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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

entry arrow10:49 PM | Trolls

I remember when Butch Dalisay wrote about the sometime lawlessness in the Internet in his blog and column ("The Anti-Rant Rant," which appeared in Philippine Star last August 6). This part points to the problem:

It’s in the nature of the Internet, of course, to host these brutal and often unrefereed skirmishes. Some surfers see the Internet as an open and wide frontier where no rules obtain and manners don’t matter. The Web’s anonymity encourages boorishness, recklessness, and other behavior that might land you in court, in jail, or in the hospital in the real world. (You might say that, on the Web, anonymity breeds contempt.) People tend to shoot their mouths off and say the cruelest things online because there’s no sense of public accountability. Slinging mud from behind an alias, you can’t get sued, you can’t get slugged, and your mother won’t even know.

I've had my share of trolls and flamers and online stalkers before, problems that usually went away when I did the one thing calculated to silence this good-for-nothings: absolute silence. But Mark's current troll (who's now trying to get at him through my blog and his mother's) is becoming dangerous day by day, and he writes about it here. Of course, now we're fighting back -- not by flaming back, but by the judicious use of law. It's time online harassments come to a stop.

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