Social Media guidance – how to handle trolls

Sadly, social media has its pitfalls due to the increasing use of racial and religious intolerance, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of identity-based hate from online trolling.

Trolling has become a subversive community who intend to just create hate and fear with the intention of overpowering their victim through intimidation and fear. Sadly, many university researchers are becoming their victims.

It is essential to understand that trolls are not seeking to enter an honest debate nor are interested to be converted. Trolls are just motivated by hate and designed to be difficult to disprove.

Trolls enjoy hurting people, so reacting to trolls really is giving them exactly what they want.

Furthermore, using the same logic of the language of victimisation, even if used to highlight the issue, often acts as positive reinforcement for trolls.

If you are on the receiving end of social media hate and are facing online trolling, then these following suggestions could help:

• Trolls want you to engage with them and their content to raise their own visibility. So, to reduce harm to you and others, you should resist the urge to respond. You might think winning or losing relies on whether you “win the argument” as that is the norm within academic circles. But for a troll, winning or losing is about how many people see their agenda.
• When a troll targets you, they do it to abuse, so block them immediately; this will ensure that they cannot tweet at you ever again, and removes mentions of them from your notifications. It is remarkable how few people you actually have to block to stop a troll storm in its tracks. It will stop their small networks from being able to target you again in future.
• If you receive several tweets in a short period of time, temporarily switch off app notifications on your mobile devices; this will protect you from unplanned exposure to troll hate.
• Trolls love reaction so do not post saying that you are being targeted; this will simply invite further abuse and hate and a troll storm.
• Even after blocking abuse and switching off notifications, you will still have to deal with having been abused in the first place, so it is important to get space from social media.

Things to do next once you have dealt with the initial rush of posts do the following:

Record

If you feel a message you have received is defamatory or might contain criminal content, e.g. incitement of violence or harassment, then record it. The best way to do this is to take a screenshot. Make sure to capture the time, date and sender. 

Report

Posts can be reported to the social media company directly from the interface. Do so in the first instance. If the post is potentially criminal, then keep a record and seek advice on whether and how to report it to the police or to discuss it with the University lawyers. 

Refer and Recruit Help

Finally, you are not on your own. Refer to your line management and the College Communications team who are there to provide support, advice and resources along with the Communications and Reputation team. They are there with their experience and expertise in online hate, social media tactics and trolling who are there to help.