Anti-wimp Coaching for Internet Newbies

News reports of suicides by youth after abuse from internet trolls are common enough these days. The response has been on an anti-bullying axis instead of anti-wimp coaching. The former tends to increase government power and the latter that of individuals. Coaching individuals new to the internet to withstand and successfully fend of troll attacks is probably a better course to pursue.

Those new to the Internet discover a planetful of communications they are not familiar with from the neighborhood. Often they go unprepared into cyberspace and experience direct personal attacks and public smears by trolls or anonymous posters. Newbies don’t know how to filter out those messages and are shocked by the public smears. I encountered that a lot at the now defunct N.P.R. Your Turn Discussions arena in 1999-2005. I got a lot of experience at posting political opinions in an unregulated frontier forum. Personal attacks are a characteristic of not only the left, but of the far right as well, though more so the left. Some do not know that it’s o.k. to criticize politicians and political policies but not individual citizens for expressing their criticism. The mob mentality is to stifle any dissent or alternative concepts with personal attack on citizens.

Internet trolls come in many political colors. There is a cornucopia of reasons why human beings given free communications access send deprecatory messages to others. For one thing it’s a juvenile trait. Another good cause is emulation of the wise-guy broadcast media. Internet coaching needs to arise to brief youth and other newbies on the facts of Internet use so they don’t need to mature through the hard knocks of personal experience that is too common, time-wasting and really ubiquitous for public forum users without filter control.

In a former era instead of political advocacy for protection from bullying an American response would have been to ‘Just say no to trolls’. Like those that interrupt a house painter from going about his phenomenal application as directly as possible Internet trolls disrupt writers and other posters from executing their personal interests without the trolling sort of generic personal attacks that are mass produced spam quality expressions of inferiority.

Free speech is the vital social blood of a democracy bringing competition of ideas to produce the best social results possible. Oppression of free speech through personal attacks amounting to a denial of services (the service of expressing one’s ideas for the public good) attack ought not to be tolerated. Standardized procedures for defending against personal attacks should be common in Internet forums such as Facebook. It is difficult to defend against mass communicated slanders and challenging too to defend against Internet dissing, yet coaching of Internet users to the facts of life would at least arm newbies with the knowledge of the nature of the beast.