or
or
or
&

Overview: Communications Tactics

Relevant resources

New research shows the internet is a swamp and the trolls have won | The Outline
theoutline.com

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

Alphabet Has a New Tool to Weed Out 'Toxic' Online Comments
fortune.com
Card image

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

26/02/2017
Is it too late to stop the trolls trampling over our entire political discourse?
www.theguardian.com
Card image

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

Counter-Speech
www.demos.co.uk
Card image

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Tim Berners-Lee slams Twitter’s 'negativity and bullying'
www.computing.co.uk
Card image

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

Against “Don’t Read the Comments”
medium.com
Card image

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

02/02/2016
Change Needed for Commenting That Favors the ‘Verified’
mobile.nytimes.com

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

What happened after 7 news sites got rid of reader comments
www.niemanlab.org

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
anildash.com
Card image

"by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet... Businesses that run cruise ships …

17/08/2015
Don’t Hit Send: Angry Emails Just Make You Angrier
www.wsj.com
Card image

In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.... We typically sound angrier in print. And when we write down something, we can reread it, over and over, and stew. With e-venting you don…

12/08/2015
The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist
thenib.com
Card image

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

09/06/2015
The Agency
www.nytimes.com
Card image

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Tackling trolls in crowdsourcing projects
medium.com
Card image

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

Research on Internet Comments: Feed the Trolls
motherboard.vice.com
Card image

Interesting research: "Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on…

11/12/2014
Civility at scale by Quora
gigaom.com
Card image

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

30/09/2014
Narrative for Europe – Have your say
ec.europa.eu
Card image

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…

23/09/2014
#ISISMediaBlackout: the first anti-viral viral campaign
www.wired.co.uk
Card image

"As #ISISMediaBlackout gathered pace it became one of the world's first anti-viral virals. Tweeted around 20,000 times, it managed to eclipse the content itself. #ISISMediaBlackout might be a sign that social media is taking the step forwards that it most badly needs.... It needs digital citizenship, the realisation that our behaviour online a…

Online trolls: "psychopaths & sadists"
www.independent.co.uk
Card image

"Canadian researchers have confirmed what most people suspected all along: that internet trolls are archetypal Machiavellian sadists.... via Heather-Anne MacLean's post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140730175026-5723090-don-t-feed-the-trolls-research-reveals-psychopathy - Online trolls are psychopaths and sadists, psychologists …

The Next Civil Rights Issue: Abuse of Women on the Internet
www.psmag.com
Card image

Great longread. Some excerpts: 1) It's a serious problem: "these online offenses are enough to make a woman want to click away from Twitter, shut her laptop, and power down her phone. Sometimes, we do withdraw: Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28…

HuffPost policy banishes trolls, drives away some commenters
www.poynter.org

Interesting survey of HuffPo, Techcrunch & other experiences with changing commenting systems and policies. - HuffPost policy banishes trolls — and drives away some frequent commenters | Poynter.

07/01/2014
Moderating trolls
arstechnica.com
Card image

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments | Popular Science
www.popsci.com

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

The Case For Banning Internet Commenters - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
Card image

" Popular Science has officially shut off its comment section, pointing to research showing that disagreeable comments hurt the reading experience. Or, at least, the reading comprehension. One study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mean comments under an article about nanotechnology "polarized readers," taking attention away f…

25/09/2013
Cookies disclaimer

MyHub.ai saves very few cookies onto your device: we need some to monitor site traffic using Google Analytics, while another protects you from a cross-site request forgeries. Nevertheless, you can disable the usage of cookies by changing the settings of your browser. By browsing our website without changing the browser settings, you grant us permission to store that information on your device. More details in our Privacy Policy.