Trolling is internet slang for a person who intentionally starts arguments or upsets others by posting inflammatory remarks. The sole purpose of trolling is angering people. Cyberbullying is also defined as the intentional act of online or digital intimidation, embarrassment, or harassment (Beran & Li, 2005). Unlike traditional bullying, cyber bullying allows the offender to mask his or her identity behind a computer. This anonymity makes it easier for the offender to strike blows against a victim without having to see the victim’s physical response. The distancing effect that technological devices have on today’s youth often leads them to say and do crueller things compared to what is typical in a traditional face-to-face bullying situation. Online publication of personal information is dangerous because it allows many people to see a side of a person more often kept private in a face-to-face interaction (Bullying and Cyber bullying, R. Donegan).The ability for online users to mask their identities provides them with an opportunity to say anything to another individual without the worry of any repercussions. (Cyber bullying Research Centre).

Several specific types of victimization and cyberbullying were discovered through a survey taken in 2010. The survey discovered that the highest concentration of victimizations and cyber bullying offenses occurred in the following areas respectively: mean or hurtful comments posted online (14.3%, 8.8%), rumours online (13.3%, 6.8%), threats through a cell phone text message (8.4%, 5.4%) (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010e, p. 1). In a Cox Communications (2009) survey 13–18 year-olds were asked how often they had ever been involved in cyberbullying. — 15% said they had been cyberbullied online — 10% had been cyberbullied by cell phone — 7% said they had cyberbullied another person online — 5% had cyberbullied another person by cell phone. A study by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids (2006) investigated how often children (6–11 year olds) and teens (12–17-year-olds) had been cyberbullied during the previous year. One-third of teens and one-sixth of the children reported that someone said threatening or embarrassing things about them online. Many children and teens who are cyberbullied fail to report it to parents or adults at school (Agatston et al., 2007; Dehue et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2008). According to a telephone survey of preteens and teens (Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, 2006).

According to Nancy Willard, there are eight categories of specific cyber-bullying behaviours, namely, ‘flaming’ which involves engaging in the use of angry and offensive language, ‘harassment’ which involves sending repeated offensive communications, ‘denigration’ which entails the posting of false information to defame a person or damage one’s relationships, ‘impersonation’ which involves pretending to be someone else online, ‘outing’ which entails revealing another person’s secrets online, ‘trickery’ which involves tricking someone into revealing private information online, ‘exclusion’ which means the deliberate exclusion of a person from an online group, and ‘cyber stalking’ which entails the use of online media to stalk or frighten someone. There’s also doxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. Cyber-bullying may involve adults, adolescents or teenagers as was in the case of Megan Meir case.

Jurisdictions and states differ in their definitions of what constitutes criminal behaviour, but the following may constitute a crime (Willard, 2007): — Threats of violence , extortion ,obscene or harassing phone calls or text messages , harassment, stalking, or hate crimes ,child pornography, Sexual exploitation ,taking a photo image of someone in a place where he or she would expect privacy. And setting up a fake account in someone else’s name and using that to bully and harass.

Other acts of Cyberbullying can involve;

· Sending mean, vulgar, or threatening messages or images

· Posting sensitive, private information and/or lies about another person

· Pretending to be someone else in order to make that person look bad

· Intentionally excluding someone from an online group (Willard, 2007)

· Text or digital imaging messages sent on cell phones

· using a person’s password to access their account and then pretending to be them

· Forwarding others’ private emails, messages, pictures or videos without permission.

· Posting mean or nasty comments online.

Purpose of cyber bullying: — The objectives of bullying may involve the following;

• To intimidate
• To upset the victim
• To be a source of entertainment for the troller
• To be offensive and argumentative
• To get attention
• To feel powerful
• To get revenge
• To harass and threaten
• To humiliate

Effects of cyber bullying

Cyberbullying is linked to serious effects such as low self-esteem, family problems, academic problems, school violence, and delinquent behaviour. However, the worst consequences are suicide and violence. Other notable effects include; change in mood, demeanour and/or behaviour: for example being upset, angry, teary or rebellious when not previously, distinct change in online behaviours: being ‘jumpy’ when text messages arrive, not leaving their phone alone, wanting to be online all the time, or never wanting to be online. The impact at work places affects productivity due to psychological trauma, legal involvement, shame/embarrassment whenever it goes public. Some people have gone to a point of resigning from jobs, others have buried themselves into work for fear of victimization, and others have committed suicide. The extreme consequences of bullying are suicidal thoughts or thoughts of violent revenge. According to a National Vital Statistics Report, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among youth ranging in age from 15 to 24 (Anderson & Smith, 2003). In the book “Bullycide: Death at Playtime” it is said that a child commits Bullycide every half hour with over 19,000 children attempting suicide (Bullycide) every year.

