I stumbled across an interesting little entry this morning, which includes a very succinct description of "troll tactics", the sort used by forum trolls, paid or unpaid, to disrupt meaningful discussion.
I have always felt I have something of "a nose for a knave", (to steal an expression from the author of the Flashman series), and I recognize trolls fairly quickly in any forum situation, but I have never before seen the type analyzed and described in such a manner.
The tactics are simple and easy to spot. When they first confront you they do it subtly while interjecting an insult. When you try to respond to them using logic and common sense, their next message will be an insult that they know you will feel you have to refute. If you answer that insult they have you hooked and have achieved the desired effect, which is to disrupt debate and the exchange of ideas and information.
No doubt most of you recognize the loathsome creature from its description. But the mention of trolls and their habits was only in passing. The gist of the article, the part that made my wicked old heart go pitty-pat, was this -
We know what is wrong with our country and what has to be undone if we are ever to live in freedom and prosperity again. We must break away from the false left-right paradigm and realize that those posing as our representatives can only be identified as a single party: the corpora-demo-publicans, of the international corporate mafia, by the international corporate mafia, and for the international corporate mafia.
The only way that we are going to see the living wage jobs returned to this country is through the destruction of the laws that reward the sending of our jobs overseas, the instituting of large tariffs on all foreign goods and huge taxes on all moneys taken out of the United States being invested in foreign countries, and laws forbidding our natural resources from leaving our country except in the form of manufactured goods, and I don’t mean a board, I mean a table.
It sounds like a far better plan than any other I have heard lately.
With the elections coming up, there are a lot of troll articles out there, with more to come. I recently saw a "Vote Out" list, showing "those who are not working for the unemployed." And guess what? The "Vote Out" list was almost all Democrats who voted FOR extending UI benefits. The list encouraged keeping in the Republicans who voted against helping the unemployed. Trolling at it's best (or worst?)
ReplyDeleteSo if you run across any lists of who to vote out, do your homework first. There are sites out there you can look up your own senators and representative to see how they voted on issues, and make your own decision
Very interesting article. You mean I could get paid for shilling myself out to the corpora-demo-publicans as an online troll who deliberately disrupts intelligent discussion? Talk about the power of the Dark Side...
ReplyDeleteI never gave much thought to the fact that these people are out there, but it's pretty sickening actually. They're just as fucked by the system as everyone else but instead of working to improve the situation for everybody, they work against the common good for their own personal benefit.