7.6. Ethics and Trolling#

7.6.1. Background: Forming Groups#

Every “we” implies a not-“we”. A group is constituted in part by who it excludes. Think back to the origin of humans caring about authenticity: if being able to trust each other is so important, then we need to know WHICH people are supposed to be entangled in those bonds of mutual trust with us, and which are not from our own crew. As we have developed larger and larger societies, states, and worldwide communities, the task of knowing whom to trust has become increasingly large. All groups have variations within them, and some variations are seen as normal. But the bigger groups get, the more variety shows up, and starts to feel palpable. In a nation or community where you don’t know every single person, how do you decide who’s in your squad?

One answer to this challenge is that we use various heuristics (that is, shortcuts for thinking) like stereotypes and signaling to quickly guess where a person stands in relation to us. Sometimes wearing items of a certain brand signals to people with similar commitments that you might be on the same page. Sometimes features that are strongly associated with certain social groups—stereotypes—are assumed to tell us whether or not we can trust someone. Have you ever tried to change or mask your accent, to avoid being marked as from a certain region? Have you ever felt the need to conceal something about yourself that is often stereotyped, or to use an ingroup signal to deflect people’s attention from a stereotyped feature?

There is a reason why stereotypes are so tenacious: they work… sort of. Humans are brilliant at finding patterns, and we use pattern recognition to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing. We also respond to patterns and absorb patterns of speech production and style of dress from the people around us. We do have a tendency to display elements of our history and identity, even if we have never thought about it before. This creates an issue, however, when the stereotype is not apt in some way. This might be because we diverge in some way from the categories that mark us, so the stereotype is inaccurate. Or this might be because the stereotype also encodes value judgments that are unwarranted, and which lead to problems with implicit bias. Some people do not need to think loads about how they present in order to come across to people in ways that are accurate and supportive of who they really are. Some people think very carefully about how they curate a set of signals that enable them to accurately let people know who they are or to conceal who they are from people outside their squad.

Because patterns are so central to how our brains process information, patterns become extremely important to how societies change or stay the same.

Patterns build habits. Habits build norms. Norms build our reality.

To create a social group and have it be sustainable, we depend on stable patterns, habits, and norms to create the reality of the grouping. In a diverse community, there are many subsets of patterns, habits, and norms which go into creating the overall social reality. Part of how people manage their social reality is by enforcing the patterns, habits, and norms which identify us; another way we do this is by enforcing, or policing, which subsets of patterns, habits, and norms get to be recognized as valid parts of the broader social reality. Both of these tactics can be done in appropriate, just, and responsible ways, or in highly unjust ways.

7.6.2. Ethics of Disruption (Trolling)#

Trolling is a method of disrupting the way things are, including group structure and practices. Like these group-forming practices, disruptive trolling can be deployed in just or unjust ways. (We will come back to that.) These disruptive tactics can also be engaged with different moods, ranging from playful (like some flashmobs), to demonstrative (like activism and protests), to hostile, to warring, to genocidal. You may have heard people say that the difference between a coup and a revolution is whether it succeeds and gets to later tell the story, or gets quashed. You may have also heard that the difference between a traitor and a hero depends on who is telling the story.

As this class discusses trolling, as well as many of the other topics of social media behavior coming up in the weeks ahead, you are encouraged to bear this duality of value in mind. Trolling is a term given to describe behavior that aims to disrupt (among other things). To make value judgments or ethical judgments about instances of disruptive behavior, we will need to be thoughtful and nuanced about how we decide to pass judgments. One way to begin examining any instance of disruptive behavior is to ask what is being disrupted: a pattern, a habit, a norm, a whole community? And how do we judge the value of the thing being disrupted? Returning to the difference between a coup and a revolution, we might say that a national-level disruption is a coup if it fails, and a revolution if it succeeds. Or we might say that such a disruption is a coup if it intends to disrupt a legitimate instance of political domination/statehood, but a revolution if the instance of political domination is illegitimate. If you take a close look at English-language headlines in the news about uprisings occurring near to or far from here, it should become quickly apparent that both of these reasons can drive an author’s choice to style an event as a coup. To understand what the author is trying to say, we need to look inside the situation and see what assumptions are driving their choice to characterize the disruption in the way that they do.

Trolling is disruptive behavior, and whether we class it as problematic or okay depends in part on how we judge the legitimacy of the social reality which is being disrupted.

Trolling can be used, in principle, for good or bad ends.

7.6.3. Trolling and Nihilism#

While trolling can be done for many reasons, some trolling communities take on a sort of nihilistic philosophy: it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, it doesn’t matter if people get hurt, the only thing that might matter is if you can provoke a reaction.

We can see this nihilism show up in one of the versions of the self-contradictory “Rules of the Internet:”

8. There are no real rules about posting

…

20. Nothing is to be taken seriously

…

42. Nothing is Sacred

Youtuber Innuendo Studios talks about the way arguments are made in a community like 4chan:

You can’t know whether they mean what they say, or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot [e.g., sockpuppets]. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend oward the most extremte version of any opinion. In short, this is the free marketplace of ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability.

…

It’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. […] When they make these kinds of arguments they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. If they cared, before they said something is true, they would look it up.

While there is a nihilistic worldview where nothing matters, we can see how this plays out practically, which is that they tend to protect their group (normally white and male), and tend to be extremely hostile to any other group. They will express extreme misogyny (like we saw in the Rules of the Internet: “Rule 30. There are no girls on the internet. Rule 31. TITS or GTFO - the choice is yours”), and extreme racism (like an invented Nazi My Little Pony character).

Is this just hypocritical, or is it ethically wrong? It depends, of course, on what tools we use to evaluate this kind of trolling.

If the trolls claim to be nihilists about ethics, or indeed if they are egoists, then they would argue that this doesn’t matter and that there’s no normative basis for objecting to the disruption and harm caused by their trolling. But on just about any other ethical approach, there are one or more reasons available for objecting to the disruptions and harm caused by these trolls! If the only way to get a moral pass on this type of trolling is to choose an ethical framework that tells you harming others doesn’t matter, then it looks like this nihilist viewpoint isn’t deployed in good faith1. Rather, with any serious (i.e., non-avoidant) moral framework, this type of trolling is ethically wrong for one or more reasons (though how we explain it is wrong depends on the specific framework).

7.6.4. Reflection Exercise#

Revisit the K-Pop protest trolling example in section 7.3. Take your list of ethical frameworks from Chapter 2 and work through them one by one, applying each tool to the K-Pop trolling. For each theory, think of how many different ways the theory could hook up with the example. For example, when using a virtue ethics type of tool, consider how many different people’s character and flourishing could be developed through this? When using a tool based on outcomes, like consequentialism, how many different elements of the outcome can you think of? The goal here is to come up with as many variations as you can, to see how the tools of ethical analysis can help us see into different aspects of the situation.

Once you have made your big list of considerations, choose 2-3 items that, in your view, feel most important. Based on those 2-3 items, do you evaluate this trolling event as having been morally good? Why? What changes to this example would change your overall decision on whether the action is ethical?

1

A good faith use of a nihilistic ethics framework would be for exploring normative features of situations.