Internet Credibility and Trolls…
By: Cullen Munson
The first important thing that I learned was about misinformation is how you can evaluate the credibility of sources on the web. Online verification skills are very important, Mike Caulfied who is Mike Caulfield is the Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver and studies digital literacy talks about how you have to first investigate the source. A Technique he talked about was simply just researching an organization and seeing what the web is telling us about that certain organization. He mentions wikipedia being a good starting point for this first verification step. The second important thing that I learned from the topics this week comes from the article “Online Trolling Used To Be Funny, But Now the Term Refers To Something Far More Sinister (March, 2019) Although this article in very opinionated I also believe that we need to be more aware and shift the definition of trolling. Trolling is becoming more serious than ever before and is becoming more harmful. We need to take acti0n and these internet trolls should be punished.
An experience that I have had with online harassment came from an incident on Instagram a few years ago. An account with no similar followers on instagram as me started directly messaging me weird/mean messages and was posting photos of me on their account with mean captions. It seemed to me that some had created an account and was hiding behind a fake name. They wouldn’t tell me who they were and wouldn’t stop messaging me. I told them to leave me alone and reported the account and had my friends also report the account. I ended up never hearing from them again and Instrgam deleted their account shortly after my friends and I had reported the account.
A social media platform that I use on a daily basis is Instagram. After doing some further research about Instagram it seems to be a struggle for them to regulate what kind of content is being posted. So addressing, limiting, enabling trolling, hostile communication, or misinformation is hard for them. Making them one of the leading sites that these instances can occur. This is mostly because of the many users on Instagram that have their profiles set to private. Instagram has to heavily rely on their users to report the controversial content. But according to the article “Instagram Has A Problem With Hate Speech And Extremism”(March, 2019) content from private accounts “can easily slip by unnoticed and go unreported by users.” This makes sense why they would be a leading social media platform for online trolling, misinformation, etc.. Another social media that I frequently use is TikTok. TikTok.com has a great resource page that lays out many different ways to help stop trolling and harassment online. Tiktok has a moderation team that can review and take appropriate action if someone is violating the TikTok’s Community Guidelines. Both of these social media platforms deal with problematic occurrences on a daily basis but both these media’s offer settings that can help limit these interactions and make the social media safer to use if the content gets reported.
