Could you spot an internet troll?

Critically evaluating what we see online is a necessary requirement to stop us being swayed by people with ulterior motives, and also so that we are not convinced by false information.

That said, would you know a fake social media account if you saw one?

Why don't you have a see for yourself:

https://spotthetroll.org/start

I think that there more than just Trolls on the internet, we face all sorts of people who use this way of communication to accomplish their un met goals in the actual world. I m thinking about the manipulators , the power seekers, the bullies, probably those 3 things in one. It is not easy to guess people s intentions when we re missing 70 % of our unusual communication visual. It is only too easy to wear a mask when our face is already hidden, our voice is not heard and our actions unknown.

6/8
Had a quick learning curve and also realized I'm much more likely to misidentify someone as authentic rather than have a false positive. I also was initially looking for more traditional trolls than bot astroturfing which colored what I expected.
I'm curious how other moderators do at this.

7/8

I missed the Indiana guy one…..he had a racist post right off, so I didn’t look super close at it.

6/8

One of those I was about 50/50 on and the odds were not in my favor when I flipped a coin lol. I experienced the same sharp learning curve Rex mentioned. Almost lole it took my brain a second to snap into critical thinking mode. Thats a tool I'd like to be more imnediately available, and more of an automatic reaction. I intend towork on that.

It definitely took some thinking on some of them! I appreciated that they explained the reasoning.

I'm not really on social media much... I don't have facebook and I don't tend to look at twitter though I have an account (mostly for contacting companies).. but it has definitely made me think twice about what I read. I tend to think I'm pretty good at spotting a 'fake' but I didn't get 8/8 so I'm clearly not good enough!

There are definitely different types of trolls because the internet has also evolved into a field of battle. As such, I've noticed various sides trying to dominate online territory, especially forums because they are persistent. So there are trolls and there are who I call "agents". A troll is mainly just trying to incite people and generally get off on causing havok and making people emotionally upset. An agent though... they have much more of a strategy. I believe some are either indirectly controlled by a government agency and others are more like terrorist cells from other organized groups.

When the pandemic hit some of these agents flipped immediately into pushing certain narratives to influence certain ethnic groups to... you can probably guess. But this was one of those things that told me that we were missing an opportunity. The whole "online Jedi" thing doesn't have to be a handicap if you know where the online war is happening. If you don't know where to go then it's just like living 300 miles from the front lines. But that doesn't mean the war doesn't exist and no one is fighting.

But this is a good topic because on one hand, we can spot trolls and on the other hand, it's possible to mistake a real person for a troll simply because we don't like their politics or other ideas. So mods have to be really self-aware that they don't have any personal political biases that may get in the way of their perception of what constitutes troll or agent-like behavior. Because one of the worst sins you can commit, as a mod, is shutting down free speech just because you don't agree with what's being said. When this happens the mod becomes their own worst enemy and unchecked, this risks the forum becoming a place where people don't feel safe or free to express themselves. And the forum is a huge pathway into the Jedi community, as a whole, so it's something we need to be watching out for, for sure.

6/8
The last one I had a feeling about and should have gone with my gut. But Rex is right there is a quick learning curve. Once you see it you can see the pattern to look for.

7/8.

After getting the first one wrong and reading the explanation of the signs, I was able to get all the other ones correctly.

Sadly as the technology goes forward the visible line between "real virtual people" and "faked virtual people" is getting thinner and thinner.

At this point it is no longer about "is it a real person". We should focus more on "How does the person affect me?"

Example - misinformation can be spread by bots, trolls or people who genuinely believe the information. At this point the source does not matter. All you have to do is a fact check.

There is a presence some describe as simulated and unstimulated presence. Happy seeking

There are some interesting considerations concerning this topic.

There are a few common terms which I don't feel we ought to be using as much as we do. That is, when thinking about people, we just tend to jump to these conclusions about them pretty rapidly. We must be much more cautious. They are generic labels which have turned into go-to categorisations any time we encounter someone who expresses things - not only in a way we may not like - but just in a manner that gives us cause to make a judgement.

One of these is "troll".

Before determining whether on not we could spot an internet troll, we might want to come to a consensus about what we're talking about.

Primo, there are no virtual people except for those generated in our vidéo games and/or some high-profile celebrity personalities curated as industrial investments. We don't tend to use the word "troll" when talking about spam-bots. Those whom we are calling "trolls" are indeed people, connecting through an electronic device to communicate, if only to be making some public noise to let Others know they exist. I'm only saying "they" because we are talking about people we call "trolls", but we all do this. I'd also like to note that I italicised the words in the previous phrase because they need to be accentuated (not phonetically, but meaning-wise).

