Internet trolls: What to do about the scourge of the Web?

from this day any one who trolls me will be reported to the fbi

By Nick Thompson, CNN

updated 5:10 AM EDT, Mon July 15, 2013

How to respond to Internet trolls?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• "Trolling" as a term first used on Usenet boards in late 1980s, says Whitney Phillips
• Anonymous users of 4chan brought trolls to prominence in mid-2000s
• Trolling behaviors, motivations extremely difficult to taxonomize, says Phillips
• Proposed laws to curtail cyber-abuse have drawn cries of censorship from critics

Editor's note: This report contains explicit language that some readers may find offensive.

London (CNN) -- Curtis Woodhouse earns a living punching people in the face, so it's fair to say he's one of the last men you'd hurl insults at if you saw him on the street.

But people tend to be a bit braver once they don the anonymity cloak the internet provides, and the 32 year-old English boxing champ faced a flurry of ugly abuse from trolls online after he lost his most recent bout in March.

One particular troll, @Jimmyob88, had been harassing the boxer in tweets and in direct messages for six months, according to Woodhouse. "He'd threatened my children saying 'be careful where you send them to school,' he threatened my wife. He'd written me saying he hoped I'd die in my next fight so I could go and see my dead dad ... it just went on and on."

But after the bully branded the boxer a "disgrace" and a "complete joke" and urged him to retire following his fight last month, Woodhouse finally snapped and, rather than trade blows online, he used Twitter to turn the tables on his troll.

Woodhouse put a "Twitter bounty" out on @Jimmyob88's head, offering anyone £1,000 for information about the user's real identity. Within minutes he had his troll's real name -- James O'Brien -- some photos of O'Brien and his home address. Woodhouse decided to make a house call.

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"I wasn't going to beat him up or anything," Woodhouse told CNN. "I was going to knock on his door and say 'listen, this stops today -- I'm not going to put up with this abuse, you have no right to abuse me and my family.'"

"I put the address into my sat-nav and it said I was 47 miles away from my house to his house. So that's when I put the wheels in motion, sent him a message saying 'I know who you are, I know where you live, and I'm on my way.'"

Woodhouse hopped into his car and headed from Hull, in northeast England, to Sheffield, updating his followers on Twitter as he drove. O'Brien continued heckling him at first, perhaps not believing the boxer was actually en route, but that all stopped when Woodhouse wheeled onto his road and posted a photo of his street sign online.

Woodhouse tweeted: "right Jimbob im here !!!!! someone tell me what number he lives at, or do I have to knock on every door".

As it turns out, O'Brien wasn't at home at the time, but he quickly apologized to Woodhouse: "@jimmyob88: @woodhousecurtis i am sorry its getting abit out of hand i am in the wrong i accept that".

Woodhouse headed home, satisfied. "The whole world saw him for what he really was, which was a coward and a bully, and the way I saw it, my job there was done."

Twitter antagonists like O'Brien are a relatively new breed of online "troll" -- people who post abusive content online with the aim of offending or provoking someone else into a reaction -- but cyberspace bullies have been around as long as the internet itself.

In the late 1980s, Usenet users began using the word "troll" to describe someone who deliberately disrupted online discussions in order to stir up controversy, according to Whitney Phillips, a New York University lecturer who is currently writing a book on trolling behavior.

"'Troll' was a name you called someone else," she told CNN. "More frequently you reacted to being 'trolled' than you identified yourself as a troll."

Phillips says it wasn't until the mid-2000s when the predominantly anonymous users of 4chan -- the website CNN once described as "one of the seedier, darker corners of the Internet" -- began to describe themselves as trolls.

As the freewheeling site's controversial "/b/" board rose to prominence, garnering media attention for everything from LOLcats and Rickrolling to allegations its users were exchanging child pornography, "trolling" evolved into an unwieldy umbrella term that Phillips believes is preventing us from considering the wide range of behaviors the word now describes.

"You can't easily taxonomize trolling behavior," she said. "A lot of trolling is about mischief and harmless, silly pranks. But really extreme behavior -- attacking friends and families of kids who have died, for example -- that seems to be a behavior with a different motivation."

In April of this year Rehtaeh Parsons, a 17-year-old high school student from Nova Scotia, hanged herself after a photo of her allegedly being gang-raped by four boys was posted online. But the abuse continued long after Parsons died.

