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[–] Flyingwrath [S] ago 

“Trolls look for attack vectors and since a lot of trolls are sexist, they will use someone’s gender as an attack vector. They are looking for the most personal gap in your armour."

I find this an interesting Quote from TB, the thing is I do believe that trolls do look for that one weakness in your armour and attack it. However when it comes to Femimists on the internet who complain about it you are just showing them the weakness in your armour, although some may be baiting it so that way they can just use it as a tool to say, "look at how much of a victim I am." It is unfortunate that this shit happens but I am glad that TB did also call out the Twitter Trust and Safety councel waything that they cannot be unbiased and I do agree that they should allow addons of create featured that allow one to not see egg accounts on their twitter feed.

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[–] Harkekark ago 

I think many trolls just pretend to be sexist, racist, homophobic or whatever else you could label them as just to get a rise out of people. That's at least what I did when I "trolled" youtube comments in my mid-teens. You just type whatever you think will piss the most people off.

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[–] 2095conash ago  (edited ago)

I also found that quote interesting, while perhaps some of them are I personally think that it's probably inaccurate in at least today's day and age to assert that most trolls are sexist, though perhaps I'm using a bit of an older definition of troll where they're intentionally trying to rile someone up (which TB at least implied earlier on isn't really the more modern use so might not be what he's referring to there). Without studies I would personally assume that they're using the gender as an attack vector just as they would use race, he doesn't say that a lot of trolls are racist so I find the assertion about then being sexist to be a bit inconsistent unless there is some research done showing that a lot of trolls are sexist but not racist. This attack vector is sorta perpetuated by society, people SAYING stuff like gaming is an all boys club or whatever puts the thought into people's mind that girls aren't welcome there, heck even creating say a mean character in a show or something who says these things in order to beat up a strawman makes people more aware or reinforces this idea that gaming isn't exactly friendly to women, while any reasonable person isn't going to be burdened by this, the basic idea is that it can work to sorta weather you down, it weakens the armor which makes it a prime attack vector for a troll, the fact that people hold onto the notion that women aren't welcome in gaming (either to agree with it, attack it, prove it wrong, etc.) is what empowers this specific attack vector, by making people BELIEVE that it's real.

It's also one of the reasons why people will repeat more or less whatever insults are popular at the time, repeating it can help reinforce the idea, either in the people you're insulting making them feel hurt from something that otherwise wouldn't hurt them (though obviously other people will learn to dismiss such insults when they receive them a lot working to build them a tolerance to that attack vector) or in various bystanders who hear it, they see people reacting and they sorta join up in the sorta mentality. If you want this attack vector to go away, people need to stop caring one way or the other and the attack vector will eventually lose it's power entirely (at least theoretically), sadly we're far past the point that we can just 'stop' caring about it because there are people making a living off of this idea of being the victim of these attacks, they have a vested interest in people believing that these insults hurt them so since trolls are a sad reality of the internet it appears that for the time being, neither side (the ones saying mean stuff and the ones mean stuff is said to) is going to relent. Thankfully people's attention span has grown shorter with the internet as well so I imagine this soapbox that these victims have been using will become less and less powerful each day, and THEN if people really want to stop women being insulted for being women (everyone gets insulted on the internet, period) then we need to work on just rolling our eyes and moving on, the trolls will get bored eventually and find OTHER ways to insult those people.

But yeah, rambling aside that one minor thing did stand out to me out of all TB said, but since I'm not a troll and I enjoyed a lot of what else he had to say I'll just leave it at this.... Which is probably a bit longer than it should be for this but I like talking.