Trolling for your soul

TROLLS are hard to find in the real world, but all too common in the virtual one. “Trolling”—posting wilfully inflammatory, off-topic or simply stupid remarks—plagues blogs and other online forums. A way now exists to curb such mischief, but the remedy may be worse than the disease.

Trolling is a side-effect of online anonymity. “On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog”, read the caption of a 1993 cartoon in the New Yorker. The problem is that so many people behave like one. In one of the first academic papers on the subject Judith Donath, an internet expert at Harvard University, called the behaviour a “game about identity deception”.

Often trolls are just out for the “LOLs”—the chance to “laugh out loud” at those who take their bait. But their antics at best degrade discussion and at worst bring mayhem. Naive questions from well-meaning newcomers attract irritable responses. Quiet and reasonable voices get drowned out. Trolls may commit the virtual equivalent of a physical assault. In a particularly nasty case in 2006 online bullies e-mailed photographs of a teenager's corpse, badly mutilated in a car accident, to the grieving family.

Yet trolling mostly goes unpunished. Many in the online world cherish freedom of speech and hesitate to exclude even the malign. Anonymity and pseudonymity are prized too: many online hangouts shy away from insisting on the use of real names, which tends to make people behave better. Even if a troll is kicked off an online forum, he can often simply sign up again under a different name.

At last an effective troll-busting weapon is to hand: Facebook. The world's biggest social network, which now boasts more than 500m members, insists that people use their real names. Having more than one identity, argues Mark Zuckerberg, the firm's founder, “is an example of a lack of integrity”. Most Facebook members comply voluntarily because they want to deal with real friends, not fake ones.

Mr Zuckerberg wants to spread this policy elsewhere in the online world. Facebook members can increasingly use their credentials at other websites. Facebook is now offering other online firms the chance to outsource the handling of their comments, too. When users want to comment, they log into Facebook, which hosts the posts (they can also use accounts from AOL, Yahoo! and other firms).

Facebook's comment service initially failed to take off, but a new version, launched on March 1st, is already used by more than 17,000 websites. (This newspaper will soon start testing it for some online discussions.) The results seem encouraging. The quantity of comments may go down, but their quality rises. In the case of TechCrunch, a technology blog, the average number dropped by more than half, eliminating most of the useless comments. As an added benefit, the service generates traffic: by default the comments of Facebook users can be seen by their friends, who are then able to click through to the original webpage.

Yet the verdict is mixed. Internet purists lament that the new service spells the end of anonymity. That is a big minus if you are trying to organise protests on social-networking sites, which many in the Middle East have done. Or it can lead to self-censorship. Even TechCrunch has its doubts: most comments are now of the overly positive sort. Others say that by using the comment service, websites in practice hand over their most valuable asset: the community of users.

The move also raises fears. Facebook has already accumulated a remarkable amount of data—and not just about its users' online, but their real-world activities: messages, pictures, calendars, likes and dislikes, even shopping. Now it is adding their opinions too. The result is a giant step towards Facebook becoming, in effect, the repository of identity for much of the internet. If governments did that, the result would be outrage. Is the same clout exercised by a private firm any less worrying? The Onion, a satirical website, recently called Facebook a “massive online surveillance program run by the CIA” and Mr Zuckerberg a secret agent with the code name “the Overlord”. LOL? Perhaps not.