Peter Burke
Myself and others run two groups on facebook, ‘Irish Rugby Banter’ and ‘Leinster Rugby Fans Forum’.
What has transpired over the last few years is an increase in this pathetic online trolling and downright nasty sentiment towards rugby players. As Nigel Owens said ‘This is not soccer’ and he’s right.
What these idiot trolls forget is that players have family and those family members are themselves members of supporter groups on Facebook, seeing as the actual player themselves would’nt want to be seen as a member of such a group, which is completely understandable.
Recently we saw the head of communications for Leinster Rugby close off comments on a thread, that was celebrating Ross Byrnes 50th cap, because of nasty and personal attacks towards him, which is completely and utterly unacceptable.
Trolling is when someone posts or comments online to deliberately upset others. In short: Trolling is when someone deliberately tries to upset others online.
From a recent publication on the matter:
“As online discussions become increasingly part of our daily interactions, antisocial behavior such as trolling, harassment, and bullying is a growing concern. Not only does antisocial behavior result in significant emotional distress, but it can also lead to offline harassment and threats of violence. Further, such behavior comprises a substantial fraction of user activity on many web sites – 40% of internet users were victims of online harassment; on CNN.com, over one in five comments are removed by moderators for violating community guidelines. What causes this prevalence of antisocial behavior online”?
A troll has been defined in multiple ways in previous literature – as a person who initially pretends to be a legitimate participant but later attempts to disrupt the community, as someone who “intentionally disrupts online communities” , or “takes pleasure in upsetting others”, or more broadly as a person engaging in “negatively marked online behavior”, or that “makes trouble” for a discussion forums’ stakeholders. In this paper, similar to the latter studies, we adopt a definition of trolling that includes flaming, griefing, swearing, or personal attacks, including behavior outside the acceptable bounds defined by several community guidelines for discussion forums. In our experiment, we code posts manually for trolling behavior. In our longitudinal data analysis, we use posts that were flagged for unacceptable behavior as a proxy for trolling behavior.”
Ok so this research think tank produced a full report on this but folks the mental health issue is a big factor here. I’m just referring to rugby players and notably Andrew Porter and Keith Earls who have both spoken out about their own struggles, and we have the great Brent Pope who has highlighted this issue and successfully continues to do so.
My take on trolls and, indeed the folks that I am ever thankful for that run our facebook groups with me, is that they are sad and angry individuals and really just need to be ignored, blocked or banned from social media.
The trouble is Facebook does not take this issue seriously and if you report and issue you are more than likely to get back ‘We have found this does not compromise our community standards’ which is bullshit they could’nt be arsed doing their job.
My advice to anyone or group with trolls trying to wreck any civil chat is just block, delete and remove, works all the time.
*Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Jan 31.
Published in final edited form as: CSCW Conf Comput Support Coop Work. 2017 Feb-Mar;2017:1217–1230. doi: 10.1145/2998181.2998213