Thursday, February 01, 2018

Being Trolled

Recently a viewer of one of my videos added a comment that simply stated "IRA". Foolish idiot that I am, I responded pointing out that the IRA had nothing to do with the video and that it was a pointless comment. This unleashed several responses such as "Your pointless", "IRA bomber, run!!!!!!!!!", "FUCK THE IRA ACTUALLY NO JUST YOU!", "Over 50 lines of places to bomb!", and "IRA WERE GONNA DIE". Needless to say it is an uneasy feeling that someone would take the time to write comments like this (appalling grammar included) on a video that teaches you how to sort data in Excel. I reported the comments to YouTube as "Spam or Abuse" and blocked the user, but several reappeared as comments. I don't know if they were reposted by the troll, or if YouTube "investigated" the comment and decided they were not "Spam or Abuse".

Image source: Karen Gately.


Compared to some people being trolled - my experience is almost nothing. I often thought to myself that if it happened to me I would brush it off or ignore. I can understand how other people can get upset by abusive comments - it makes me want to reach into my computer screen and give the troll a clip on the ear. There are no more comments today, so I hope the troll has stopped - I hate to think that he (yes - I'm guessing that the troll is male) will have moved on to someone else.

For the record: I have never been in the IRA or planted a bomb.

No comments:

Post a Comment