These random acts of harassment go well beyond the scope of traditional face-to-face bullying because unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying can occur not only among teenagers at school, but in the home and any place where technology is accessible and to anyone including adults of any standing (Shariff & Hoff, 2007; Stover, 2006; Strom & Strom, 2005). Studies have suggested that although it may occur less frequently than face-to-face bullying, up to 70% of students in the United States have experienced cyberbullying (Juvonen & Gross, 2008; Wang, Iannotti, & Nansel, 2009).

Notable examples of Cyber bullying

In July, trolls who had long been furious that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters starred four women instead of men harassed the film’s black co-star Leslie Jones so badly on Twitter with racist and sexist threats–including a widely copied photo of her at the film’s premiere that she considered quitting the service. When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, and gays–anyone who might feel vulnerable. Many people around the world reacted strongly against “cyberbullying” or cyber-bullying after the suicide of Megan Meier in 2006. She committed suicide after alleged online harassment by a fictitious “teen boy” who turned out to be the mother of a fellow school girl of Megan. Em Ford, 27, innocently did a YouTube video and was suddenly on the receiving end of trolls. She received en masse messages on her YouTube tutorials on how to cover pimples with makeup. Men claimed to be furious about her physical “trickery,” forcing her to block hundreds of users each week.

This year, Ford made a documentary for the BBC called Troll Hunters in which she interviewed online abusers and victims, including a soccer referee who had rape threats posted next to photos of his young daughter on her way home from school. What Ford learned was that the trolls didn’t really hate their victims. “It’s not about the target. If they get blocked, they say, ‘That’s cool,’ and move on to the next person,” she says. Trolls don’t hate people as much as they love the game of hating people.

The Psychology of cyberbullying

As with most competitive atmospheres, the social struggle among today’s youth and digital generation has an evident hierarchy. Bullying is a component of this hierarchy and has its own structure. According to Dr. Dan Olweus, there are seven different levels within the bullying ladder: the students who want to bully and initiate the action, their followers or henchmen, supporters or passive bullies, passive supporters or possible bullies, disengaged onlookers, possible defenders, and defenders who dislike the action of bullying and help those that are victimized (Olweus, 2001). Dismantling the aggressive portion of this ladder and shifting students to a deterring mind-set must be a fundamental part of any prevention program (Ericson, 2001).

Offenders are likely to utilize bullying tactics as an outlet for other insecurities or problems in their lives. This utilization of bullying as a coping mechanism contributes to the cyclical nature that the process evidently has on victims. So, what does this all mean? Research confirms that both bullying victims as well as offenders are emotionally harmed by the act of cyberbullying. In a fact sheet produced by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; loneliness, humiliation, and insecurity were each reported as further manifestations of the initial emotional responses to the bullying process. These feelings have the potential to cause students to fear going to school. This constant instability makes it difficult for bullying victims to adjust socially and emotionally, focus on their studies, and develop in a healthy mental fashion.

Fred Baker, fellow at Cisco, commented, “Communications in any medium (the internet being but one example) reflects the people communicating. If those people use profane language, are misogynistic, judge people on irrelevant factors such as race, gender, creed, or other such factors in other parts of their lives, they will do so in any medium of communication, including the internet. If that is increasing in prevalence in one medium, I expect that it is or will in any and every medium over time. The issue isn’t the internet; it is the process of breakdown in the social fabric”. Others have the view that Cyber bullying is actually an expression of long stifled voices that have finally found a way to express themselves. Jeff Jarvis, writer of the Buzz Machine blog, says, ” I believe we are seeing the release of a pressure valve (or perhaps an explosion) of pent-up speech: the ‘masses’ who for so long could not be heard can now speak, revealing their own interests, needs, and frustrations — their own identities distinct from the false media concept of the mass. Yes, it’s starting out ugly. But I hope that we will develop norms around civilized discourse”.

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at Altimeter Group, walked through a future scenario of tit-for-tat, action-reaction that ends in what she calls a “Potemkin internet.” She wrote: “In the next several years we will see an increase in the type and volume of bad behaviour online, mostly because there will be a corresponding increase in digital activity. … Cyber-attacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view. The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a safer and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor. Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us. The worst outcome is that we end up with a kind of Potemkin internet in which everything looks reasonably bright and sunny, which hides a more troubling and less transparent reality.” Vint Cerf, Internet Hall of Fame member, Google vice president and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, summarized some of the harmful effects of disruptive discourse: As things now stand, people are attracted to forums that align with their thinking, leading to an echo effect. This self-reinforcement has some of the elements of mob (flash-crowd) behaviour. Bad behaviour is somehow condoned because ‘everyone’ is doing it. The combination of bias-reinforcing enclaves and global access to bad actions seems like a toxic mix.

