Flavia Dzodan from Tiger Beatdown has a very interesting post on internet trolls, amusingly titled “The Troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable“. The argument is that the traditional troll as we know it, that gloomy person who uses hateful rhetoric, is now obsolete because his/her tactics have become mainstream, overpassing in a way the traditional persona. Racism, sexism, and hateful speech became common, and we (the moderators) but most importantly news agencies, do not do anything drastic about it. More often than not, we allow some rather hateful comments under the assumption that everyone is entitled to an opinion. This is not the case Flavia Dzodan argues and I agree with her because hate speech is another form of violence and as such should not be tolerated.

Two excerpts to make you go to read the whole article:

…What was once brushed off as “trolling” became the standard. We saw the incendiary language get worse every day, certain slurs that were usually reserved for the back rooms of hateful sites repeated on news hours, commenting sections of news sites, blogs, etc…

and

…I have to wonder why are not all news sites and major blogs made “safe”? If in any other environment, people felt systematically unsafe, we would demand immediate change and measures of protection. If a club, a venue, a public space allowed people to be subjected to violence without actually taking counter measures, such places would most likely be shut down due to public outcry. .