: Mindfulness approach to troll bait
It can be often be hard to tell the difference between a troll and someone who is genuinely “just asking questions.” I’m not sure there’s really a “policy solution” to the problem, e.g. getting rid of algorithmic feeds or only using group chats or whatever. To be mistaken is to be human.
A fundamental social dynamic, in all social settings, consists of making provocative (relative to the setting) statements in order to measure the response. If you have been at a new job for about a month and are at a happy hour with your colleagues, you might make a light jab at your boss to probe his response: If he and others laughed along then you know you have earned their acceptance; if there’s an awkward silence you know you still have work to do.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just the chimp brain’s way of gaining information about the social hierarchy in order to navigate it more effectively and minimize the risk of maximum loss (ostracism; getting fired).
But it can be a bad thing when people of similar leanings get stuck in an echo chamber and steadily push each other into more extreme positions, sort of like the “penis game.” We saw this just this week with the headline about Young Republicans trading racist jokes in a group chat, then claiming they didn’t mean it, or they meant it but didn’t inhale, or whatever.
The point of saying a thing isn’t always to proclaim it as truth, but instead to proclaim myself as “the type of person who says things like this.” The “FACT: God has never made a single drop of alcohol” tweet is a great example. Of course, we can footnote this with facts about breweries, but the speech act embodied by the tweet isn’t really a claim about whether or not Adam and Eve would recognize a PBR can. It’s more about putting a stake in the land to say, “That’s right bitches, I’m not half-assing MAGA, I’m bringing back prohibition and everything.”
I share the resentment of these kinds of hyperbolic tweets, whose goal is clearly to drive engagement whether or not the author specifically had the strategy of “get people to retweet with corrections” in mind. But I have to admit that sometimes I am grateful for the bait: Without an opposing side to argue with, my own political beliefs are based strongly on vibes and my social formation; at least now I have a guy I can point to and say “not that.”
Thus, in the end, I struggle to find issue with the mere fact that bait exists—it’s an inevitable phenomenon of a heterogeneous society, like crime or body odor—bait causes me to suffer primarily through my own response to it. I have to bit the bait to feel the hook. That’s a me problem.
Instead of replying directly—and thereby feeding the trolls—I try to treat bait as an invitation for me to do some thinking about the fundamental issue at hand, and relieve myself of the obligation to respond to the troll’s specific point. For example, OK, whatever this whacko has to say about the amount of booze on earth at creation, what do I actually believe about alcohol and adjacent substances? What are the “is"es and “ought"s? Are there practices related to alcohol that I disagree with but still think should be legal? Etc. Basically, “mindfulness Monday” but you are allowed to think about politics.
Reposted from this thread on the 32-bit cafe, where my post got autofiltered, probably for using a certain word lmao:
https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/lets-talk-about-baiting/1109/1