7.6. Ethics and Trolling#

7.6.1. Background: Forming Groups#

Every “we” implies a not-“we”. A group is constituted in part by who it excludes. Think back to the origin of humans caring about authenticity: if being able to trust each other is so important, then we need to know WHICH people are supposed to be entangled in those bonds of mutual trust with us, and which are not from our own crew. As we have developed larger and larger societies, states, and worldwide communities, the task of knowing whom to trust has become increasingly large. All groups have variation within them, and some variations are seen as normal. But the bigger groups get, the more variety shows up, and starts to feel palpable. In a nation or community where you don’t know every single person, how do you decide who’s in your squad?

One answer to this challenge is that we use various heuristics (that is, shortcuts for thinking) like stereotypes and signaling to quickly guess where a person stands in relation to us. Sometimes wearing items of a certain brand signals to people with similar commitments that you might be on the same page. Sometimes features that are strongly associated with certain social groups—stereotypes—are assumed to tell us whether or not we can trust someone. Have you ever tried to change or mask your accent, to avoid being marked as from a certain region? Have you ever felt the need to conceal something about yourself that is often stereotyped, or to use an ingroup signal to deflect people’s attention from a stereotyped feature?

There is a reason why stereotypes are so tenacious: they work… sort of. Humans are brilliant at finding patterns, and we use pattern recognition to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing. We also respond to patterns, and absorb patterns of speech production and style of dress from the people around us. We do have a tendency to display elements of our history and identity, even if we have never thought about it before. This creates an issue, however, when the stereotype is not apt in some way. This might be because we diverge in some way from the categories that mark us, so the stereotype is inaccurate. Or this might be because the stereotype also encodes value judgements that are unwarranted, and which lead to problems with implicit bias. Some people do not need to think loads about how they present in order to come across to people in ways that are accurate and supportive of who they really are. Some people think very carefully about how they curate a set of signals that enable them to accurately let people know who they are, or to conceal who they are from people outside their squad.

Because patterns are so central to how our brains process information, patterns become extremely important to how societies changes or stays the same.

Patterns build habits. Habits build norms. Norms build our reality.

To create a social group and have it be sustainable, we depend on stable patterns, habits, and norms to create the reality of the grouping. In a diverse community, there are many subsets of patterns, habits, and norms which go into creating the overall social reality. Part of how people manage their social reality is by enforcing the patterns, habits, and norms which identify us; another way we do this is by enforcing, or policing, which subsets of patterns, habits, and norms get to be recognized as valid parts of the broader social reality. Both of these tactics can be done in appropriate, just, and responsible ways, or in highly unjust ways.

7.6.2. Ethics of Disruption (Trolling)#

Trolling is a method of disrupting the way things are, including group structure and practices. Like these group forming practices, disruptive trolling can be deployed in just or unjust ways. (We will come back to that.) These disruptive tactics can also be engaged with different moods, ranging from playful (like some flashmobs), to demonstrative (like activism and protests), to hostile, to warring, to genocidal. You may have heard people say that the difference between a coup and a revolution is whether it succeeds and gets to later tell the story, or gets quashed. You may have also heard that the difference between a traitor and a hero depends on who is telling the story.

As this class discusses trolling, as well as many of the other topics of social media behavior coming up in the weeks ahead, you are encouraged to bear this duality of value in mind. Trolling is a term given to describe behavior which aims to disrupt (among other things). To make value judgements or ethical judgements about instances of disruptive behavior, we will need to be thoughtful and nuanced about how we decide to pass judgements. One way to begin examining any instance of disruptive behavior is to ask what is being disrupted: a pattern, a habit, a norm, a whole community? And how do we judge the value of the thing being disrupted? Returning to the difference between a coup and a revolution, we might say that a national-level disruption is a coup if it fails, and a revolution if it succeeds. Or we might say that such a disruption is a coup if it intends to disrupt a legitimate instance of political domination/statehood, but a revolution if the instance of political domination is illegitimate. If you take a close look at English-language headlines in the news about uprisings occurring near to or far from here, it should become quickly apparent that both of these reasons can drive an author’s choice to style an event as a coup. To understand what the author is trying to say, we need to look inside the situation and see what assumptions are driving their choice to characterise the disruption in the way that they do.

Trolling is disruptive behavior, and whether we class it as problematic or okay depends in part on how we judge the legitimacy of the social reality which is being disrupted.

Trolling can be used, in principle, for good or bad ends.

7.6.3. Reflection Exercise#

Revisit the K-Pop protest trolling example in section 7.3. Take your list of ethical frameworks from Chapter 2 and work through them one by one, applying each tool to the K-Pop trolling. For each theory, think of how many different ways the theory could hook up with the example. For example, when using a virtue ethics type of tool, consider how many different people’s character and flourishing could be developed through this? When using a tool based on outcomes, like consequentialism, how many different elements of the outcome can you think of? The goal here is to come up with as many variations as you can, to see how the tools of ethical analysis can help us see into different aspects of the situation.

Once you have made your big list of considerations, choose 2-3 items which, in your view, feel most important. Based on those 2-3 items, do you evaluate this trolling event as having been morally good? Why? What changes to this example would change your overall decision on whether the action is ethical?