Jack Brisson, Agnieszka Chmiel, Erik Edman
A spectre is haunting
the Polish internet, the spectre of counter-trolling
Following
two weeks of theoretical lectures and practical workshops, we were left both
intimidated by the hostile situation for refugees in Poland, as well as
determined to do our part to catalyze change.
We
originally struggled to find a particular topic to tackle: Poland’s opposition
to refugees is a complex, multi-layered challenge ranging from the political to
the cultural, and from the economic to the social. What helped us narrow our
focus was primarily our own abilities and talents, whose utilization, we
concluded, would be key to making the most of the short and intense time we
were given in Warsaw.
Jack’s
Brisson experience with video-editing and online-culture,
Aga’s Chmiel knowledge of Polish current affairs, and Erik’s Edman exposure to
trolling in the gaming community all came together to form the group Troll the
Troll. Our initiative focuses on a basic conclusion of many academics and
social media users: you can only beat trolls by trolling them. Reacting
emotionally or trying to ignore them only encourages them further.
With this
in mind, we set about designing a campaign to help combat online hate speech
against refugees. We designed a Facebook page containing funny and provocative
memes to be used against online haters and beat them at their own game. We also
created an online persona, Mati the Troll, whose job it is to troll trolls
wherever he might find them. Here we found struggle. On the beginning Mati the
Troll had his own Facebook account. Unfortunately because of the lack of real
data, his account was disabled by Facebook. Of course we answered the challenges
and we recreated him as public figure. Social media users are encouraged to
like his page and tag under hateful comments online. Mati then takes care of
the rest.
Mati the Troll
Creating
own social campaign from scratch in such a short period of time has taught us
how to work under time pressure. Challenging for us was also running fun page
on social networking sites. We understood the importance of topic and time of
our posting. Even though we had visually attractive and funny graphics it was
hard to reach the visibility. Therefore, in our actions we decided to target
not only Polish but also English pages. Moreover, we were focusing on searching
for different kinds of hate speech. The actions described above are reflected
in impact. Our Facebook page has reach more than 900 people; more than 120
people like our page and we recorded more than 2300 post engagement.
We are now
looking for the way ahead. Troll the Troll has great potential and we are eager
to expand its reach. We are reaching out to various organizations who can help
us increase our publicity, which is key for our campaign: we have been doing
our best to create attractive material, now we need individuals to, on the one
hand, tag Mati to use it, and on the other, to use it themselves against online
trolls.
Our
flagship promotional video will be finished tomorrow (20/06) and we are hoping
it will also help us increase our reach. As the video points out in the end:
“Contact Mati the Troll. Combat Online Hate. Save the Internet.” Troll trolls
of all countries, unite!
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