Trolls maintained: baiting technological infrastructures of informational justice

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we use trolling to illuminate the entangled and complex relationship between online debate, technological infrastructure, and justice. While a great deal of research has investigated the harmful effects of trolling in the form of cyberbullying and online harassment, attention to the infrastructure of trolling can provide new insights into information flows within digital infrastructure, and consequently, bears on questions such as access to, and quality of, information; the status and credibility of knowledge claims and claimants; and about the gatekeepers of knowledge and information. We show how trolling takes advantage of the rapidity of information transmission and reproduction; technical illiteracy; automation; and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as conventions, protocols, etiquette, and rules governing online communities to affect informational justice using a methodologically symmetrical approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Information justice
• digital infrastructure
• internet trolls
• social hacking
• algorithms
• epistemic justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Eric Kerr is a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He is Associate Editor of Social Epistemology and holds fellowships at Tembusu College and the Asia Research Institute. His work centres on the philosophy of technology and social epistemology.

Clarissa Ai Ling Lee is a Research Fellow with research specializations in science and technology studies, foresight and sustainability, comparative media studies, and critical theory. She is presently running a project relating to art science for sustainable futures and is part of an AHRC funded project on the deployment of speculative design to community relevant issues and policy making. She tweets as @normasalim.

Notes

1 Although scholars have been attending to important issues of epistemic justice, in areas ranging from privilege, exclusion and oppression, trust, cognitive and implicit bias, the virtues (and vices) of individuals and social institutions, and silencing to analyses of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Anderson, 2012; Dieleman, 2015; Dotson, 2011, 2014; Fricker, 2007; Gendler, 2011; Origgi, 2012; Sherman, 2015), with little attention has been paid to how the technological fuses with the social to enable the compounding, and making prominent, of these issues within digital communities.

2 Developments in AI and algorithmic technology complicate this further but will not be discussed in this article.

3 The relationship between the algorithms that are increasingly inscrutable and opaque both to end users and developers is being extensively explored by, among others, Beer (2009), Danaher (2016), and Gillespie (2012).

4 This form of epistemic injustice is discussed in, e.g., Fricker (2007), for example, and in studies of online griefing, e.g., Coyne, Chesney, Logan, and Madden (2009).

5 Researchers have attempted to uncover the psychology of abusive trolling and explain why it is so common online (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014). One significant factor that is often suggested is the lack of face-to-face communication but the ways in which we receive feedback online could also be a possible factor.

6 See, for example, https://www.419eater.com/ where people practise what they call ‘scambaiting’: engaging with, primarily, email scammers and encouraging them to waste their own time, effort, and sometimes resources.

7 In fact, there is a possible connection between trolling as a form of baiting and the baiting crowd described by the psychologist Leon Mann who documented the phenomenon of public suicide attempts especially in its ‘lulz-seeking’ mode (Mann, 1981).

8 There is another model for protocols known as the OSI - International Organization for Standardization Open Systems Interconnection - with its own set of standards governing the physical connectivity of the Net.