Trolls disrupt the message and discourse

One of the more lively sessions at last weekend's Online News Association conference in Atlanta was a talk titled "Bag a Troll," or - my words - how to keep idiot commenters from taking over the village.

A few words into his presentation, Peter Dykstra was heckled by critics who challenged his assumptions then yelled at each other.

"Here we go with that liberal stuff about global warming," began a member of the audience wearing a sign that identified him as Horndog3019. "It's a hoax, cooked up by Al Gore, the U.N., and some wealthy scientists."

Someone identified as Dr. Kenneth Noisewater jumped in next:

"Do you have a link to back that up, Horndog? Or are you just spouting what Sean Hannity told you to say?"

And on they went.

They were volunteers playing trolls - the people who derail the conversation in online spaces - using real names and actual comments collected by Dykstra, who runs two nonprofit news sites: Environmental Health News and the Daily Climate.

He's made a study of troll behavior and likens it to the emboldened way people act when they are riding in cars.

"You're protected by anonymity," he said afterward. "You're contained in your own car, which means you're in your own world. It doesn't matter if you swear and distribute middle fingers. You basically behave as if you are not being watched. You behave differently than if you are walking down the sidewalk or in line at the ATM."

He brought a fresh example of a news organization losing its patience with trolls. Popular Science's Sept. 24 readers' note began bluntly: "Comments can be bad for science."

Most of its commenters were delightful, it continued, but "a fractious minority" distorted readers' perceptions of the articles they were commenting on. The note sought support in research conducted at the University of Wisconsin that shared a fake article on nanotechnology with 1,183 readers. Some got a version with negative comments, others got civil comments.

"Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself," coauthors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "The simple inclusion of an ad hominem attack," they wrote, "was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought."

That's one reason Dykstra doesn't allow comments on his sites. The other is that with nine employees, he doesn't have the horses to read every comment, and he doesn't like automated comment moderation software, which he finds robotic.

He says, "I'd rather produce journalism than herd cats."

Dykstra became interested in trolling when he noticed a flood of warming-denial comments by an "Orkneygal," who described herself as a climate-science student in New Zealand. To learn the psychology of trolling, he tried to interview her, but he was beaten to the punch by two video producers from Climatedesk.org, who tracked down a prolific Twitter commenter, @Hoytc55, who counters those who contend the globe is warming.

The producers were stunned to find the combatant to be an avuncular 57-year-old in a comfy sweater. Hoyt Connell told the interviewers he doesn't believe in sitting on the sidelines. Dykstra hadn't finished showing the video last week at ONA13 when, somehow, Connell's ears started burning. He tweeted:

"By definition, I'm not a troll, as there is logic, civility, and data behind most of my responses. But it's a name."