
An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic - pepys
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic
======
kyro
Many of the comments there are chastising Kathleen for how she responded, but
I sympathize with her. As wonderful as the internet has proven to be with
connectedness and giving the masses a voice, I struggle to accept that people
like Blythe, who abuse their newfound reach, just happen to be the cost of an
open online world, not having to bear any consequences for their actions.

The potential damage that one person can now cause online is real and
substantial. All it takes is one malicious individual to rile up the online
troops to doxx, smear, and ruin a person and their career. And there's almost
no risk involved in participating in such an act -- you are anonymous and not
held accountable for anything you do.

So while Kathleen's response might seem a bit excessive, I can certainly
understand why she acted that way. She was being attacked by an individual who
had all the voice and reach in the world, on a mission to destroy her literary
work, using a platform that's frustratingly conducive to mob-creation but not
debate. I might have done the same.

I don't know what the solution is, or even if one exists, but this is a real
problem. We saw the other week how Twitter was used to volley targeted death
threats, and how the individual on the receiving end felt genuinely unsafe for
her life. And yet Twitter, Reddit, et al. are very blasé about the severity of
it all. You wouldn't want to hurt your growth rate, I guess.

~~~
HillRat
To me, what's really interesting -- and depressing -- about the article is not
just how easy it is for a mob to get whipped up by a dedicated troll, but by
the (alleged) identity behind the trolling.

We're used to thinking of trolls as teenaged or twentysomething male denziens
of 4chan, reddit or Anonymous' IRCs, and yet this article suggests that behind
a troll who (again, allegedly) whipped up a hate-mob against a 14-year-old
girl could lie a seemingly well-adjusted, gainfully employed middle-aged woman
with a couple of dogs and a neatly tended split-level ranch.

In other words, trolling may be more of a universal phenomenon than we usually
consider it to be. And if the woman in question _was_ the true identity of the
poster, her reaction suggests that she's not the kind of dead-eyed psychopath
we normally associate with "swatting," "doxxing" and "the lulz" \-- and that
trolls may be otherwise normal people who are in thrall to a kind of
psychological compulsion occasioned by social networks, pervasive
pseudonymity, and the thrill of socially transgressive behavior. Call it
something like "electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder."

~~~
dobbsbob
Media has distorted the meaning of trolling. You would never outright threaten
or ad hominem attack somebody while trolling them because that would be too
obvious. This is what trolling actually is (well, was)
[http://youtu.be/AHqGV5WjS4w](http://youtu.be/AHqGV5WjS4w)

Doxing, also now totally misused. Hackers would drop dox on each other to
expose them to all the secret service agents and FBI agents watching. If
somebody is not wanted by the feds and using their real name on social media
there's no point in telling the world their information, considering there are
eleventy billion personal data mining services to find out anybody's complete
personal info for under $10. We're all already doxxed.

The worst thing you can possibly do when a horde of e-cretins is trying to
bait you into losing face in public is to acknowledge them by writing "I'm a
victim" posts and articles. That's exactly what they want. If you get death
threats sue their asses or call the police. Otherwise that horde is just a
bunch of meaningless text on a screen you can safely ignore that will quickly
move on to a more responsive target.

~~~
kevingadd
Ignoring them doesn't work anymore because modern social media and
communication tools have given them power that doesn't depend on whether
you're paying attention.

They can send shopped nudes with your face on them to your parents, they can
call & email your boss at work to try and get you fired, they can threaten to
rape & murder your sister. Sure, ignore that, it'll go away.

~~~
dobbsbob
It does go away, nobody remembers Boxxy/Katie of youtube/4chan fame? The horde
went after her worse than threats and calls yet she's still there making vids.
She didn't write a big victim blog or appear on Oprah (Jessi Slaughter) and
the lynch mob quickly lost interest when denied their reaction prize.

Threats of course should be handled by police and not ignored, but the moment
you seek media attention or acknowledge how the horde has "ruined your life"
you are throwing gasoline on the fire.

~~~
abroncs
On the other end of the spectrum are people ( teenage girls mostly) who
actually kill themselves from the relentless online harassment.

Different people will react differently, just like in an offline setting.
There isn't really a solution that works for everybody.

------
eksith
"I troll therefore, I am" : An odd, yet perfectly acceptable lesson on the
motivation behind their actions.

As an aside, this is why helbanning exists. To delete a comment or ban an
account, (or in the case of the article, block an account) is a response, a
different one to feeding, yet a response nonetheless. To deny a response in
essence is to deny the troll validation of their existence.

------
incision
That this started on Goodreads doesn't surprise me at all.

I use the site regularly, but I put it in the same category as most single
topic 'communities' \- something I'll use (reference), but know better than to
engage with.

Basically, I find that such places tend to end up heavily steeped in their own
customs and hierarchy which are dominated by the sort of super users and
relationship-driven mobs that the author ran into.

At least Amazon finally acknowledged the toxic elements of the Goodreads
community [1]. It's surely a tough problem.

What I really wonder is what exactly causes a community to end up that way?
Every successful community has a struggle with growth and groupthink, but some
get particularly bad. Is it a failure in moderation or are some topics and
demographics just more susceptible?

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism_and_controv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism_and_controversy)

------
tzs
Suppose the author had followed the advice she kept receiving from everyone
she talked to with experience dealing with book bloggers, and ignored the
blathering of the bloggers.

Would would be the likely consequences for the author and her book?

The book's Amazon reviews are fine. The critical reviews there generally seem
to be sane and rational, not trollish. As far as I can tell Googling a bit,
the intense negativity seems confined to Goodreads and maybe some blogs.
Taking a look at a few of the negative Goodreads reviews, it is pretty obvious
that they are not legitimate [1] reviews. Most people reading the Goodreads
reviews to actually try to determine if they would enjoy the book should have
little trouble recognize the troll reviews and ignoring them.

In short, do these people actually matter?

[1] What I mean by "legitimate" is that the reviewer read the book, and is
giving their honest opinion of the book itself based upon just its contents.