Secundo, real human beings have a profound existential need to communicate (our virtual game characters and public faces of celebrities do not). It is one of the most fundamental aspects of life (not only human life, but we'll condense it to that in the interest of brevity for this reply). Communication is not limited to verbal language, but on an internet platform, it is the verbal which will come across most prevalently. There are also two complementary dimensions to communication : the normative - which serves the interest of social cohesion, shared/divergent values, participation in society ; and the functional - disseminating information in the interest of fostering particular behaviours and/or attitudes, cooperation in specific projets, propaganda &c.. We also must consider that mass communication, be it traditional media - newspapers, radio, television, cinema -, or contemporary media - subscriber television, internet - has been divided between generalist and thematic, with generalist being that which is sent out to everyone irrespective of communitarian interests and the thematic that which is tailored to (as much as can be done) communitarian interests. Moreover, we have come recently (by recently, I mean over the past 50 years, not the past 50 days) to refer to the informations being communicated as "content" of which the public are the consumers. There is an important economic/financial interest in promoting "content" to attract a wide consumer base which has essentially capitalised on our inherent human need to exist, to be heard, to belong... In other words, the normative dimension of communication has been to a great degree absorbed by the functional ; the tyrannical ideology of choice in our mass individualistic culture has perverted our notion of social cohesion and shared values. This is resulting in an evolutionary catastrophe.

It is important to note here that disseminating information is not communicating.

Tertio, it will come as a shock to no one that we live in an era of information overload. Our perpetual connectedness to the excessively surplus ambiant information, and within that the incitation to choose our own identities, has made us rather schizophrenic (our personalities become like a patchwork quilt). We tend to become our avatars, and that not just on-line, but in our physical presences with Others when- and wherever we interact. There are more places on the internet than there are in the Solar system now, and we can visit most of them from our limited geographical "place". We are also living in an era of extreme personal isolation, regardless of who or how many may be around. One solution to this existential conundrum is to seek out "like-minded" people (people who have about the same uptake - no matter how limited - on the information available) on the Internet in the hopes of being understood, appreciated, acknowledged...

Thus, under such stressful conditions, it isn't a huge mystery that people approach social interactions in such a way as to self-aggrandise, to try to stand out (exist = existo/existere : to stand out, come forth from the background) to emulate those which are heavily mediatised - be they film characters, celebrated personalities, important economic or political actors - which are merely representations presented to us through the omni-media and have no integral reality. Ergo, we also aspire to be un-real, though we don't actually think about that. Therein lies that schizophrenic pulsion I mentioned earlier : we have an innate need to communicate, to be perceived, to matter as someone "real", yet we are conditioned to aspire, to emulate, to present ourselves as mere representation, that which is "un-real" or simulated.

As some have pointed out, some people come into our midst proclaiming supernatural prowess (inspired by commercialised fictions, undoubtedly - [super]hero identification), yet others come and introduce themselves with their laundry-list of psychic pathologies (inspired by the need for comprehension and compassion - which is common to us all), yet in both cases (and we can't limit the strategies to but these two - people are still remarkably creative in their self-presentations), yet it all comes back to that burning need to "stand out", to be recognised, to be perceived... to exist. This is not "trolling", it is a common need we all experience. But, many, perhaps most, of us have never developed the cultural or intellectual capital to contribute in any monumental, world-altering way (myself included). We never get around to thinking that of all the people who have ever existed throughout all of human history, not very many of us are in the history books. Yet, out of the around 49 000 000 000 of us who have lived throughout all the human generations, we could conjecture that there are more "real" ways of existing than to pretend to incarnate the unreal representation of our media-inspired aspirations. We simply need to disconnect from our networks and reconnect to who we are. Youtubers with millions of followers are a fascinating aberration of thematic media. The concept of social media influencers is downright obscene. And, there is little wonder why the Self-Help industry is £ 12 000 000 000 annually (on average) quite lucrative : there aren't so very many of us comfortable in our own skins. Those mediatised, publicised (therefore also capitalised) gurus are also pretty pretentious, but how many of them get labelled "trolls" - even if what they diffuse is even more deceptive and potentially dangerous than claiming to suffer from the whole DSM-5 or controlling natural phenomena with the Force ?

At any rate, since we all have that need to be recognised, to be heard, to belong, but just some of us have had the privilege to gain access to the cultural and intellectual capital to do so in a more digestible way for Others, is it fair that those who have not been so lucky are called "trolls" and that they are "toxic" ?

They are real human beings - not virtual. They have the same human needs which have probably gone unmet for most of their lives (which can also be true for most of us "non-trolls"). They are not "toxic". Our mass individualistic consumer cultural paradigm probably is...