The 'Trollocaust' Is the Dumbest Internet Controversy in Days

Tuesday, December 3, 2013 will forever be known in the annals of ridiculous web history as the “trollocaust,” when more than 45 Twitter accounts owned by Anonymous supporters, trolls, and followers of deep web etiquette—as well as seemingly innocent bystanders and activists—were suspended.

The suspensions began on Monday, after a few people tweeted offensive jokes as well as death and rape threats at four well-known female activists and writers (some self-identifying as feminists, which apparently was a source of harassers' ire) with large Twitter followers: Caitlin Moran, Stella Creasy, Caroline Criado-Perez and Hannah Curtis.

The four women blocked the accounts harassing them and reported the abuse to Twitter, who then suspended the accounts based on Terms of Service (ToS) violations. Twitter’s ToS explicitly states “You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others," the offending parties were suspended, and that should have been that.

In a pastebin related to the suspensions, members of the Anonymous community warned others not to tweet abuse at these four women—or even to tweet at them in a positive way—to avoid getting their accounts suspended. As with many things in this web community, that warning only galvanized other members to hurl more abuse. These “trolls,” aka wannabe pop culture satirists who choose to communicate with each other through a code of charged and offensive language, also took to protesting on Twitter with memes:

And so by Tuesday afternoon, it appeared the suspensions had taken on a life of their own, perhaps even spiraling out of control. Accounts that had not tweeted at these women were caught up in the sweep, like many members of the trolling group Rustle League, known for making fun of Anonymous, activists and the mainstream media.

Even more troubling, accounts that do no “trolling” whatsoever, like @opBOYCOTTisrael, which is primarily concerned with Israel’s policies towards Palestine and devoid of any anti-Semitic troll nomenclature, were also suspended.  Even @The_Block_Bot, an account feminists, skeptics, and atheists followed because it warned them about problematic Twitter users (and blocked them), was removed. Cries of censorship and the right to free speech echoed throughout the digital ether.

And then came in the theories as to who was conducting the suspensions. The community became convinced the mass suspensions were the work of a bot, given the scope of the suspensions went beyond those related to the original harassment of the four women. For a while it was believed this suspension bot was targeting key words, IP addresses, and shared log-ins. If true, this would explain why an activist account like @opBOYCOTTisrael would have been suspended, if one of the people using the account was also suspended for using a keyword.

Then the theory arose that the mass suspensions were somehow related to @The_Block_Bot’s blocked Twitter list. To the trolls being suspended, the four women who originally complained of harassment and The_Block_Bot were seen as perpetrators of all evil.

Who knew the four horseman of the apocalypse would actually be cyber feminists on Twitter?! #Shocker #Trollocaust pic.twitter.com/lUnwsCMI5V

— Suspendquatch (@MyYetiNinja) December 4, 2013

With this being the “trollocaust” and all, where the main villains are “feminazis,” the community naturally fixated on this important block bot list and tried to crack it, test it, figure out why some on the blocked list were not suspended.

Not to burst the conspiracy bubble too gleefully, but @The_Block_Bot and its list are in no way affiliated with Twitter and have no suspension power whatsoever. Twitter also does not block based off IP, because:

IP blocking is generally ineffective at stopping unwanted behavior, and may falsely prevent legitimate users from accessing our service. IP addresses are commonly shared by numerous different users in a variety of locations, meaning that blocking a single IP may prevent a large number of unconnected users from logging into Twitter. In addition, IP addresses are easy to change and blocks can be easily circumvented by logging in from a different location, a third-party service, or one of many free websites or applications.

The only way users are suspended is if someone reports the account for abuse and Twitter deems the account in question to be violating Twitter’s rules. "We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons," said a Twitter spokesperson when reached for comment on why non-abusive and non-troll accounts were suspended.

So what happened? If suspensions are a result of human input and carried out by Twitter after investigation, then the only way for so many suspensions to happen would be if actual people manually reported all these accounts. Mass voting/flagging brigades are not uncommon on YouTube, and are generally used and abused to silence people with opinions the flaggers disagree with. Could it be that the tables have now turned and the long-trolled denizens have grown wiser and apparently organized, mad as hell and unwilling to take it any longer? Hey, anything's possible.

Twitter users who had their account suspended can appeal here.