Although I participate in social media on various sites I find the online snitches to be far more virulent re reporting certain posters.
Also the 3rd party boycotts of businesses by the Greens, Crikey, Get up and unions is far more serious than first thought when they started to ruin businesses.
We are also shut down for not showing enough sympathy for people who lose their lives doing things that lead to that very fact & playing the race and redneck card is a particular favourite.
The stifling of opinions by calling to arms their adherents to remove people is a 21st century thing, more people who don't have the education to make an educated comment have access to social media.
The article below should be an eye opener to some but I'm not holding out any hope that they will pull back from this type of activity:
What sort of person posts tasteless things online and what trolling may reveal about society at large.
There is another question that has gone unasked: what type of person grasses on people for saying things they find offensive about people they don’t even know?
The online snitch is not the antidote to the online troll; he is the flipside, indeed, online snitches pursue their targets with the same unflinching obsession as online trolls.
Online snitches repost offending comments and encourage others to share, submit and express their outrage, some even campaign to make the troll ‘famous’ for being offensive.
Like the trolls, snitches express the same egotism and desire for attention and validation, only they want to be validated for their pious outrage rather than their ability to comment & push buttons.
This has a profound negative impact, not least for those people directly affected by trolling. Indeed, if online snitches actually cared about those targeted by online trolling, they should ignore such trolling. Instead, the actions of such people increase the exposure of offensive online posts.
By engaging with trolls and, in many cases, reporting them to the police, snitches turn small, often unnoticed incidents of trolling into full-blown media stories, making it much more likely that those affected by trolling will become aware of the offensive posts.
However, a more worrisome development is the impact the online snitches are having on how speech is policed online.
The online troll and the online snitch are not wholly different creatures: they come from the same swamp. The difference is that trolls don’t actually matter; their attention-seeking outbursts have no meaning outside of the online world.
Trolls
There are a whole bunch of theories about dealing with trolls. The most well-known being that you shouldn't feed the trolls.
- Be vicious to trolls. It's not like you're depriving anybody of food or oxygen.
- Be capricious. If you're consistent, they'll know where the line is; if they know where the line is, they'll skate to the edge of it.
- Be indifferent to trollish suffering. Being called a facist (not a typo: most trolls can’t spell) who's suppressing free speech is not a cause for concern; its semantically equivalent to “You're doing your job.”
- Be obnoxious. Trolls do it because it amuses them to do it. Being made fun of is not amusing, particularly when you can enforce a ban. Remember: they need your site more than your site needs them.
It all boils down to this: every so often you have to dispatch a troll.
The snitch, however, has a far greater and more dangerous impact.
In their sanctioning of intervention into speech, online snitches are facilitating the erosion of freedom of speech – and cheering it all the way.
Rob Harries is a writer and researcher based in London.
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