67
Originally published as Chapman, Simon (2015). Why I block trolls on Twitter. The Conversation, 12 January.
Many people who use Twitter experience being trolled, often by anonymous accounts. I got a steady stream from the outset, and soon discovered the block and later the mute functions, which to me are the equivalents of the spam filter with email, the call screening and blocking functions on phones that save you from sales agents or people you just don’t want to speak with, or a sign near your doorbell saying you won’t buy from door-to-door sales people.
Most of my trolling comes from vaping obsessives because I’ve been sceptical of core claims that have been made. Most of these tweeps have nothing else in their feeds. I have often awoken to dozens of tweets from the same person, and opening gambits strewn with abuse, typically from a dedicated vaper with a handful of other vaping followers.
My first column1 last week was quickly trolled by a small group of mostly UK-based vaping activists. Of 49 comments posted, 17 were removed by The Conversation’s moderator before the comments were closed off after two days. I saw some of these before they were removed. They were mostly from one-track trolls I have long blocked from my Twitter account.
Using this app,2 I can see I’ve blocked 335 accounts since November 2011 (see Table 67.1). By far the biggest category here is a well-connected network of electronic cigarette advocates, most of whom have small followings of mainly fellow vapers. In many cases their feeds show they have apparently no other interests other than talking about their love for nicotine and hammering anyone who expresses any scepticism about any of the glowing claims being made. One troll actually went to the trouble of opening 16 different accounts, populating them with random followings and then firing off venom to me in his or her first tweet each time, hoping I wouldn’t guess it was the same person.
I’m targeted because, along with many others in public health, I support regulation3 of e-cigarettes and have written “hasten slowly” commentaries4 trying to temper some of the often commercially driven hype in circulation about these products. Anything less than doctrinaire enthusiasm for almost complete lack of regulatory oversight will not be tolerated, apparently.
| Reason blocked | n | % | Reason blocked | n | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vaping/e-cigs | 227 | 67.8 | Climate-change denial | 5 | 1.5 |
| Mixed abuse | 26 | 7.7 | Israel/Palestine extremism | 4 | 1.2 |
| Pro-smoking | 23 | 6.9 | Anti-cycle helmets | 3 | 0.9 |
| Racist | 18 | 5.3 | Pro-gun | 2 | 0.6 |
| Anti-wind farm | 13 | 3.9 | Religious fundamentalism | 2 | 0.6 |
| Extreme libertarian | 12 | 3.6 | |||
Table 67.1 (n = 335)
A month ago, I downloaded my Twitter feed and did keyword counts of all the times I have ever tweeted anything with the words ecig, e-cig, vape or vaping, and compared this with the frequency of other issues I often tweet about (see Table 67.2).
| Keyword | n | % |
|---|---|---|
| Tobacco or smoking | 2,513 | 19.8 |
| Wind* | 1,208 | 9.5 |
| Plain† | 1,176 | 9.2 |
| Vaping/e-cigs | 373 | 2.9 |
| Solar‡ | 116 | 0.9 |
| All others | 7,334 | 57.7 |
| Total | 12,720 |
Table 67.2 *tweets about wind farms and turbines †tweets about plain tobacco packaging ‡tweets about solar energy or solariums
So there is a giant disconnect between what I tweet about and the preoccupations of those whom I choose to stop clogging up my Twitter feed and thereby distorting for my followers the extent of my interest in e-cigarettes. Blocking is a bit like putting a sticker on your mailbox saying “No junk mail accepted”, except that unlike with junk mail, it works!
The concept of an internet troll is unavoidably subjective: what one person regards as hostile or inflammatory can be genuinely intended by the sender as an attempt to engage in debate. But having a Twitter account is not an obligation to engage with anyone seeking to do this, no matter what adamant trolls might want to insist. I take a similar attitude to hostile, ignorant, obscene or simply tediously persistent tweeters hitting my Twitter feed that I often give to such attempts at interaction communicated through other means. Like millions of others, I block such people on email using junk filters. I don’t engage with uninvited door-to-door or telephone proselytisers and promoters either.
Obsessed vapers, like golf, dope or wine bores, apparently cannot understand why anyone would not want to share their preoccupation and not engage in the endless back-and-forth’s evident in their feeds with each other.
Trolling often comes in waves and a little searching of new followers’ feeds which look suspicious often quickly reveals networks of those I have blocked. There’s a good deal of mutual goading to troll the recalcitrant. So I sometimes block such people pre-emptively before they have tweeted.
In Australia, there is a highly civil dialogue about e-cigarettes that is well advanced between colleagues in research and public health who might be described as either highly optimistic or sceptical and cautious about the potential key benefits and risks. There is much common ground. There is also zero tolerance of the sort of infantile name-calling that infests much social media advocacy on vaping. Twitter is a terrific vehicle for disseminating new research and data but the block and mute functions are a godsend to denying trolls the attention they crave.