‘What Happens Next?’: Are There ‘Good’ Trolls?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and ask the experts what will happen if we don't change and what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Last week, we began to investigate digital vigilantism, the phenomenon of internet users taking to social media and other forums to investigate crime and serve their idea of justice. In part one, we looked at some of the ways that behaviour can go awry, sometimes even translating into real-world violence. This week, our expert guests weigh in on whether or not digital vigilantism can be used for good, and what you should do if you encounter it.

Ginger Gorman: Good day. My name's Ginger Gorman, I'm a social justice journalist, cyber hate expert, and author of the book Troll Hunting.

Dr Susan Carland: What do you see as the difference between trolling and digital vigilantism?

Ginger Gorman: If we think about the word “trolling”, it almost has no meaning now. We use it in so many different contexts that it doesn't really often mean what we hope it will mean.

So for example, if you go down to the police station, and you are a woman who is the target of extreme cyber hate from an ex-partner, and you're a domestic abuse survivor, and you say that the police, “I'm being trolled,” they will most likely, from the research I've done, not take you seriously.

The way I now have come to understand trolling is that it's really a spectrum of behaviour and it has mild pranks at one end and hate crimes at the other end. So you might have heard of a Rickroll, where someone posts a link of the Rick Astley song, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. And you think it's something else you're clicking on and then his song starts playing. That's funny, right? That's just a harmless prank. It's hilarious. Even the White House has done it.

But then at the extreme end, we see behaviour like what we saw in Christchurch, where somebody is using the internet to set out to do real-life harm, and they're supported by a huge online cohort that eggs them on and they go on to perpetrate murder. So those are not the same behaviours, but I see them as being a spectrum.

Dr Susan Carland: So it sounds like the way you describe it is that vigilantism is trolling with the veneer of justice-seeking.

Ginger Gorman: I think so, but we can all fool ourselves that we are seeking justice. But really, if we look at the offline world, there's a reason that we have the justice system and we have courts and we have processes. We're not each taking justice into our own hands because it doesn't work out.

If you can just go and try to harm someone who's harmed you, what kind of a world would we live in? I personally don't feel equipped for that to be the judge and the jury. And I don't think any of us should be. I'm not qualified in that realm. And I don't think most individuals are.

Dr Susan Carland: Although violent extremism expert Dr Josh Roose, of Deakin University, is also wary of that eye-for-an-eye mentality, he believes a culture of victimhood is just as problematic.

Do you see digital vigilantism and cancel culture as the same thing, as related, as different topics?

Dr Josh Roose: There's certainly a relationship, albeit poorly defined. I think cancel culture... really, I don't like the term, for starters.

Dr Susan Carland: Why not?

Dr Josh Roose: I think the term's been defined and utilised by, in particular, the populist right.

Because there are times in political debate where some positions are so outrageous that you should be able to take someone on and seek to sort of prevent that view being aired. That might be… attempts by evolutionists to replace science on the curriculum, for example, or racism. And so there is a time and a place for taking on highly objectionable political perspectives driven by ideology.

But on the other hand, there is certainly an identity politics that has emerged that seeks.... There's a great paper about it that talks about honour cultures, dignity cultures and victimhood cultures. And honour cultures, it's an eye-for-an-eye, and you see that. And that's by no means the right approach, but it's inherent in certain communities.

Dignity cultures – “Oh, if someone hurts me, I'm going to report that to the police and to go through a formal process.” But victimhood cultures seek to amplify their suffering, and they seek to target others and bring others under the microscope for hurting their feelings.

And so we've got this unfortunately victimhood culture that drives this approach to cancel people we don't agree with. And that is a legitimate problem at the moment in terms of political debate. But that said, there's also no space for extremism.

Dr Susan Carland: When does something become digital vigilantism?

Say you say something online that I don't like, or even in real life, and I decide to write an angry tweet about Josh Roose, or I decide to try to work out where you live and maybe email your employer. Is that digital vigilantism? When do acts tip into digital vigilantism?

Dr Josh Roose: It's a really great question, and I think it's an open question because the academic literature doesn't necessarily agree on it. But I'd say that, I suppose there's got to be a level of coercion and a power imbalance to some extent for it to cross that line.

And I suppose, let me give you the case of online investigative work, done by members of the public, that works. And so that might be something like Bellingcat, which is an organisation started and formed by volunteers. And the work they do is effectively to use geolocation, and facial recognition technology, and all sorts of other... they mine social media to uncover war crimes, and atrocities, and everything else. And that's again, state actors, and they've really achieved some pretty amazing things.

