Hope J
Hope J
Aug 25, 2017 · 1 min read

I wonder how much of online hate speech is consciously or subliminally intended to silence, vs is coming from people in hateful, borderline sociopathic, or attention-seeking troll-mind. How much is traffic from a right-wing or transphobic site that linked your article, and how much is just Medium traffic?

Which is all to say: sometimes there is a political agenda and sometimes it’s just trolls wanting to engage in a hateful state of mind. It makes them feel good. Sometimes it’s both; silencing you is a political goal that also gives them sadistic pleasure.

Hate speech is damaging to those who overhear it, partly because it makes them feel unwelcome, or hated, or threatened. But what if we knew that a lot of this speech had no such intent behind it? Could that help decrease the harmful effect of hate speech?

One study looked at how onlookers conceive of online trolls. It found some evidence to say that people who conceive of trolls as “attention or conflict seeking” (as opposed to being “vicious” or having low self-confidence) are correlated with having emotional resilience to remembering a trolling event: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/12136/1/Cutts%20-%20Implicit%20theories%20of%20online%20trolling_%20Author%20Copy%20(2).pdf

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    Hope J

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    Hope J