The first thing I’ve learned from this week is the word “trolling”, and some reasons behind trolling. Society always wants to create a healthy digital environment for all people, but hostility and misinformation are hard to avoid. Personally, it is so easy to find an internet user from Instagram which can always be negative and try to blame something under different posts.
Have you ever questioned why people troll?
A lot of people believe that having freedom of speech online is a way for them to give vent. However, it should not be the reason for impacting, even hurting other users. Many articles mention that trolling behavior largely relates to the experience and mental health from people’s real life. For instance, if trolling can attract people’s attention and encourage more people to give comments, the people who are looking forward to having attention seeking can be fulfilled by the internet. For some people who might have mental problems which get amusement from “conflict”, being a troll can also achieve their goal.
The second thing I’ve learned is how social media’s companies pay effort to reduce hostility. Due to many factors such as anonymity and social media settings, detecting every negative and misleading information is impossible, but it doesn’t mean we don’t need to work on it.
An announcement posted by Instagram explains how this company is working on controlling hate speech. The company is actually using a new tool to detect abusive messages and control this phenomenon by giving prohibition and restriction to that user. Data shows that “6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram” has been taken action between July and September last year. This post is telling the public that Instagram will not tolerate hate speech or any other offensive posts in order to fight hate and racism.
Connecting back to my personal experience, I feel like I was always a bystander witnessing hostile communication. I felt uncomfortable but I was also afraid to speak up since I was afraid to become a “target”. Even though most hostile communication occurs in the comment area, I do realize that more and more memes can also convey hate speech. Maybe we can think that those memes are just for fun and people use them to say something in a humorous way, but they do bring racism, sexism, and more unconsciously.
Besides disabling users’ accounts, Instagram also provides tools which can help users to protect themselves. For example, people can prevent offensive comments by using comment filters. I think Instagram is doing a great job on controlling those “bad” users and teaching everyone to protect themselves at the same time.
Finally, I connected Instagram to a similar social media in China, and tried to figure out how social media in different countries do the same or different thing. In China, there is a law stating that when a misleading or containing misinformation post has over 500 reposts, the person who posts that information actually violates the law. This law just came out several years ago when people realized cyber violence was much more serious than they thought, and I think it is a helpful way, using law as a resort, to warn the public to use the internet appropriately.
