Alex Troll - Cologne, Productmanager. Interested in Digital Marketing, Social Media, Mobile Marketing, Apps, Sports, Soccer, Digisport. My Life As A Troll Susan BohnetWhat happened when I confronted my cruellest troll . And because I choose to do that as a career, I. Today I joined a group of anti-war protesters who were picketing in downtown. I brought my own sign. It read, 'USE BOMBS WISELY.' MLIT. GTA 5: PC - First Person Photograph: Bob Peterson/Lindy West. Sometimes the hate trickles in slowly, just one or two messages a day. But other times, when I. It floods my Twitter feed, my Facebook page, my email, so fast that I can. When you talk about rape, I said, you get to decide where you aim: are you making fun of rapists? Are you making the world better?
Choose. The backlash from comedy fans was immediate and intense: . After a week or so, I was feeling weather- beaten but fortified. Nothing could touch me anymore. But then there was my dad. The name on the account was . The only thing he valued more than wit was kindness. He was a writer and an ad man and a magnificent baritone (he could write you a jingle and record it on the same day) . I loved him so, so much. There. Trolling is recreational abuse . The message is: you are outnumbered. The volume and intensity of harassment is vastly magnified for women of colour and trans women and disabled women and fat women and sex workers and other intersecting identities. Who gets trolled has a direct impact on who gets to talk; in my personal experience, the fiercest trolling has come from traditionally white, male- dominated communities (comedy, video games, atheism) whose members would like to keep it that way. I feel the pull all the time: I should change careers; I should shut down my social media; maybe I can get a job in print somewhere; it. I hear the same refrains from my colleagues. Internet trolling might seem like an issue that only affects a certain subset of people, but that. All I could do, really, was ignore it: hit . Nor should it be, of course. Does ignoring trolls actually stop trolling? Can somebody show me concrete numbers on that? When I speak my mind and receive a howling hurricane of abuse in return, it doesn. Why should I have to rearrange my life . But reporting abuse is a tedious, labour- intensive process that can eat up half my working day. In any case, most of my reports are rejected. And once any troll is blocked (or even if they. But, as a private company . As a collective of human beings, it could choose to be better. So, when it came to the case of Paw. West. Donezo, I went off script: I stopped obsessing over what he wanted and just did what felt best to me that day. I wrote about it publicly, online. I made myself vulnerable. The next morning, I woke up to an email: Hey Lindy, I don. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self. I have e- mailed you through 2 other gmail accounts just to send you idiotic insults. I apologize for that. I created the Paul. West. Dunzo@gmail. Twitter account. When you included it in your latest Jezebel article it finally hit me. There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit. I am attacking someone who never harmed me in any way. And for no reason whatsoever. I. An admission of weakness and self- loathing? I wrote back once, expressed my disbelief and said thank you . I returned to my regular routine of daily hate mail, scrolling through the same options over and over ? I wondered if I could learn anything from him. And then it struck me: why not find out? Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty Images. We only had made that one, brief exchange, in the summer of 2. I still had his email address. I asked the popular US radio programme This American Life to help me reach out to him. After a few months of gruelling silence, he finally wrote back. He was shockingly self- aware. He told me that he didn. Hearing him explain his choices in his own words, in his own voice, was heartbreaking and fascinating. He said that, at the time, he felt fat, unloved, . For some reason, he found it . What made women easy targets? Why was it so satisfying to hurt us? For all his self- reflection, that. Why, when men hate themselves, it. He started taking care of his health, he found a new girlfriend and, most importantly, he went back to school to become a teacher. And that, in turn, has made it easier for me to keep talking in the face of a mob roaring for my silence. Keep screaming, trolls. I see you. Hear Lindy West.
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