Trolling. How it works

Trolls scare SMS managers and nervous business owners. These evil mythical creatures go on the Internet and crave to profit from the negative emotions of their victims. And the Internet is generous in emotions, and we happily dump a ton of “food” on the provocateur, adding more reasons to continue trolling. Let’s figure out who the trolls are, how not to become their victim, and what to do with corporate social services. accounts when the provocateur gets to them.

According to Wikipedia, trolling is the incitement of a participant in communication (“troll”) anger, conflict by covert or explicit bullying, humiliating, insulting another participant or participants, often in violation of site rules and, sometimes unknowingly for the “troll” itself, the ethics of network interaction . At lurkmore, they clarify the goals of trolling - calling a flood wave, flame, offtopic wave, receiving a negative user reaction.

Trolling can be targeted and non-targeted. Target trolling is the writing of articles or messages for a specific purpose, such as advertising or information warfare. Non-targeted trolling is the lot of people who simply have nothing to do, who want to realize themselves on the network at the expense of others, who have no one to talk to, or simply out of stupidity.

It should be noted that a client dissatisfied with your service or product may report this in an offensive manner, but in no case is it a troll. Therefore, if someone loudly announces on your Facebook page that the client manager, Maria Ivanovna, was naughty or incorrectly placed an order, it is more correct to act according to the following scheme:

1. Apologize. Even if it later becomes clear that Maria Ivanovna has nothing to do with it, and the client himself is a fool and didn’t understand something, it’s still worth apologizing, because for some reason the person left you unhappy.
2. Check what can be corrected regarding this client. It is possible to make a free refund, offer a discount or an additional service. At this stage, there is a chance to get a loyal customer and a plus in your business karma.

Do not argue, do not swear, do not prove that you are not a camel.
But our song is not about that offended client - not a troll.

The person who came to you with feedback (even in the form of a complaint) is usually ready for a constructive dialogue. The troll will provoke you without hearing arguments, manipulating the facts, juggling and juggling thoughts. A particularly favorite troll technique is the use of logic traps and cognitive distortion. Examples of such traps:

• appeal to the personality of the opponent , and not to his arguments, the transition to the individual. Zhvanetskiy joked about this: “What views on architecture can a man express without a residence permit? Caught red-handed, he confesses and admits himself defeated. And in general, how can we be interested in the opinion of a bald man with such a nose? Let him first correct his nose, grow his hair, and then express himself ”
• a search for circumstances that supposedly force the opponent to put forward this thesis : “it is beneficial for you to defend the position of the Colorado potato beetle, because potatoes are not growing in the country!”
• an indication that the opponent is acting contrary to his arguments : “if Windows is so bad, how can you use it yourself?”
• finding an easily criticized like-minded person , this mistake eventually gave rise to the independent phenomenon of “Hitler's argument” - when everything that Hitler supported or could support was demonized: “Hitler was a vegetarian, which means all vegetarians are evil.”

As a consequence of the prevalence of “Hitler's argument” in discussions, the Godwin Law was first formulated on the Usenet network, which states that as the discussion grows, the likelihood of using a comparison with Nazism or Hitler tends to unity. In many Usenet groups, there is a tradition according to which, once such a comparison is made, the discussion is considered completed, and the party who resorted to this argument in its negative sense is considered to be the loser.

• appeal to the majority : “Everyone thinks so, which means it’s right”
• appeal to the authority : “Darisa Lolina said in an interview that this medicine is an excellent way to cure all terrible diseases, so I drink it.” But if a person (conditional Darisa Lolina) has authority in any one area (for example, a pop song), it does not mean at all that she knows as much about other aspects of life.
• appeal to tradition : “Our ancestors did this, so it’s so right”
• appeal to mercy : "If you do not agree with me, you will act cruelly." It is used because on the Internet, many try to be nicer than necessary. Wikipedia writes that an anecdotal case of applying the argument should be considered a real case when a juvenile delinquent who killed his parents pleaded for a commutation on the grounds that he was an orphan.
• appeal to ignorance : the absence of evidence of something is considered evidence of the opposite: “Prove to me that homeopathy does not work. You can not? So it’s acting. ” In 1952, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote about this in his article “Is there a God?”

Peter Atkins (British chemical scientist), in his Atheism and Science for The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, argues that the main idea of ​​Russell’s teapot is that the scientist cannot prove negative statements and, therefore, in accordance with the principle of the razor Ockham, of two theories that explain the same thing, a theory with superfluous entities (in which, among other things, higher beings are present) should be rejected, and a theory without superfluous entities should be accepted in its place.

• “ Argument for nausea ”: repeating the thesis (possibly by different people) until the opposing side loses interest in challenging it.
• Appeal to fear : an argument from a position of strength “I will calculate you by ip if you do not agree with me”
• wishful thinking : “If I believe in it enough strongly, it will happen, and only your disbelief prevents me!”
• scarecrow : simplification or distortion of the arguments of the interlocutor to an absurd appearance. “If women's equal rights are applied, women will have the right to use men's toilets as well”
• imaginary logical connection : “Since Masha abandoned Petya, it means that he cheated on her, and that means he will go to the Light”
• after that - it means for the reason of this : “It started to rain after I danced the ritual dance, which means I called it”
• “The same through the same ”, “vicious circle”: “God exists, because he created the Earth. You live on Earth, you cannot deny that it exists, which means that God is, because he created it. ”
• attribution of statements .

So, a suspicious commentator has been discovered, suspected of trolling. How not to drop your face?

1. Remember that you (your business, your personality, dog, blog and thoughts) should not and cannot be liked by absolutely everyone. There are those who will criticize you constructively, as well as those who will only be angry because they can. Do not take it personally and try to evaluate yourself objectively. After receiving a negative comment, do not rush to respond. Cool down and think about whether to slip into an argument.

2. Do not feed the trolls. Try to abstract from emotions and respond either reasonably and politely, or with humor. Or do not answer at all, the following paragraph will help you.
3. Do not hesitate to ban especially stubborn, vicious and endlessly overflowing commentators from empty to empty. If you see that the conflict has gone out of a constructive rut, and just started to take time, effort and reputation (and long threads with quarrels on corporate pages are unlikely to lead loyal customers to you - if there is a conflict, then something is wrong with the company, people they don’t particularly read and don’t begin to find out who is really wrong.In any case, all conversations that contain at least some sense can be transferred from comments to personal messages, mail, skype, phone
4. Be self-critical and self-ironic. Ability to admit your mistakes and edostatki - a necessary feature of the adult and the adult business like their ability to correct the..
5. Use the achievements of formal logic. It helps not to forget, in the heat of the dispute, how the discussion began.

In any case, we wish you respectful and informative online communication, constructive criticism and loyal customers.