It is hence an industry opinion that the concept of Cyber bullying is not a new concept but a re-launch of some of humanity’s vices into the digital realm. The Cyber bullies have only found a new more effective, accessible, cheaper and real time avenue to practice their trade. Enabled by further characteristics of the internet mainly the concept of “Potemkin internet”, which compartmentalises the internet into small echo chambers, the bullies have a ready ear for their trolls which keeps them active. Even worse is the reality that these can now be automated using Artificial intelligence via bots & botnets to deploy at scales never seen before.

AI and Cyber bullying

Just like everything in the digital realm has moved to large scale automation, so has vices such as trolling and cyber bullying. AI enabled Bots have emerged as a handy way of automating tasks from online assistants for customer support to automatic mail sorting & response, to autonomous weapons systems. But as the power of bots grows, so does the capacity for misuse. Bots now pollute conversations around topics like #blacklivesmatter and #guncontrol, interrupting productive debate with outpourings of automated hate. There are tens of millions of them on Twitter alone, and automated scripts generate 60 percent of traffic on the web at large. An increased demand for systemic internet-based AI will create bots that will begin to interact — as proxies for the humans that train them — with humans online in real-time and with what would be recognized as conversational language. When this happens, we will see bots become part of the filter bubble phenomenon as a sort of mental bodyguard that prevents an intrusion of people and conversations to which individuals want no part. The unfortunate aspect of this iteration of the filter bubble means that while free speech itself will not be affected, people will project their voices into the chasm, but few will hear them.” said Lisa Heinz. According to Lindsay Kenzig, a senior design researcher, said, “Technology will mediate who and what we see online more and more, so that we are drawn more toward communities with similar interests than those who are dissimilar. There will still be some places where you can find those with whom to argue, but they will be more concentrated into only a few locations than they are now.” When this happens, we will see bots become part of the filter bubble phenomenon as a sort of mental bodyguard that prevents an intrusion of people and conversations to which individuals want no part.

The worst bots undermine voter sophistication by pervading the networks people go to for news and information hence compromising the normal discourse of conversations. These bot at times are programmed to automatically troll and bully social media users engaging in a discussion on a certain popular topic to drown their opinions or shape the course of a discussion in a particular way. They have sensors for particular key words and by using sentiment analysis and natural language processing AI models, they can gauge user contributions as either favourable and retweet the content or unfavourable and respond with abusive opposing content or start an opposing hash tag on twitter. This can be very traumatising if an army of bots all are deployed against any opposing views and have at times led users to commit suicide due to overwhelming negative comments directed at them not knowing they are actually arguing with automated scripts. A bigger risk to the public discourse on social media is the fact that as designed, major social media platforms; Facebook, twitter, Instagram use algorithms that employ sophisticated algorithms to analyse user interests to display relevant content. As convenient as this maybe in online shopping where the users are shown all related items to purchase, in public discourse debates this leads to asymmetry of truth as users are only presented facts that support their views, a concept called the filter bubble.

Social media Business models & online trolls

Despite the obvious risks associated with cyber bullying especially on major social media platforms, technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for their users. Their business model is driven by advertising revenues generated by engaged platform users. “Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform,” said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report on Cyber bullying. “Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged, excepting of course some egregious cases.” In particular, social online communities such as Facebook also function as marketing tools, where sensationalism is widely employed and community members who view this dialogue as their news source gain a much distorted view of current events and community views on issues. This is exacerbated with social network and search engine algorithms effectively sorting what people see to reinforce worldviews.” They reward emotional investment whether positive or negative. They reward conflict. Baratunde Thurston, a director’s fellow at MIT Media Lab, Fast Company columnist, and former digital director of The Onion was even blunter in his response, “The application space on the internet today is shaped by large commercial actors, and their goals are profit-seeking, not the creation of a better commons”. “I do not see tools for public discourse being good ‘money makers”, added David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT and Internet Hall of Famer. Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Del Harvey, struggles with how to allow criticism but curb abuse. “Categorically to say that all content you don’t like receiving is harassment would be such a broad brush it wouldn’t leave us much content,” she says.

Cyber Bullying and freedom of expression & digital privacy rights

During 2007, two high school girls in the USA created a profile on the MySpace.com website of their school principal that showed him to be a sex addict and paedophile. It came to the school’s knowledge and the girls were suspended for 10 days on the ground that they breached the school’s disciplinary code. The code prohibited the making of false accusations about school staff. The one girl instituted a civil rights suit on grounds of her free speech rights. On the facts of the matter, the court ruled that the suspension did not violate her free speech rights. In another Pennsylvania ruling where an unflattering profile of a principle, again with cruel and vulgar language was created by a school boy, the school also suspended him for 10 days on the grounds that he breached the school’s rules. Again, court action was instituted inter alia on grounds that the disciplinary action violated his free speech rights. This time the Court ruled in the boy’s favour on the facts of the matter and found that the School indeed violated his right to freedom of expression.

