The keyboard warrior of Twitter
In this guest post, NBN staffer Scott Rhodie writes an unofficial, personal view on his experience with a hostile Twitter critic.
Last night I had a strange incident. While on Twitter I noticed someone saying that Australia’s NBN is already outdated. I wrote a small note back explaining they were incorrect.
And their response? The lovely gentleman (whose Twitter profile says: ‘Father of 5 kids, Loving Grandfather of 10 Grandchildren,and 2 Great Granddaughters. love to give heaps to Pollies and Poofters’) said to me: “Go and lick Gillards C*** out U commie Prick” (I’ve edited the swear word but they didn’t).
Yup. They seriously wrote that.
In four years of being on Twitter it’s the first time I’ve been visibly shocked by a tweet.
I never mentioned politics.
I never mentioned communism.
I never mentioned sex.
Oh yeah and I’m Scottish and not a citizen in Australia so I can’t even vote here!
Yet there they were attacking me for correcting them. Which brings me to the world of the lone keyboard warrior. I spend a lot of time online and more and more I’m seeing this kind of thing. I’m used to it on forums where long-term friendships and hatreds are born. I’ve even been a moderator on a gaming forum where daily abuse was the norm but Twitter – where people are more likely to use their own names – I’m noticing a marked increase in the attacks.
Maybe it’s because I’m spending a lot more time looking at certain issues which people are passionate about but even then the debate should be cordial and without personal attacks. But on Twitter the area I have noticed the most hatred and vitriol is from the political area. It seems that when people start talking about politics there are those online who revert to the most vile and disgusting abuse … but only behind their keyboards.
I’ve never really had the urge to troll nor attack people online. I’ve occasionally defended myself but I see online and offline as two worlds that have less and less of a gap between them and people at some point will have to stop being keyboard warriors and start realising that what they say online can and will have repercussions for them offline. If you wouldn’t say it to someone in a street then don’t say it online.
Have you had any dealing with any crazy keyboard warriors?
- A version of this article first appeared on Scott Rhodie’s personal blog Kilt For Hire. His day job is as digital communications manager at NBN Co. He’s on Twitter as @ScottRhodie
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This ‘user’ has a history of vile, misogynist tweets specifically in reference to Prime Minister Gillard (granted there are more targets). His language includes calling the Prime Minister a ‘slut’ and worse.
The misogynist reference to ‘licking Gillard’s’ female anatomy is what I find more disturbing. It is not isolated – the trend in Australian ‘keyboard warriors’ as you say, I just call them trolls, to use abusive, threatening and down right sexist and scary language towards women (and yes, women trolls do it too) is what I think is the bigger issue.
As I’ve said about this wider issue publicly, I can’t imagine Llewellyn would say this to your face, Scott. Or to Gillard’s. So let’s make it unacceptable to do it online.
Block, report and call it out publicly like you’ve done. And if you see it being done to someone else online, call it out and expose them for wider community judgement.
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Lol, you fed the trolls.
Bad idea.
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Well we should at least have the guys name and handle in the text of the page:
Llewellyn J Groves
@3Groves
There’s actually a video of him here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gLN3QoN-q8
Squeal like a pig city boy!
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Probably one of Abbott’s staffers… Or of course one of his deranged voters… Politics? 😉
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I am sure Scott Rhodie is a lovely person, but I can’t believe they couldn’t find an Australian for his job.
But getting to his posts, the crazy Abbot followers don’t care what the truth is, they are just pissed off as their guy couldn’t persuade the minority MP’s to support them. Tony Abbot will say anything and change his position from 1 day to the next.
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Welcome to the internet
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I know Scott. Although I can’t confirm Scotts affection for Gillards privates- I can specifically state he is a communist!!!
Might I also mention we grew here and he flew here?
In all seriousness- when I used to post videos on Youtube, I regularly got death threats when I made slightly controversial videos. It wasn’t till the other day when I randomly got a twitter threat after a pretty hilarious comment about my dogs reaction to cricket that I actually got a little shock from it. Something so asinine as cricket or wireless technology and people jump extremely brutal/rude comments.
But as said above, welcome to the internet!
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Ha ha – love it – we don’t like this ignorant guy but….
“I am sure Scott Rhodie is a lovely person, but I can’t believe they couldn’t find an Australian for his job.”
We grew here, you flew here etc.. lah lah.
Julia Gillard flew here didn’t she? Can’t believe you couldn’t find someone who grew here!
In fact, 42% of Australians flew here.
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The reasonTwitter has been sinking into the gutter is the company’s reluctance to constrain growth and allocate funding to complaints management over architecture expansions (to cope with growth).
Facebook has fairly active moderation to ban accounts who consistently behave offensively. Twitter takes the US line that hate speech is OK.
Facebook now offers effective controls to ban users from pages and create lists of banned words (on a page by page basis). On Twitter the ‘block user’ control doesn’t really stop you seeing a particular user’s comments in hashtag discussions.
Twitter will eventually have to implement better filtering tools, however right now their focus is maintaining growth and figuring out monetization.
This, of course, allows people to behave inappropriately and largely anonymously, and will cause further issues for the service and for the community as these people learn that their behaviour is socially acceptable on Twitter.
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You “correcting them”?
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His name is actually Carl Groves… He’s also a wannabe film producer.. I found this: http://mornington-peninsula-le.....ost-of-it/
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Well done @anonymous, good find. Now to research this delightful grub of society. Stand by for more.
