Trolls beware of the Cyber Bullies Part One!

Snugglepuss

I have been looking into the world of online communities recently and found some really interesting stuff!
Online communities like to believe they are in Utopia! This is mainly because everything is done by the written word and behind the comfort and safety of the computer screen. When someone comes along and upsets this feeling, then the discussion board feels totally at unease and out of sorts with the world.

There are many different ways of an unpleasant people upsetting the harmony of an online community such as:

Trolls beware of the Cyber Bullies Part One!

Trolls
Cyber Bullies
Thread Breaking

Trolls beware of the Cyber Bullies Part Two!

Stalkers
Flaming
Baiting
Hit and run posting

There are other ways, but for the time being I will concentrate on:

Trolls beware of the Cyber Bullies Part One

Trolls

This one interested me for two reasons, it is mentioned in the Geek commandments and I believe that I have now been TROLLED and was the initial reason I started looking into the psychology behind it all! An Internet troll or troll in internet slang is someone who intentionally posts messages and which is constructed to cause controversy on an online community!

So why do they do it? Well many people believe that it is because they are sad individual jerks who love the attention it generates. It also could be because they are bored or lack communication skills in the real world. As stated earlier, the World Wide Web is in lots of ways anonymous and therefore in some ways the troll feels that their true identity will not be discovered.

Furthermore, by being so aggressive and hurtful on the internet, they escape the reality of a real life face to face confrontation!

How do they troll? Basically what they like to do is find a thread, post a load of rubbish on it, but more importantly, is extremely personal to the thread starter. The troll is not bothered whether they (the troll) look silly or not, they just love to cause havoc and try to discredit the thread starter. Once the people from that particular community respond to the post, and then basically the Troll has managed to do what they had set out to do and won in their opinion – cause trouble, hurt people’s feelings and gain a lot of attention!

The best way then of not encouraging a troll, is not to respond to them AT ALL! some online communities have signs which warn not to feed the trolls and hand on heart, in the future, if I believe anyone is either being an internet troll on a thread I start or another members thread, then I will alert the mods to a TROLL ALERT and then put them on my ignore list!

Cyber Bullies

For me, I believe this is far worse than trolling! With a troll, the thread and posts soon run their course, or one of the wonderful mods will delete/sort it out, if the original poster hasn’t already. The troll has got a “quick fix” and will wait for the next opportunity to have a go at someone else – they very rarely attack the same person in a short space of time.

The cyber bully however, is far harder hitting to the person that they are bullying. This is mainly because of the psychology of the bully. They are motivated by power, anger, revenge, frustration, boredom, for laughs, to increase their ego – to show that they are a better, more controlling and powerful person than their victim, that their social standing is better than their victims. Sometimes it can be the revenge of the bullied – what I mean by that is that the original person who was bullied try to defend themselves and then they discover that they can be the tough guy or gal or that they are righting a wrong and protecting the bullied!

They show this by wearing down the victim by continual harassment on posts. For example, they may post about a bullied person and ask for comments and ratings about whether this person is liked. The bullies will then use instant messaging to discuss the results. All the while they will be letting the victim know that it is them that they are on about.

Other forms of bullying can be attributed to repeat ignoring of what a person has said in a post and the cyber bully wanting to have their own opinion known. To do this, all they have to do is keep telling the poster/victim that they are wrong and they should do it in “XYZ” way otherwise, they must be stupid if they don’t etc etc etc.

As with trolls, the way in which everything is anonymous actually amplifies the negative impact the bully has on the person they are bullying. Furthermore, because you do not know the person who is the bully, then it wears you down even more – mainly because if you can see/know the bully, then you have a better idea of what you up against.

Also in day to day life, there can be an escape form a bully for short periods of time.

(PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM NOT CONDONING ANY TYPE OF BULLYING just trying to point out the differences).

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