~~~
lgas
Someone who's reading through the reviews might be able to figure out which
are troll reviews and ignore them, but someone searching through a list sorted
by rating or just visually scanning a list with star ratings surely won't, and
thus may never make it to the actual reviews to realize there are trolls
present.

------
seren
"Blythe" Goodreads profile if anyone is interested :
[http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5206717-blythe](http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5206717-blythe)

~~~
nether
Her twitter: [https://twitter.com/blharris4](https://twitter.com/blharris4)

The review distribution in her GoodReads profile doesn't look like that of a
troll or griefer. I thought it'd be bimodal with a huge number of one-stars.
Instead it's unimodal centered at 4/5\. Just like a book enthusiast who likes
most of the books she reads.

~~~
makomk
Her Twitter and GoodReads profile are private now, but from what I can tell
from the Guardian comments from people who did read them she isn't a troll -
she genuinely didn't like the book and really did think that some of the sex
in it was rape, by virtue of one of the parties being underage and so unable
to give meaningul consent.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Imagine a slightly different version of this story, told from the other
viewpoint:

A woman writes a negative review of a book that she feel trivializes underage
rape and PTSD. She encourages others to see the book in that same light.

She hasn't used her real identity online, and she's sensitive about rape and
trauma. Is she hiding her ID for reasons of safety?

The author then net stalks her, finding out her where she lives and where she
works. The author calls her (more than once!) at work, saying she knows who
she really is. The author also drives to her home, but doesn't knock and
leaves a book with the creepy title A Short Guide To A Happy Life (is it a
hidden message? SHORT LIFE?) on the doorstep.

Then the author publishes her real name in a major newspaper, resulting in
views all over the planet. Whatever reason she had for keeping a low profile,
even if it was for her own safety from a past abuser, it's blown now.

The story sure looks different from that angle. Not saying it's all the way
things are, but it's certainly a valid alternate view.

~~~
jasonlotito
You left out the part where she decides to openly mock, or, I guess the phrase
today is cyberbully, the author on Twitter.

Angles are fine, but don't leave out things that happened.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Well, I don't know what the author considered to be ridicule on Twitter. It's
not the case that all ridicule is "cyberbullying". I also note that the other
person wasn't directly engaging the author on Twitter (via "@"), since the
author acknowledges she only found it be searching for her name.

If I ridicule, say Justin Bieber, on Twitter without directly engaging him, am
I "cyberbullying" him?

I don't know the whole story here, but what's been presented certainly is open
to being flipped around the other way.

------
kentdev
Reminds me of the trolls that taunted Zelda Williams after her father died.
Despicable.

~~~
EvenThisAcronym
Popular culture and the mainstream media, as both tend to do, have turned
trolling into a meaningless word, and now nobody actually knows what trolling
is anymore. Taunting someone whose father has died, however, is definitely not
trolling.

~~~
mwfunk
Sure it means something, just not quite what it used to. Once upon a time,
"trolling" meant going on a Usenet newsgroup, posting something that contained
an incorrect statement about Star Trek (for example), and seeing if anyone was
enough of a smarty pants to flame you for it. Then you "YHBT, HAND" and scurry
back to alt.religion.kibology where you post a recap for everyone's amusement.

To my knowledge, that is the actual origin of the term as it pertains to the
Internet (as opposed to the meaning in fishing, which is what it ultimately
derived from).

Now it just means being an online griefer. I can accept that. There needs to
be a name for it and that's as good as any.

I'm not sure what you think the original meaning of the term was, but most
people who complain about mainstream culture getting Internet subcultures
wrong think it dates back to the earlier days of web forums, which itself was
a dilution of its meaning from Usenet.

The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter. It may matter even less than
getting riled up about hacker vs. cracker misuse, which itself is profoundly
unworthy of getting worked up over. :)

------
vitalique
This reminds me of another story by Leo Traynor about troll's victim tracking
down and finally meeting the troll:
[http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/09/meeting-
troll.html](http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/09/meeting-troll.html) The massive
amount of damage that can be imposed by all kinds of online manipulators to
their victims' mental health and career is even more depressing than the
complete absence of a solution to the problem. At least I'm glad to hear that
breaking the 'Do not engage' rule brought some relief to Kathleen.

------
abroncs
Very interesting read.