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Trying hard to see the value in Tweeting responses to someone who is clearly entrenched in their ways. It can’t be education. What possible result can there be from replying to someone like that? I can’t think of one. In customer service there is the concept of letting someone vent, and not reply, then they have nowhere to go because it’s all vented and you’ve given them nothing to reply to. You should excercise that concept methinks, Scott.
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Interesting that a Carl Groves from Ballarat has @theladyofpearls as an account as well. Plugs the same indy movie as @3groves. So either they’re brothers, or he’s running 2 accounts? This one is more of the same, ant-NBN stuff, but not nearly as abusive from what I’ve seen.
Oh BTW, Carl is looking for commercial partners to be involved with his film if anyone’s interested.
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I think Scott Rhodie needs a bit of a lesson on using the internet.
This 3Groves character is obviously a troll and troublemaker. Why you’d engage him and try to educate him is beyond me.
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Cam, I’m wel aware of customer service however they were chatting to others and saying the NBN was outdated so I simply dropped in to chat. I wasn’t aware of how deeply entrenched he was.
I watch our hashtag and mentions of our brand online on a daily basis and there are a number of people I don’t engage with simply because nothing you do will ever change their mind.
However, I don’t agree that people should get away with saying untruths and when they engage others then why shouldn’t you engage?
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I honestly don’t know how celebrities use twitter, they get so many evil messages. Is there a way for them to read some of them rather than all of them? Eg just to read the replies from the people they follow?
Manchester City defender (and all-round great guy) Micah Richards this weekend had to quit twitter due to sustained racial abuse. http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech.....ter-racism
Perhaps a way of other followers blocking people? So if, say, enough of your followers flagged a tweet aimed at you as being hateful, then that person would automatically be blocked?
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I’m sure 99% of australians were imported at some point in the last 200 years. Scott’s accent probably sounds more like the founding fathers of ‘Australia’ than the aussietrolls on here. I wonder if Scott will bother becoming a citizen after all the vitriol on an allegedly ‘learned’ forum.
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Why does a political comment to some people have to come from the other side of politics? Regular citizens also participate in politics and their positions don’t necessarily reflect any of the main stream parties (have you not noticed the number of fringe dwellers out there?).
@Oppose Everything – just because this vile human being made a truly awful comment doesn’t mean it came from a Coalition staffer or Liberal/National voter.
And @Sam how on earth can you read anything about Tony Abbott in all of this?
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Also yes good point maybe Carl and John Llewellyn Groves are brothers?
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And this tweet shows the two twitters engaging so I am pretty sure they would be brothers
https://twitter.com/#!/3Groves/status/121591271277072385
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I thought you were an ‘online guru’ Scott?? And you can’t even follow rule 14 of the internet?
You fool….
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/i.....net_v2.gif
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@3groves has form with publicly abusing people. He was also the leader of One Nation Victoria for a while.
http://www.theage.com.au/feder.....15;96.html
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The more I read his posts the more I don’t believe he is a troll.
You see a troll posts to provoke. This guy, it seems, actually believes what he writes. Have a look at some of his other stuff and the vitriol he spouts. He isn’t doing it to provoke people he seems to genuinely believe in what he writes. Quite worrying actually.
Take for one of his posts in the last 24 hours:
https://twitter.com/#!/3Groves/status/168586583010848768
I don’t tend to feed the trolls. The problem is that when politics get involved some very smart people seem to really lose who they are and attack people online.
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Yeah, the guy is a douche and a troll but man, the pedant in me is so offended by Scott’s “many country’s all doing…” 😉
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Julie – yeah sorry about that. I’m still gutted I typed ‘ate’ instead of ‘are’ .
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Wow his movie looks like a quality project… He is very vicious bitter old man.. we should feel sorry for him being such a douche…must be hard to fail so much.
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@scott i totally agree this guy is not a troll he is just a moron, although the two are certainly not mutually exclusive! Any money he has a cabled wifi router in house and he thinks that is the “wireless” future he is describing! As for all of this crap about blaming/censoring twitter, really? really guys?? Morons are entitled to their voice, nice one one @scott for making sure anyone reading might have seen a more logical argument.
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Apparently this troll’s vitriol doesn’t count as sexist comments, according to various pundits and commentators. One would have thought that language would be the most sexist comment possible.
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How did you correct them? You said they were wrong, that isn’t correcting.
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Take no notice Scott – the guy’s clearly a deranged lunatic.
The most worrying aspect of the whole episode is that he describes himself as a father of five and grandfather of ten. The old saying that it’s always the ones who shouldn’t breed that do the most has rarely been more apt.
Never mind, I’m sure your mood picked up no end when you heard the news about Rangers. ;o)
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Was the lesson here to maybe look before you leap? His behavior was disgusting. Your surprise and continued engagement was unwise.
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I think the POV expressed in the comments above that you cannot be a troll if you believe what you write is flawed. Trolls often completely believe in what they write. Sure, there are some who take a devil’s advocate position and argue it just for the sake of arguing. But most, I would argue, totally and utterly and passionately believe in what they’re saying — and then use it to pick fights. And that’s still trolling.
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Nothing wrong with a good flame!!!
Back in the old MIRC days everyone loved a good roasting.
Gillard is pretty clueless
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Oh boy who’ve we handed the media over to?! I prefer Rupie.
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