A Facebook memorial page created for Parsons after her suicide was targeted by trolls, one of whom wrote: "lol, teach your kids not to be huge p****es and they'll take care of anyone who's bullying them." Another wrote: "She wasn't bullied for being a rape victim, she was bullied for being a sl*t, which she was."

The comment section on one of CNN.com's stories about Parsons was flooded with a similar flavor of bile. Within hours of the story being published, a user called "Cookie Monster" wrote "Thank god she got justice" and told another commenter to stop "acting like a 12 year old cancer patient" -- and these were some of the less grim offerings on the page.

So what kind of person trolls strangers online? Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, creators of the Penny Arcade webcomic, offer up an explanation known as John Gabriel's Greater Internet F**kwad Theory, consisting of the following equation: "Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total F**kwad".

The math may a bit fuzzy, but there's something to that equation. The anonymity users have on the internet is a big factor in the "online disinhibition effect," which Rider University psychology professor John Suler says enables people to say things to each other online that they wouldn't say in person.

[Trolling] is a creative outlet to exercise wit, blow off steam, deal with boredom and (it) provides entertainment.
"GG," a CNN comment troll

"Without face-to-face presence, a potential troll is more likely to perceive others as a 'target' rather than a real human being," he told CNN.

If anonymity is one factor, psychological and emotional issues are another, according to Suler, who says many trolls likely have problems with depression, low self-esteem, and anger.

"They want to inject their own emotional turmoil into other people by luring them into negativity. It's a way for them to feel some kind of control or power over their own disruptive emotions, at other people's expense."

While Whitney Phillips agrees that anonymity plays a role in someone's propensity to spew bile down Facebook walls, Twitter pages and news website comment boards, she says the bile was there first, just waiting to be hurled out at unsuspecting passers-by in cyberspace.

"The problem with blaming anonymity is that it assumes people are only horrible anonymously. Search a racial slur plus Obama on the internet and you'll see more people than is reasonable who are perfectly happy being disgusting bigots under their own name."

Is it possible to separate your online behavior from who you really are? Many trolls reject any relation between their profiles on the Web and their real life personas, according to Phillips, and say they are merely performing in order torment their targets "for the lulz," or to teach people a lesson.

"Some trolls think that spending your time posting condolence messages on Facebook to someone you've never met is weird, and grounds for being trolled. They think they're teaching people a lesson, teaching people how to behave online."

Ultimately, Phillips says, it's impossible to definitively say what makes trolls tick when you don't have any demographic details about them. "We can't very easily or in any kind of verifiable fashion sit a troll down and ask him what is in his heart, and if you could he would lie. They would tell you some bulls**t about what's in their heart."

No one Phillips interviewed was willing to speak for publication -- her trolls are mostly done with speaking to the media, she says -- but CNN has its own stable of comment board trolls, a handful of whom answered questions via email for this article. An email address is all users need in order to post comments on CNN.com, so it is impossible to confirm their identities or the veracity of their remarks.

"GG" declined to give her real name but described herself as an American thirtysomething with a finance degree who trolls CNN's comment pages in tandem with at least a dozen other users -- "engineers, professionals, mothers, fathers and at least one grandpa," she said.

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As far as comment trolls go, GG's posts -- which she says number in the thousands -- are relatively tame: Jokes about oral sex on a story about a sinkhole which swallowed up a man in Florida in March; dreams of Anne Hathaway being "impaled on wooden stakes and set on fire" on a story about the actress.

"We mostly deal in humor," GG told CNN. "It's a creative outlet to exercise wit, blow off steam, deal with boredom and (it) provides entertainment."

Another troll, "MK", explained: "The belief that anyone truly cares about other people's opinions on an online forum is ludicrous. It's arrogant and needs to be checked." "RR" wrote: "I do it because it makes me giggle. Fellow trolls make me laugh. Some of the terrible things that happen every day should be muted with humor."

GG says her friends don't post on stories involving children dying. "There was a group moratorium on any posts regarding Sandy Hook ... There are certain topics which are just not funny."

Funny or not, there is evidence to suggest that comment trolling is preventing us from thinking rationally about the stories we read online.

In a recent study, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers asked more than 1,000 people to read a blog post about nanosilver technology. Half of the participants were exposed to civilized reader comments on the post, and the other half were subjected to profanity-laden screeds and putdowns.

