By Neil Patrick
There are a lot more zombies than trolls lurking online...
Yesterday evening I spent an enjoyable couple of hours drinking beer with Katrina Collier of Winning Impression. Katrina is one of a small elite band of people I consider to be true experts on social media for recruitment and HR. If you are in either of these fields, you really should be connected with her. Here’s a link to her website.
As we chatted, both watching our social media feeds at the same time, Katrina was laughing as she observed Twitter trolls tweeting all sorts of hate to her after she retweeted the petition to keep Donald Trump out of Britain.
Katrina’s an Australian and if I know one thing about Aussies, it’s that they are not easily intimidated. When you grow up surrounded by countless species of creatures which are mostly looking for people to kill, I guess this is understandable.
Yet this was also an instructive situation. The more the hate poured in, the more she laughed. And I ventured that this explosion of Twitter troll activity would do her Twitter metrics no harm at all. Algorithms do not care whether we are generating online love or hate. They just count impact.
The trolls were inadvertently boosting Katrina’s online influence scores with every drop of bile they spat at her. She could laugh with good reason.
When the mainstream media is full of stories about cyber-bullying, the popular message is understandably that we must protect the vulnerable from such things.
But if you are big and grown up enough to take such things in your stride, if you are not easily intimidated, trolls and bullies do us no harm at all. In fact they help us for the simple reason that AI cannot yet always distinguish between love and hate.
This little story came full circle this morning as I reviewed my new followers on Twitter.
This is a daily task for me. Every day there are 30 or 40 new followers. Most are what I call “randoms” – people who are following as many people as possible in the hope that a percentage will follow back and artificially make them look more popular than they actually are. I have written about these ‘binge and purgers’ here and what you should do with them (tip…Don’t follow back ;-))
Another friend of mine, the ever clever Matt Ballantine tweeted the other day:
Matt is bang on the money I think. Most people like to feel popular, but many are in reality terrified that engaging in real dialogues on social media could:
- Stir up hate – (don’t worry, at least you believe in something)
- Expose them as not being an expert on everything (don’t worry, no-one is)
- Meet people they’d rather not (don’t worry, you can block them)
As I reviewed my new followers, I looked at the ones who looked genuine and interesting and then looked at who they were talking to and about what.
And this is where most fall down. I don’t expect anyone to spend hours and hours every day chatting on social media. Not if they have any sort of life. But I do expect to see something that shows they are not a zombie.
Time and again, I see tons of tweets, but zero conversations. It’s as if these people would rather stand there talking to themselves than risk the imaginary terror of the things I describe above.
If you like talking to yourself, be my guest. But really what’s the point? If you are doing this you have become a zombie.
We shouldn’t be afraid of trolls. And we should pity zombies.
All of them used to be people, once.
PS. More proof of this trolling backfire emerged this morning when The Daily Telegraph featured Katrina's tweet in its piece about the Donald Trump petition. Nice one Katrina! :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/12041412/Petition-to-block-Donald-Trump-from-entering-the-UK-hits-100000-signatures.html
Aww thanks Neil!
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