Avoid­ing The Trolls On Twitter

Twit­ter trolls are grow­ing (in terms of abuse-qual­ity and num­bers) by the day – but, hey, do you know what Twit­ter Trolls are?

These are the guys who in­sult, threaten, bad-mouth, abuse or oth­er­wise of­fend other Twit­ter users.

Trolls are all over Twit­ter com­ment­ing on what they feel like and gen­er­ally spread­ing abuse.

Here are a few samples:

Ex­am­ples of Twit­ter Trolling

1. David Cameron, UK’s head hon­cho, tweeted,

To this tvBite tweeted,

2. When George Os­borne tweeted about eco­nomic policy,

Farmer Mc­Boob hit back with this abuse, “Oh shut it Sh_tface, the coun­try is f__ked and it’s down to you. Go tie your d__k to a trac­tor and f__k off.”

These were a cou­ple of “gen­tle and kind” ex­am­ples – trolling can re­ally get down and dirty on Twit­ter. You can read some of the caus­tic tweets here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/tips-for-politicians-who-dont-want-to-be-abused-on-twitte

What’s Twit­ter Do­ing About It?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Twit­ter users that blocked an ac­count could not view/follow any of its tweets. But Twit­ter, seem­ingly car­ried away by its grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity, made some dra­matic changes in De­cem­ber 2013. These changes al­lowed blocked users to view and post tweets even af­ter the block­age came into effect.

This lead to a huge protest in Twit­ter­dom and Twit­ter had to rush in and re­verse the changes within 24 hours of in­tro­duc­ing them. Michael Sippey, Twitter’s Prod­uct VP, had this to say, “… we never want to in­tro­duce fea­tures at the cost of users feel­ing less safe.”

So, all’s well for the mo­ment – rude and of­fen­sive users, once blocked, can­not in­ter­act with their hap­less victim’s account.

But many Twit­ter users who are the butt of ridicule con­tinue to com­plain to Twit­ter. Twit­ter re­sponded to their com­plaint by cre­at­ing a “Re­port Tweet” but­ton, but one has to see whether the peo­ple who judge of­fen­sive tweets are ca­pa­ble of pun­ish­ing the abusers.

If the abusers are al­lowed to get away scot free, the “re­port tweet” but­ton will not serve any purpose.

What About Abuse On Other So­cial Networks?

Most so­cial net­works are full of use­ful and fun in­for­ma­tion that some­times gets min­gled with rude and of­fen­sive posts. So­cial net­works are so­phis­ti­cated chat­ting and shar­ing rooms that have the power to cre­ate or dif­fuse ugly and happy situations.

How­ever, once you block or un­fol­low or un­friend any user on other net­works, they can­not in­ter­act with your ac­count – and this comes as a ma­jor relief.

To Sum Up

So­cial net­works are cloud-based global ap­pli­ca­tions just like fax-to-mail, de­sign, of­fice pro­duc­tiv­ity or other SaaS ap­pli­ca­tions. The only dif­fer­ence is that so­cial net­works are in­ter­ac­tive and their mul­ti­me­­dia-in­­­for­­ma­­tion-shar­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties are im­me­di­ate. They can make or break any sit­u­a­tion. There­fore, all abusers must think be­fore post­ing stuff that has the ca­pa­bil­ity to of­fend and in­sult. So­cial net­works too must set up ef­fec­tive post-mon­i­­tor­ing de­part­ments and en­sure that their loyal clients are not abused with­out reason.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: I’d like to draw a con­clu­sion for busi­nesses.

One stu­pid Tweet can trig­ger a so­cial me­dia cri­sis, hurt­ing your busi­ness sub­stan­tially. It’s not enough to trust that so­cial me­dia sites will take care of the Trolls. It’s ab­solutely cru­cial that every busi­ness mon­i­tors its brand name(s) across so­cial net­works and blogs.

To do this you can use free tools like Google alerts, and, of course, so­cial me­dia man­age­ment tools like Sprout­So­cial, and tools specif­i­cally de­signed for rep­u­ta­tion monitoring.

The next step, af­ter mon­i­tor­ing and dis­cov­er­ing po­ten­tially harm­ful Tweets, it’s im­por­tant to know how to re­act. That’s why every busi­ness should have a pre-de­fined strat­egy how to han­dle a so­cial me­dia cri­sis.