"The results were both surprising and disturbing," researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele wrote in the New York Times. "Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself."

Scheufele told Mother Jones that reading a story online today is like "reading the news article in the middle of the town square, with people screaming in my ear what I should believe about it."

So what can be done to keep the trolls at bay? Where is the line between trolling and harassment? While most trolling behavior isn't of a criminal nature, many countries' harassment laws extend to cyberspace, and a handful of bullies have been jailed recently for crossing that line in the eyes of judges.

In October a judge handed down a 12-week prison sentence to David Woods for posting sexually explicit remarks on his Facebook page about April Jones, a five-year old girl who went missing in Wales.

British student Liam Stacey was also jailed last year for 56 days for posting racially abusive tweets about Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba after the player went into cardiac arrest during a match. As Muamba lay struggling for life on the pitch, Stacey tweeted "LOL f**k Muamba he's dead !!! #Haha" and followed it up with a handful of racist posts aimed at other users.

Did Stacey's punishment fit the crime or was it over the top? And where should we draw the line between free speech, censorship and privacy?

Britain's politicians are considering new laws that would require websites to reveal the identities of trolls who have posted defamatory content about other people online.

In Italy prosecutors aren't only going after cyber-bullies, they're also threatening action against the social media sites themselves.

The January suicide of 14-year-old Carolina Picchio, who threw herself out of her bedroom window in Novara after a group of boys posted a video of her in the bathroom of a party, has prompted Italian authorities to consider bringing charges against Facebook staff for allowing the abusive content to be posted on the website, according to media reports.

In May, bowing to pressure from activists and advertisers, Facebook announced plans to ramp up efforts to delete hate speech, particularly depictions of violence against women, on its site.

"In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate," Marne Levine, a Facebook vice president in charge of public policy, wrote in a post on the site.

Stamping out serious abuse on sites like Facebook may be a step in the right direction -- but any law aimed at curbing online trolling runs the risk of casting a net so wide that it snares non-trolling behaviors as well, say critics.

"There are a number of online behaviors that are annoying, but do you really want to illegalize annoying behavior?" asks lecturer Whitney Phillips. "The push to illegalize these poorly defined behaviors isn't actually addressing the root issues of trolling."

David Aaronovitch of The Times newspaper in London says most online abuse would go away if we simply pulled away the cloak of anonymity that emboldens trolls.

"If you're not going to moderate comments on your site, insist on registration and lack of anonymity," he told CNN. "If you had to register under your own name and comment under your own name, who's going to be a s**tbag under those circumstances?"

CNN troll GG wouldn't, for one. "Of course not," she told me, "Who would risk a 6 figure salary on the chance that your employer disagrees with your opinion or off-hours activities? No one."

At the end of the day, the best way to deal with trolls is to simply ignore them, says Aaronovitch.

"You simply have to decide how much attention you want to give them, and grow up really," he said. "It's about saying, 'How threatened am I really by this?' and reserving your ire for the cases when there really is some serious harassment going on."

Whatever you do, hopping in your car and driving to your troll's house may not solve all of your problems, as boxer Curtis Woodhouse found out.

"Ever since I did that the abuse has been 10 times worse," he said with a laugh. "Now I've got people saying, 'If I call you a crap boxer, will you come round my house for a cup of tea?'"

CNN's Doug Gross contributed to this report.

Muslim Group Wants The West To Criminalize Criticizing Islam

By Robert Gehl on December 24, 2013

A Muslim group – itself known for sexism and intolerance – has called on the Western world to make criticizing Islam a crime.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), based in Saudi Arabia, has released a 94-page document on “Islamophobia” that suggests saying the following things should be felonies: “Islam is an inherently expansionist religion,” and suggesting that Muslims are inclined toward violence.
In the OIC’s Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, there’s no respect for freedom of religion and it repeatedly claims all laws come from Sharia Law. In fact, Sharia law is mentioned no less than 15 times. Every right – every statement – comes with the caveat that it comport with Sharia law. It demands that there be “no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shariah.”
This would include blasphemy laws, which make “insulting Islam” punishable by death — laws the OIC wants to bring all Americans under.

