Trolling: a tale as old as time

Behavioural planner Stephanie Watson explains how suffragettes receiving hate mail happened for the same reasons people feel able to troll online today

The Atlantic made waves (sorry) when it recently announced that it would be shutting down its comments section, blaming a hijack from “people who traffic in snark and ad hominem attacks and even racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish invective”.

Many commentators will point to online trolling as a scourge of the 21st century, and it’s true to say that online forums often encourage this kind of behaviour. However, trolling isn’t new, and it certainly isn’t a problem that has been borne of the internet. The internet has merely made the process much easier; exposing what happens when impulses are quick, easy and often consequence-free to carry through.

100 years ago, women in Britain were granted the right to vote for the first time – if they were over 30, and owned property (it was 1928 before women had access to the vote on the same terms as men). So what does this have to do with The Atlantic’s comments section?

The answer is human behaviour. The Museum of London has put together an exhibition in celebration of 100 years of female suffrage and in it we can see that the campaigners for women’s right to vote received hate mail. While trolling now is – we could say – an equal access method of spreading hateful messages, as the 85% of adults in the UK with a smartphone can post a diatribe without much difficulty, postcards criticising female rights advocates in the beginning of the last century were a popular method of attack.

So what is it about hate mail and online trolling that enables people to say things they often would never say out loud, or to a person’s face? There are a few commonalities that stand out from a behavioural perspective.

Perceived obscurity

When we think nobody knows who we are, the temptation to act outside of cultural norms is always far greater. This is for much the same reason we feel that we can sing, swear or pick our nose when we drive alone in the car, even though everyone can still see us. Anonymous hate-postcards to the Suffragettes could, of course, protect the identity of the sender – perhaps even coming from personal acquaintances.

Although many news sites ask us to connect our Facebook profiles to our comments, this sense of obscurity still remains because they are part-removed from the source and there are a few steps between seeing a comment and being able to associate it with a specific person. This allows for greater impulse actions in a knee-jerk reactive comment.

The urge towards self-expression is not held back by a concern about name associations; and the implications these would have on our social reputations, employability and relationships with friends who may have differing views.

Lack of consequences

Or, at least, the perception thereof. The fast-moving nature of both the news cycle and the internet means that the consequences of one comment appear small enough to mitigate reservations someone may have about posting an extreme or vitriolic comment. This may not be entirely true – last year, police arrested around nine people a day for offensive messages online.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister recently announced plans to launch an independent review ensuring that the UK is a safe place to be online, looking specifically at whether legislation is up to date with the realities of tech and social media. However, online forums are still largely seen as a law-free zone by many members of the public.

Even more so in the era of our forebears who fought for the vote, the consequences of a hate-card would have been virtually non-existent, encouraging the messages from irritated onlookers.

Desensitisation

The desensitisation that occurs online and in ‘extreme’ environments – such as the debate surrounding the women’s vote in the last century, or the violent language so commonly employed in comment sections – means that extreme words are seen as more acceptable in the context of the other conversations going on around them.
What can be done?

There are two options, the first being wait and see if it gets better. Women are still receiving huge (and often disproportionate) levels of online trolling: according to Amnesty, Diane Abbott received almost half (45.14 per cent) of all abusive tweets in the run up to the Election, showing that misogynistic comments didn’t disappear when women gained the right to vote.

The other is to make a change. The Atlantic has made the decision not to allow destructive and unhelpful discourse to be held on their pages, choosing the moderated ‘Letters’ system. While a moderated system is definitely a solution, it’s worth noting that comments can still work in this context without having to be removed entirely.

A well curated comments section sets the tone and can encourage ‘herd’ behaviour. What’s more, it encourages participation: brands such as the National Journal have heavily curated their comments sections and have seen their user engagement increase dramatically, as well as a lift in returning visitors of around 20%.

While debate should be encouraged in an increasingly polarised world, it is easy for debate to slip into vitriol – as it did in the campaign for female votes, and as it does now on most news sites that allow unmoderated comments. If we accept that allowing reactive comments without moderation encourages our worst impulse behaviour, and has done throughout history, it is easier to start to look for solutions – and the single step of introducing a moderator can go a long way towards rationalising the debate.

Stephanie Watson is a behavioural planner at Total Media