Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases

By artappraiser on Thu, 08/14/2014 - 11:30pm |

By Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, August 14, 2014

[....] That’s the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting.

“As long as the Internet keeps operating according to a click-based economy, trolls will maybe not win, but they will always be present,” said Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at Humboldt State University and the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a forthcoming book about her years of studying bad behavior online. “The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on. They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days.”[....]

URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/technology/web-trolls-winning-as-incivility-increases.html?ref=business