciously mimic the choices of function-word classes they are communicating with.” Sure enough, they found that “text similarity” of banned users was significantly lower than that of non-banned users.

Additionally, the posts of banned users had similar word counts to those of non-banned, but when tested against a standard readability index were revealed to be significantly harder to read.

On top of the information found in the actual posts, the authors also found that users who would go on to be banned interacted differently with the community at large. “For instance, [future banned users] tended to spend more time in individual threads than [users who weren’t banned],” they write.

With all the information together, they created a prediction model which can guess with 80% accuracy whether or not that user will go on to be banned from just their first five posts. Looking at the first 10 raises the accuracy of the model by a further two percentage points, which raises the possibility of automatically highlighting potentially problematic users to moderators so that antisocial behaviour can be dealt with more quickly.

But the authors warn that overzealous moderation can have its own downside: “Taking extreme action against small infractions can exacerbate antisocial behaviour (e.g. unfairness can cause users to write worse) … Whereas trading off overall performance for higher precision and have a human moderator approve any bans is one way to avoid incorrectly blocking innocent users, a better response may instead involve giving antisocial users a chance to redeem themselves.”

LizzyNY wrote:Nicky and Lorna - Thanks! Nicky, is that why when I tried to log in to the NY Post article thread and the thread about the woman with the disabled daughter (both of which I posted in earlier) I got the message that "only users granted special access" could post in the forum? (Sorry for the too-long sentence! ) The message had me really confused.