FanPost

When will the Next Troll Attack Hit?



You know its coming. This attack yesterday was wildly successful. Be clear it was an attack, this goes way beyond the normal banter about playing ability, or coaching decisions. A coordinated effort was made to accuse a young man of committing a felony offense for which he could be sentenced to prison. The troll who sprang it is in heaven today. He not only got bloggers, and players to respond. One report has it that even the University put out a statement. The day before a big game with a rival, all of sudden a majority of the talk was not the game, but about the attack.

How can you stop the next attack? I guess you can't.

All a troll has to do is register to post at a dozen sites, if that many, with multiple user names for all, and then fire away. Go to the first site, "I heard that so and so did such and such." Log back in under a different username, respond, "I know everybody is talking about, looks real bad." The off to the next site, go up with a post linking back to the other site, and chime in with more nonsense, more multiple usernames suggesting you've heard the same thing. Repeat at the next site, with new usernames. Add in twitter and facebook and you are off and running.

It is too easy.

How will posters, blogs, players and news sites respond next time? I hope more will ignore unsubstantiated posts from anonymous sources, not respond and not forward. I hope more sites will be proactive and move to delete such posts instantly. In the future I'd like to see more focus on limiting multiple posts under different usernames from the same IP, and also doing more to find out who is actually posting on a site. Some political blogs that I frequent, for example, no longer allow registraion with simply a yahoo or hotmail address.

But we haven't seen the last attack on our basketball team. The guy who launched this one will be back. Copy cats will likely try similar as well.

Lastly, any law students here? With the wave of cyberbully and cyberstalking cases over the past 2 or 3 years, I know a lot of states have put net laws in place. Is it possible any laws where broken with the attack on Scoop?