trolls

Here’s what I’m talking about this morning.

1. “Fake news” trolling: There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the age-old problem of fake news. A relatively new phenomenon is that people are starting troll legitimate news sources by calling real stories fake.

We get that all of the time at the newspaper, and I’ve even started to see it on this blog.

I’ve found that most of the negative comments come from people who fall into one of four categories:

1. Those who genuinely disagree with the author.
2. Readers who assume that the author is exaggerating or misrepresenting facts due to ulterior motives.
3. Non-readers who are just reacting to a headline, tweet, or social-share image without fully reading a post.
4. Pure-trolls who solely want to write negative comments to harass or bully the author.

You can work with people in category #1, but #2-4 are lost causes.