But then you've got someone sitting at home who doesn't like something that someone has said who then says, “Well, I'm going to expose that person for the fraud, or the charlatan, or whatever they are”. And actively starts digging up that person's name, their family names.

And you see this on – unfortunately, due to the nature of my work, I spend time on TikTok and other things, and you see people seeking to expose people they believe are acting in a, for example, licentious manner. And so they seek to expose them to their family and friends and saying, “Is this your daughter?” or so on.

And so here, you've got this really quite malevolent dimension, and an attempt to disempower the other individual to have them rejected by their loved ones and friends and by wider society, without any recourse. There is certainly a place for digital investigations and so on when there's an ethical framework. But not in the context of targeting individuals, because you don't like them, or you don't like what they've said.

Dr Susan Carland: Philosopher at Monash University, Research Fellow Mark Howard, has considered that ethical framework in his research.

Have there ever been times where you think digital vigilantism, or otherwise, has actually done some good?

Dr Mark Howard: So something we need to think about is we shouldn't conflate the notion of morality and justification with legality. While often now the law might reflect our ethical principles and our commitments, it's not exhaustive in this regard and it may even conflict with morality as well.

So when we start to feel that our social systems are failing basic tests of justice, then the obligation to obey laws, et cetera, is diminished. Just because an act's illegal doesn't mean it's going to be immoral.

There's certainly lots of cases where it is immoral. Looking at old-form vigilantism, which still exists, we think about the Ahmaud Arbery case, we think about situations like Kyle Rittenhouse, which really was a translation of vigilantism into civilian policing through having tacit support of law enforcement agency. But they certainly fail tests of proportionality and foreseeable harm and moral obligation, et cetera.

But to get round to your question about perhaps examples of good, we might think of DV, or vigilantism, being at its best when it makes the state to live up to its promises, or when it exposes unjust hierarchies within the rule of law.

We might think of environmental campaigns that release details of unethical company investment practises, or what we're seeing more of now in digital vigilantism is responses to racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, and also exposing how these sentiments are getting a place within our parliamentary systems, et cetera.

So exposing those sympathies, I think is an example of DV being used for good. And then there's lots of debate around other things such as Edward Snowden leaking documents, Anonymous’ campaign to identify a thousand Ku Klux Klan members, and things like that, which certainly on the surface look to be pursuing a moral end, but we really do need to appreciate the complexity of vigilantism.

Dr Susan Carland: In his research, Monash University criminologist Dr Lennon Chang has come across examples of digital vigilantism acting as a force for good, building enough pressure at a grassroots level to create social change.

Dr Lennon Chang: For some countries, this will be very difficult from a top-down approach. But if the bottom-up approach has created public pressure to the government, the government might need to do something in reaction to the public comments or pressure. So I would say in the sense that these are positive examples, or positive ways of using internet vigilantism to make our society better.

Dr Mark Howard: Well, not being necessarily immoral or unjustified, a lot of DV is full of mistakes, full of unintended consequences. It can be self-righteous, it can ignore the collateral damages that occur, and it can introduce disproportionate harms.

But there does appear some good to be coming out of digital vigilantism. As I said, some of the pushback against right-wing groups here in Australia, I think is a good example of it having a positive effect. Highlighting associations between views of the right, that we wouldn't necessarily find acceptable in our country. And how they're getting purchased within parliament, I think is a real positive that we see happening through DV.

But having said that, we then need to also be aware of the forms that we use with DV. So I think for it to be good and to deliver good outcomes, it needs to be quite controlled. This can be really tough to come to an adequate concept of. But what we've also got to remember, and always got to remember with the digital environment, is once we put something out there, we ultimately might lose control of it.

And while we might not be culpable for it, we do have to accept some kind of moral responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. That's a key test of professional ethics. I talk to my professional ethics students about this all the time. Are you being responsible for foreseeable harms, even if they're unintended? And the measure of your morality in these situations is that you're aware of them, and you take steps to make sure these harms are counted.

Dr Susan Carland: Say someone sends me an abusive message on social media, a private message on social media from an account that is linked to their real name. If I republish that on my own social media, and just say, “Look at what this person said to me,” knowing that that will probably send other people their way, maybe they could even end up losing their job. Do you reckon that counts as digital vigilantism?

