This week’s readings were both interesting and helpful. I say interesting because I was not too familiar with the trolling that occurred online so it was interesting to hear about the different definitions and the different kinds of trolling that existed. I found the online verification skills article very helpful because there were a lot of skills that I was not aware of before. Some that specifically stuck out to me were investigating the source and the Wikipedia trick. I used to hear that Wikipedia was not a trustworthy source so I would have never guessed that it would be helpful with confirming information on a source or outlet.
I have never experienced online harassment or trolling and don’t know anyone who has experienced it. I would say that if I was put into that position, it would be hard to do this but I think the best way to avoid the trolling is to just ignore what the other person has to say or report it. A lot of the time, people who are online do not care about what they’re saying and if it’ll hurt the person that they are trolling. One thing mentioned in the article that we read this week said, “the problem is the people using the network, not the network itself” (Rainie, Anderson, Albright). I can see why they say this because services or apps are usually created for others to connect and meet other people but it’s the people who choose to use their accounts as a way to say harmful or hurtful things toward other people that creates the issues.
I found an article from Forbes that talked about troll control on Twitter and Instagram which led me to an article from Variety that mentioned another article which took me to a post by Del Harvey the VP for Trust and Safety and David Gasca the Senior Director of Product Management and Health at Twitter. This article/ post was written in May 2018 where they addressed a new approach to trolling that was occurring on Twitter. They stated that their new approach presented will have, “policies, human review processes and machine learning to help them determine how Tweets are organized and presented..”(Harvey & Gasca). They also presented that after putting this new approach to use, they saw a “ positive impact, resulting in a 4% drop in abuse reports from search and 8% fewer abuse reports from conversations” (Harvey & Gasca). Overtime they were able to see these changes happen but they also mentioned towards the end of their post that they understand that there will be mistakes and they hope to improve their tools to make the user experience better. I really liked this article because it addressed what the issue was, how they plan to approach the issue and then results that they were able to get from using their approach. They also acknowledged their understanding of how the process was working and was honest that they understood it may not work perfectly but it’s something that they will continue to work on to improve. I think this is something that I do not see a lot from companies so this was new and interesting to learn more about.
References are linked below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WnXGHvEGdtlS1WrxobwR8XzLaabzdLL2GVDX432fzdI/edit?usp=sharing
