Summary
In the paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”, researchers take a look at Usenet newsgroups and how the users interact with one another. Since the newsgroups are in a virtual world, it can be more difficult to assess how competent a user is and if they are being honest or even correct in their responses. They discuss the implications of assessment signals vs conventional signals and how they relate to a virtual space. There are many ways to establish who a person is such as through their “voice”, the language they use in their messages, the signatures, the email address they use etc. However, even with these indicators some people, known as “trolls”, can still deceive people. They incite arguments and controversy. Some people ignore the trolls, others argue with them. On Usenet, users are able to block certain users’ posts to prevent seeing material from trolls using a killfile and in some groups moderators can remove a troll.
In the paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, they looked at the 4chan. 4chan is a website where users post images and other users can reply to the posts. The catch is that depending on the amount of posts and the popularity of a post, the posts can be deleted in a short amount of time. The researchers found that posts rarely last longer than 4 minutes before they are deleted forever. Users also have the option of having a username or being anonymous however 90% of users chose to be anonymous.
Reflection
The study done on Usenet is pretty outdated given that it’s about 20 years old. It would be interesting to see a similar study done on Reddit which sounds somewhat similar to Usenet to see if anything has changed since the late 1990s. It’s amazing how much power anonymity gives to a user since there are few to no repercussions for what is said. The lack of rejection and the ability to be whoever you want to be is an interesting social concept brought about by the anonymity found online. It’s also quite dangerous as some people take what is said online for face value and don’t fact check. People can be taken advantage of or do ill-advised things as a result of trolling. When it gets to that point, I start to wonder if there should be a more severe punishment when the intent is to do harm to someone.
Questions
- How do trolls impact someone’s social interactions outside of the web? Do they become more cynical?
- What motivates a troll to post inflammatory things when it only brings them negative attention?
- Do people fact check people online the same way they do people in real life?
- Should there be more severe consequences for “trolling” in order to help prevent it? Where do we draw the line?
