I FIRST encountered trolls during my elementary years of European legends. Back then, they were mythical, cave-dwelling being depicted in folklore as either a giant or a dwarf, typically having a very ugly appearance.
Over time, the denotation has evolved into real life beings with very ugly behaviors. Nowadays, trolls are those who sow discord on the internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response, or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion on political issues.
In this age of social media, trolls can use fake accounts to disable Facebook accounts. One who fell victim to these ugly creatures was Bacoleña Salvacion “Inday” Espina-Varona.
I knew Inday way back in the 1980s when we were both anti-dictatorship fighters to oust Ferdinand E. Marcos from power. She, of the alternative legal press, I in the underground press. We often coordinated our acts. Talk about upland-lowland integration in media work.
Inday is an activist and a journo. I know her political slant, but she’s a journalist first, of reporting and writing from both sides of the political fence, as befitting the daughter of her journalist father and columnist Rolly Espina.
This week, when she logged on to Facebook, Inday was aghast to find a message “Someone asked us to review your profile because you might not be following our Community Standards.”
Cyberspace expert Janette Toral believes this could be due to trolls reporting Inday’s account to Facebook, whether to say it violates its terms and conditions, it is fake, or it has been hacked.
She advised Facebook users who were vocal about their advocacies to lower their dependence on Facebook, and use other platforms, such as their own website, instead. That way, if anything happened to their Facebook account, they would still have a presence on social media. Their posts would not be deleted just like that.
Well, thank you, VoxPop Bacolod. In 2003, former reporter Avelyn Z. Agudon invited me to write Op-Eds for the paper. Avs assured me I can use it as a platform for my environmental advocacies. When VoxPop Bacolod Publishing Inc. president Jimmy Golez took over, he echoed the same to veteran columnists. Our views, and nothing but our views.
Having said that, though, let me echo Inday who usually expresses my views much better than I can: “We’re journalists. We need to face the fact that we’ll be questioned, and every person who becomes more rational even if he or she doesn’t have to agree with me, but just becomes rational and polite and civil, is, I could see there a victory. So, I refuse to give up. If we do, then we cede the space to them, and I think we just need to fight it out.”
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