Arguments against the Troll ( position paper )

We envision an improved social Web, in which the Trolls’ disruptive power is inhibited or restricted, and the content produced by and shared among community members can gain authoritativeness. We believe that argumentation theories have the potential to give a key contribution to this vision. We sketch a research path in this direction and discuss some research questions. It can be argued that the Web 2.0’s key to success resides in participation. 500 million active FaceBook users exchange 30 billion content items every month.1 Wikipedia pages and registered users are counted by tens of millions, page edits by hundreds of millions.2 No doubt social computing is a hype. Probably it is over-hyped. But it is clearly changing the way people interact, business is run, services are provided, information is produced and shared, Internauts spend their virtual life, real people make friends and real ties are broken up. We could speak of a large scale cultural, social and technological revolution. Of the innumerous questions that come together with such a revolution, one is particularly interesting to us. That has to do with authoritativeness of social Web content, and ultimately with the survival of the social Web phenomenon itself as we know it today. The Web 2.0 may be the expression of freedom of speech and democratic participation. This is all very good and welcome, but: is it going to last? What will be the face of tomorrow’s social Web? Today’s Web 2.0 is participated by different groups of users with very different backgrounds and attitudes. We find many of those eager to share their family secrets, joys and pains with the rest of the world; the IT-savvy, wary about spilling their life to the social Web and about relying on information produced by it; those planning their holidays based on TripAdvisor ratings; the lovers of solitude, who finally found a peaceful beach and are going to give it very low marks on TripAdvisor, in the hope to lie there alone for a little while longer. These are the crowds that will elect the next president of the United States. Copyright c © 2010, The authors. All rights reserved. Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info. php?statistics. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Special:Statistics. Nice. And problems come along. The Web 2.0 has given rise to a good number of emerging phenomena such as social stalking, multiplication of junk sources and time sucks and gossip amplification. Privacy is probably at its historical minimum. One common reason, if not for all at least for many of these negative effects of the social Web, is the lack of authoritativeness in the Web content. In the social Web, everything could be equal to everything else. The very idea of grassroots and diffused democracy, that underlies the Web and its social version of today, is the reason of this lack of authoritativeness of the social Web contents. We can’t do anything about it!