Trolls were once the dwellers of online hidey-holes, but no longer. Today, they are bold, visible and pesky — surfacing from behind those obscure message boards and popping up on the comments section of your favourite websites and social media accounts. From posting irrelevant photos to hijacking discussions and attacking people online, they are all over Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to name a few.
From the innocuous to the vicious, trolls can either be harmless, funny or downright infuriating with their untiring vitriol.
Angkita Dutta, a Youth Congress worker, has been harassed on numerous occasions. Once, when she kept ignoring a troll, she was called a “prostitute”.
She filed an FIR and when the police apprehended him, the troll said that he had made the comment only to draw her attention. Another person sent her some pornographic material.
Ms. Dutta says she notes a spike in trolls around the time she organises political activities or posts pictures of party-related events.
According to a recent study by Stanford and Cornell universities, science can predict trolling behaviour before it gets out of hand. By analysing over 1 million posts on three popular news sites, the study found that trolls tend to post more than average users and almost never have anything to say about the topic.
Cyber law specialist Pavan Duggal says six out of 10 Indians have experienced harassment online at some point in their lives. “Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act dealt with online abuse among other things. After the Supreme Court struck it down in March, there has been an increase in harassment.”
The controversial provision was seen as unconstitutional as it curbed the freedom of speech. But, Mr. Duggal says freedom of speech “is not a license to abuse”.
The two major social media sites — Facebook and Twitter — claim they take abuse seriously, but a look at public pages and the timelines of prominent people show harassment of users is rife.
An internal memo by then Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was leaked in February, confirming what users suspected. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Mr. Costolo had said. Commenting on action taken by Twitter, a spokesperson from the company said they have recently made two policy changes — one related to prohibited content and one about how Twitter can enforce certain policy violations. The spokesperson says the prohibition is not limited to “direct, specific threats of violence against others” but now extends to “threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others.”
The Twitter India spokesperson said they have introduced an additional enforcement option that gives the Twitter support team the ability to lock abusive accounts for specific periods of time.
A Facebook spokesperson said: “We do not tolerate bullying and harassment on Facebook and we will react quickly to remove content that is reported to us. We have a real-name policy and provide people with simple tools to block people or report content which they find threatening so that we can remove it quickly.”
But, experts say the enforcement of laws and cooperation between the police and sites leaves a lot lacking. “The Indian Penal Code is thoroughly inadequate at tackling online harassment. The intermediaries [sites] are the repository of data and must be made accountable,” said Mr. Duggal.
Now, if a user reports abuse to the police, it takes a court order for the authorities to get information on the IP address. With the number of trolls growing by the day, a quick and efficient system needs to be put in place before the problem goes out of hand.