It complains they play a “negative role” by propagating “stereotypes and misperceptions about Islam.” Specifically, it doesn’t like reporting on the “radicalization” of Muslims, arguing that Islam does not radicalize Muslims to the point where they commit terrorist acts.
Yeah, tell that to the terrorist who last May hacked to death a British soldier in London. At his sentencing this month, Michael Adebolajo said he did it to “make it to paradise.”
The OIC also demands non-Muslim nations observe all Muslim holidays. How is this not “expansionist”?
If the Islamofascists want to curb criticism of their faith in non-Muslim countries, they should rein in their supremacist attitudes as well as the hordes of terrorists who give their faith a bad name.
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Phil Robertson and A&E Fight Not About 1st Amendment, Expert Says

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By Colleen Curry

Dec 20, 2013 2:37pm

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are among the politicians and citizens who have said A&E’s suspension of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson from the show this week was an affront to free speech and the First Amendment.
Robertson’s comments in which he compared being gay to bestiality were released this week by GQ magazine, prompting A&E to suspend the bearded reality show star as punishment. In the wake of the suspension, many have cried foul over A&E’s policy.
“The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive,” Jindal said.
“I also acknowledge that this is a free country, and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed-up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended,” he said.
Palin echoed his concerns:
“Free speech is an endangered species. … Those intolerants hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us,” she wrote on her Facebook page.
Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said the issue is not actually a First Amendment violation.
“The First Amendment, like the constitution generally, only applies to the government, so if the government stops someone from talking or punishes them, that’s a First Amendment issue. If a private person says I won’t hire you or let you be on TV anymore, that’s not,” Roosevelt said.
“The idea is we don’t let the government decide what’s a good opinion, but we do let individuals decide what they think is offensive and what should be rewarded and what should be discouraged. That’s the way the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work,” he said.
Roosevelt also pointed out that the U.S. has anti-discrimination laws that bar a company from firing someone for their race or religion, but allow it to fire someone if they have opinions the company doesn’t like.
“There’s a line that is difficult to draw between religious beliefs and religiously motivated conduct, but what the Supreme Court has said is you can’t treat people differently because of their beliefs but if those beliefs lead them to engage in certain actions, you can treat them like someone who had engaged in those actions for a nonreligious belief,” he said.

Karolina Wojtasik/A&E

Free Speech, Costly Consequences

By Susan Milligan

December 23, 2013 RSS Feed Print

A sign in West Monroe, La., supporting Phil Robertson of the "Duck Dynasty" television show.

Somewhere between vitriolic, anonymous Internet comments and reality TV, we seem to have lost the idea of the true meaning of the First Amendment. The first afterthought by the Founding Fathers says that government cannot interfere with free speech or religion or assembly. It does not say that someone can be an asshat and suffer no consequences for it.
Those who are fans of "Duck Dynasty" (and that's an issue to take up at another time) are upset because Phil Robertson, one of the characters on the show (if you can call someone a "character" who is not actually an actor), made some remarkably offensive and just stupid comments in a magazine interview about male homosexuality. It's too crude and again, just stunningly stupid, to repeat, but the gist of it is that he cannot understand why gay sex would be more appealing than heterosexual sex. Well, no Phil, if you're heterosexual, you probably would not get it.
And you know what? Gays don't get how you can do whatever it is you might do with women. That's because they are gay, and you are straight. Pretty simple. Seriously.
[2013: The Year in Cartoons]
But the remarks were so offensive to the point of being hateful that A&E suspended him from his own reality show (now, that's an accomplishment!). The anti-gay community fought back with petitions on Change.org and through a website called IStandWithPhil, in which his supporters say:

While the LGBT community may be offended by his opposing viewpoint, your rash, discriminatory, and unfair treatment toward Mr. Robertson – a recognized symbol of the faith community – is a slap in the face to Faith Driven Consumers and everyday Americans alike.

