Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
Internet forums are, in a sense, a grand experiment in free speech. A trip to an open forum on just about any topic—from the new iPhone to the latest political campaign—is likely to yield astute critiques and interesting perspectives—as well as lots of irrelevant, incoherent, offensive, and inflammatory banter. Does the value of the open discourse outweigh the negative impact of vitriol? Editors at Popular Science decided that the negativity of trolls was overwhelming and shut down entirely the comments section on the magazine’s website. Other organizations instead rely on moderators—commonly known as “mods”—who set strict rules for the forum, sometimes reviewing posts before making them public but mostly deleting them afterward. Webzine Boing Boing deletes posts that moderators find offensive. “It’s fun to have disagreements,” explains Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder, “but if someone gets nasty, we will kick them out” (Niemann, 2014). Indeed, many moderators will ban repeat offenders for life. However, a recent study found that trolls can survive on a forum for a long time (and several hundred posts) before being banned (Cheng, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, & Leskovec, 2015). The researchers devised an algorithm to try to identify trolls earlier, based on their posting patterns and other people’s responses to their comments (such as thumbs-down votes). Using data from three news sites, 1.7 million users and nearly forty million posts, they were able to accurately predict, based on the first ten posts, which users were likely to end up getting banned. Time will tell if such technology could be used effectively to weed out trolls before they cause too much damage. Other researchers suggest that the forum mods and members themselves are in the best position to deal with trolls—whether by recognizing troll behavior and not responding, turning the trolling behavior back on the trolls, or setting aside separate sections of the site for those who enjoy the vitriol to let loose (Coles & West, 2016).