Troll: Social Media Hate Speech & Shit Storm

A so-called troll is an anonymous person on the Internet who attracts attention through a high number of negative and critical comments. The so-called trolling has even managed to become a fixed term. The goal of the trolls is to defame people or companies, ideas, projects, even countries. In Russia there are whole trollfabriken, houses in which employees work, which influence the opinion of the people purposefully by a high number of comments.

What does a troll do? Troll factories

Away from the single working faithfully, in the nursery or even the old man on the sofa, there are professional troll factories. First of all, it is important for a troll to have different accounts. After all, everything has to look real and of course the posted content has to be likened and again commented by supposed third parties. If one person manages 30, 40 accounts and ten people work together, you will quickly reach an amount of 300, 400 accounts that are disproportionately active. Although the number is not extremely high, their influence is great. Normal users publish a few postings a day, maximum. There might be an Instagram photo listening, 3.4 stories and maybe something being shared on Facebook. Troll, on the other hand, publish comments all day long, search for specific fan sites, profiles became also groups. Something new is constantly rated negatively, critical newspaper articles are shared and of course YouTube videos. Through the extremely high mass of publications, her opinion gets a very high presence. They also hardly take a break, while the normal user is offline for four or five days, doesn’t publish anything new, they produce new content every day. Trolls have become an extremely important topic, news they take as a theme, in Denmark Lan become a well-known sportswoman’s life. Even one of the biggest series in the world, South Park, turned it into its own show. Hate speech, hate speech on the Internet, has become a real problem. Especially for people who perceive digital life as serial, have less self-confidence or social relationships. Apart from the private hate-speech, troll factories are problematic worldwide. Because not even political elections are stopped. Social networks tend to react passively to this. Although there are algorithms and a human check of critical content, Fred sensors receive up to 4000 media per hour for evaluation. For a single image or comment, often only a fraction of a second remains. 4,000 media? That sounds like a good idea at first, but realistically, every minute over 1000 hours of video material are uploaded to YouTube alone. Accordingly, the human control, following the evaluation of the algorithm, it is random. Therefore, users in social networks also have the opportunity to report offensive content. If enough users have responded to a comment in this form, it will be checked. During this process the troll has most likely already published ten new postings. So it remains an eternal cat-and-mouse game.

What to do if you are trotted? Crisis management

When we are booked as social media consultants, we answer the question Trolle, Shitstorm, hate speech by saying: if we were in their front yard, would they tolerate that? No. In the same way you should consistently report and delete actions in social networks. Of course, constructive criticism should always be considered, unfounded negative and critical comments will be deleted consequently and immediately.

Read more about the topic here:

• Crisis management