Well, Pope "who am I to judge" Francis might not agree with that assessment, but it doesn't matter. Being religious does not give anyone the right to say whatever he or she wants without consequences. And nor does the First Amendment, despite what Sarah Palin and her fellow not-constitutional scholars contend.
Try this at home or at work: Go into your office and tell your boss he's overpaid, incompetent and only got his job because he slept with the boss. See how well it works, claiming First Amendment rights, when you get fired.
[Check out our gallery of political cartoons.]
Or do this – go home to your spouse and tell her you think he or she has let him- or her-self go, you find them physically repellant, and will be sleeping with people 20 years younger until the spouse spruces up – and maybe not even then. While your beloved is filing divorce papers, claim indignantly that the First Amendment allows you to say such things. Hey! It's your opinion, and everyone has a right to his opinion!
Well, that's true. But people don't have to like it, and they don't have to keep paying you to perform on what is a pretty idiotic (though apparently popular) TV show. The fact that you can't be sent to jail for saying how you think doesn't mean it's a nice thing or smart thing to say. It just may expose you for the jerk you are. You might not have any trouble with the feds. But you might not have a TV show, either – or many friends, for that matter.

• Read Jamie Chandler: 'Duck Dynasty's' Phil Robertson Isn't a Political Correctness Victim
• Read Susan Milligan: Romney's '47 Percent' and Kingston's ‘Free Lunch' Show Senseless Cruelty
• Check out U.S. News Weekly, available on iPad

freedom of religion

 it is time we fight for our rights  

we can not let obama and his muslims take our freedom of  religion

if the gays and muslims want to take our rights to love jesus then they should lose they rights too 

 

 

 

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

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"First Amendment" redirects here. For other uses, see First Amendment (disambiguation).

United States of America
This article is part of the series: United States Constitution
Original text of the Constitution

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights was originally proposed as a measure to assuage Anti-Federalist opposition to Constitutional ratification. Initially, the First Amendment applied only to laws enacted by the Congress, and many of its provisions were interpreted more narrowly than they are today. Beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to states—a process known as incorporation—through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Court drew on Founding Father Thomas Jefferson's correspondence to call for "a wall of separation between church and State", though the precise boundary of this separation remains in dispute. Speech rights were expanded significantly in a series of 20th and 21st-century court decisions which protected various forms of political speech, anonymous speech, campaign financing, pornography, and school speech; these rulings also defined a series of exceptions to First Amendment protections. The Supreme Court overturned English common law precedent to increase the burden of proof for defamation and libel suits, most notably in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964). Commercial speech, however, is less protected by the First Amendment than political speech, and is therefore subject to greater regulation.
The Free Press Clause protects publication of information and opinions, and applies to a wide variety of media. In Near v. Minnesota (1931) and New York Times v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected against prior restraint—pre-publication censorship—in almost all cases. The Petition Clause protects the right to petition all branches and agencies of government for action. In addition to the right of assembly guaranteed by this clause, the Court has also ruled that the Amendment implicitly protects freedom of association.

Edward Snowden: I kept my oath to uphold the Constitution; NSA Chief James Clapper did not

Edward Snowden: I kept my oath to uphold the Constitution; NSA Chief James Clapper did not
Snowden gave an extended interview to the Washington Post. In it, he remains principled, defiant, and committed to exposing illegal and unconstitutional actions by the Federal government.
from WaPo:

It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.
In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.
“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?
“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

read the rest
I only wish there were more members of Congress who had the guts Snowden has.
10:28 pm  •  24 December 2013  •  View comments

See the Note President Obama Wrote to a Little Girl When She Asked for His Signature

Dec. 25, 2013 8:10am Jonathon M. Seidl

if this was my kid i would kick her out of my home

• Barack Obama

Kyrstin Lavelle, 10, got a personalized autograph not many get on Tuesday. While at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe, she snagged the John Hancock of the president.

“I’m going to text my friends back home,” Kyrstin, from Toronto, told the Associated Press.

Kyrstin Lavelle, 10, holds open her book for photographers to see with President Barack Obama’s autograph and comment that reads “To Kyrstin Dream Big Deams” on Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. Kyrstin and her family met President Obama outside the base workout facility as he entered. The first family is in Hawaii for their annual holiday vacation. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

But the president didn’t just give her a signature when she asked for one, he also gave her an inspirational message.

“To Kyrstin– Dream big dreams!” it said:

Kyrstin Lavelle, 10, holds her book for photographers to see with President Barack Obama’s autograph and comment that reads “To Kyrstin Dream Big Deams” on Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. Kyrstin and her family met President Obama outside the base workout facility as he entered. The first family is in Hawaii for their annual holiday vacation. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Kyrstin also gave the president a flower, which he said he would pass on to first lady Michelle Obama.

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