These two cases despite their different rulings show the continuing debate of what the balance between freedoms of expression online is and what constitutes Cyber-bullying. Does everything that you dislike online amount to bullying as Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Del Harvey asks? , does what a user posts on his ‘private’ online page constitute hate or is it a private space where they can freely express themselves as enshrined in the first amendment and the international law on freedom of expression. Federal offences include cyber fraud, identity theft, spamming, cyber stalking, making intentional false representations online, the use of password sniffers, the decimation and creation of worms as well as the writing of viruses and Trojan horses, website defacements and web-spoofing. However, there is no specific legislation addressing cyber-bullying. This grey area then continues to be the space where the bullies continue to operate in knowing only too well that neither the moral code nor the legal codes explicitly condemn their actions. This also creates a chance for governments intent on controlling the social discourse to introduce controls to limit to what can be shared online in the guise of responding to and controlling Cyber bullying.

Michael Rogers, author and futurist at Practical Futurist, predicted governments will assume control over identifying internet users. He observed, “I expect there will be a move toward firm identities — even legal identities issued by nations — for most users of the Web. There will as a result be public discussion forums in which it is impossible to be anonymous. Paula Hooper Mayhew, a professor of humanities at Fairleigh Dickinson University, commented, “My fear is that because of the virtually unlimited opportunities for negative use of social media globally we will experience a rising worldwide demand for restrictive regulation. This response may work against support of free speech in the U.S.” Experts predict increased oversight and surveillance, left unchecked, could lead to dominant institutions and actors using their power to suppress alternative news sources, censor ideas, track individuals, and selectively block network access. This, in turn, could mean publics might never know what they are missing out on, since information will be filtered, removed, or concealed. Those who believe the problems of trolling and other toxic behaviours can be solved say the cure might also be quite damaging. “One of the biggest challenges will be finding an appropriate balance between protecting anonymity and enforcing consequences for the abusive behavior that has been allowed to characterize online discussions for far too long,” explained expert respondent Bailey Poland, author of “Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online.” Throughout history, the United States has been shaped by the public’s right to freely express their opinions. Inevitably, when a case arises attempting to limit these rights, the plaintiff’s side is often hard to argue due to such a strong tradition. Without limiting constitutional rights, lawmakers must grapple with the difficult task of defining cyber-bullying, as well as determining proper sanctions for committing the act. John Stuart Mill advocates for the freedom of expression alongside the freedom of thought. He suggests that there is required the fullest liberty of expression to push our arguments to their logical limits. Further, he advocates for the protection of free speech but also recognizes that there can be exceptions to forms of expression that provide a positive instigation to mischievous acts.

As a result of the Megan Meier incident, the state of Missouri amended its harassment and stalking statutes to prohibit the use of electronic means to intentionally “frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress to another person.” To protect children from sexual misconduct, the state of Missouri has enacted legislation making it illegal for teachers and students to interact via social media. In New Jersey, the new ‘Anti-bullying bill of rights’ was introduced requiring all public schools in New Jersey to adopt detailed anti-bullying policies, to provide staff education and training, and to follow strict new requirements for reporting online and offline bullying incidents. The UK government through the UK Safer Internet Centre has published guidance for schools as well as parents on how to protect children from Cyber bullying and what to do to ensure the children develop the knowledge of what it is about and how to report should they fall victims.

Conclusion

The right to freedom of expression must be considered in the context of other core values such as human dignity, psychological integrity, privacy and equality. In the context of digital media where there are many ways to express ones opinion both with known identities and anonymously, there are those who will always misuse the power accorded to them to advance partisan, racial or sexist agenda. This can be done either in person or via automated bots designed to troll or advance a particular political, religious or geo-political agenda. There’s been a concerted effort to try to reign in on the culprits but the legal limits of the universal freedom of expression and its interpretation in different cases have made a concrete legal intervention difficult. This in addition to the legal rights for privacy of users online complicate any interventions hence leaving the digital world to be a digital market of ideas where it is hoped that the good ideas will sell and the bad ones will not.

Unfortunately the Social media platforms that one would hope would be at the forefront of battling this scourge are either overwhelmed by the sheer amount of hate and vitriol shared via their sites or are complicit in these as such content drive levels of engagement in the respective platforms making them attractive to online marketers. The responsibility therefore ultimately lies with the users of digital platforms who unlike the victims of physical bullying have more power in their hands having known the objectives of the cyber bullies as discussed in this article. The bullies derive their power in identifying, reaching out to, accessing the victim via the content, designing the content to achieve the desire goal and most importantly allowing the content to have as wide reach as is possible