Dr Mark Howard: If it's going to be ethical, it can't be based on the promotion of self-interest. And it can't be promoting the notion of vengeance. So digital vigilantism, DV, at its best, will actually push back against things such as hate speech and revenge porn and things like that.

But that's got to come from this notion that justice has been avoided in this instance, and based on an idea of promoting public good. So if it's aiming to just make you feel better about the situation, then it comes from a place of self-interest and we might struggle to justify it.

So a couple of important questions when you're thinking about responding or perhaps engaging in digital vigilantism: Are there other avenues? Are there non-punitive methods of delivering justice in this instance? Will they be comparable in their effect? Are the norms that you're promoting with this action reasonable? So are they coming from an ethical basis?

You also need to be aware, too, that sometimes when we're talking about DV, the actions are likely to be illegal. So you need to be aware of that.

Dr Susan Carland: Ginger Gorman also believes education is key to reducing harm, but isn't sure that's enough.

Ginger Gorman: The first thing I would say is there's a troll in all of us. [Laughter]

So we all need to be kind online and teach our kids online resilience skills and think about the online disinhibition effect. So when you're interacting with someone online, it's gamified. You don't have a social contract, you don't know the person, you can't see them. I'm sitting opposite you now, we're having this really nice conversation. But if you were saying something online I didn't agree with, I would have a propensity to be more aggressive than usual.

So it's being aware of that and essentially teaching those skills to our kids, teaching online social skills, if you like, and online resilience skills so we don't get to that point.

I've got to say though, you can't in some ways, especially blame people who resort to digilantism because the mechanisms are not there online to keep us safe. So if there were good, strong laws that the police took seriously and understood and enforced and investigated, if the courts took this seriously, if the platforms took our complaints seriously, if we were all kinder online, if the whole mechanism worked, we wouldn't need to resort to that.

If you think about the offline world, if I smash into someone's car, for example, that… most likely we take each other's details, it goes through insurance. There's mechanisms to sort that out. No one is then going to come and throw rocks through my window and try to murder my children, you know? [Laughter]

That's not how it works, because there are mechanisms to keep us safe, which don't exist in the online world. So I almost feel like people feel that they have to resort to digilantism because they aren't given any choices.

Dr Susan Carland: So is the best way to start tackling the trolling and then the responsive digital vigilantism to just have better internet policies? Can we policy our way out of this problem?

Ginger Gorman: No. It's not one thing, but I guess I see it as a multifaceted problem, and it's all of our problem. So yes, we have better laws. Yes, we have the eSafety commissioner and she's empowered to help us in different ways.

The other thing I've been doing is I've developed an online intervention. I call it happy trolling [laughter], to counteract when someone's being attacked online. It's kind of an up-standing technique and it works. It's amazing. It works. If I saw you being attacked, which I do sometimes online and it was getting out of hand, I would basically step in and do a massive show of support for you.

So it's like what we teach kids in the playground to up-stand. So I would say these disgusting things you get called, I would say, “Susan is being trolled because she's Muslim and she's copping a lot of hate. Let's support her, amplify her voice, and make her bigger. So retweet her, follow her.”

And then if you're going to talk back to the trolls, be polite and don't be aggressive. And then I would also ask people to mass-report your trolls.

So essentially, I'm doing the opposite of what the trolls want. I'm making you huge, I'm giving you a much bigger voice, and I am making the trolls small. And it works. It's incredible. I did it. I gave Brittany Higgins some assistance recently with that, and it was kind of amazing to watch it happening.

Dr Susan Carland: Wow. So that makes a difference.

Ginger Gorman: It just… Yeah. And especially in terms of how the victim feels, because what the troll is trying to do is make you feel weak and alone. But if you then suddenly have 50,000 more followers and everyone's retweeting you and mass-reporting your trolls, you feel like you're not alone.

You feel like, “All right, I've got a crew here.” A friend of mine called them the snowflake crew, because you know how trolls love to call people getting attacked “snowflakes”. So yeah. It's a really powerful intervention technique.

So yeah, I don't want anyone listening to think that I think we can legislate our way out of this, but we do need the framework to be safe. But each of us can behave better online, yeah, for sure.

Dr Susan Carland: Why not give happy trolling a try on your own social channels?

Thanks to all our guests on this series: Dr Lennon Chang, Dr Mark Howard, Dr Josh Roose and Ginger Gorman.

This is the final What Happens Next? episode on digital vigilantism. If you're enjoying What Happens Next?, don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share the show with your friends.

Thanks for joining us. See you next week with an all-new topic.