At this year’s C&W, I presented a working theory on addressing trolls who specifically target academics, based on my own close calls.
Access copy of my talk below.
For High-Knowledge Threats: A Placebo-Controlled Rhetorical Trial to Treat Aca-Trolls
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Fairfax, VA
May 27, 2018
[1] I’m a Sri Lankan-American, queer, disabled, female rhetorician, media studies scholar, and novelist. A 4channer myself, I’ve written extensively about the subculture. I have a name that is frequently misgendered; I’m often mistaken for being heterosexual and able-bodied; and I’ve published enough traditional research to look like a conventional social science scholar despite identifying as an autoethnographer. Maybe all this is what you expected, but these identity factors indicate that I occupy strange territory when it comes to trolls. Apparently, these identity factors and my rhetorical style served as an inoculation against trolling. In this presentation, I will first unpack how trolling that targets academics, what I’m calling “aca-trolling,” is based on academic stereotypes, like the notion that academics deemphasize writerly craft, give non-constructive criticism, and are always purely objective. In accordance with the suggestion that phronesis is necessary to counter digital harassment meant to silence or convert academics, I will highlight some practical skills drawn from my own experience that could help us better identify the academic language that triggers aca-trolls and become more adept at using stylistic strategies to shield us from backlash, without compromising academic content.
According to Gabriella Coleman, Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer, and others, trolling is a complex set of behaviors consisting of the troll’s motivations, the victim’s perception, the act itself, and the context in which it takes place. Alongside these scholars, I have also argued that trolling—which at its simplest consists of actions that disrupt others’ emotional equilibrium—is incorrectly portrayed as a monolithic phenomenon. Instead, it encompasses a set of diverse behaviors from clever pranks to reputational damage and systematic intimidation. At the time, like those troll scholars, I was writing prolifically about 4chan’s onsite trolling, which adheres to tricky rhetoric, offensiveness, unreality, and contingency. Unlike them, I used the writing style and ingroup slang of a 4channer. I’ve since shifted my research focus to rhetorics of health and medicine, but just last year, Coleman, Phillips, and Beyer, previously accepted by the *chans, were named on 4chan’s /pol/ in threads crowdsourcing and evaluating academic targets. The rationale was that they were “asking for it,” [2] by claiming in a Motherboard article that expert, celebrity status alone validated their published criticisms of 4chan, Reddit, and the online alt right, which in some ways has inherited the anti-celebrity, meritocratic norms of Anonymous. [3] However, male troll scholars named in that same article were not included in that /pol/ thread, and male academics deemed troll-worthy tended to possess nonwhite names and work at non-Western institutions. Last year I suggested this was gendertrolling, but my work was linked in the Motherboard article, I was named in the /pol/ thread, and I was mostly complimented on my accuracy and thoroughness, with the worst critique being [4] “POO” in response to my South Asian name. No mention of gender. The single mention of my academic credentials—[5] that I was a suffering, lowly Ph.D. student going against the grain by writing “fairly” about 4chan—was almost sympathetic.
The aca-trolls insist this is not about gender or race but about academic bias and corruption. While this does recall the Gamergate rationale—[6] “actually, it’s about ethics in academic publishing”—the heuristic for evaluating and attacking academic targets doesn’t revolve around misogyny or racism. Although bigotry remains an important part of aca-trolling’s rhetorical toolkit, their selection process parallels the meritocratic norms that govern scholarly publication and peer review: for instance, singling out studies with “self-serving arguments”; articles whose overuse of jargon renders them inaccessible and elitist, or, inversely, that lack a strong theoretical backbone; and authors they perceive as unwilling to thoroughly represent subcultures that are repugnant by mainstream standards. Moreover, this variant of trolling seems emphatically concerned with rhetoric as epistemic, and thus targets authors who use particular methodologies and writing styles in an attempt to restrict the way we access and understand the world to traditional notions of research. Aca-trolls notice that academia privileges specific, conventional research and writing methods, as well as certain identities, and embracing our priorities, these trolls harass academics with the selfsame disciplinary rhetoric we use to prevent, dismantle, or otherwise limit alternate epistemic forms.
[7] That said, aca-trolling does intersect with what Karla Mantilla calls gendertrolling, which differs from generic trolling in that it uses gender-based insults to upset and silence targets, but also expresses sincere beliefs held by the trolls. Aca-trolling, like gendertrolling, involves the large-scale participation of many trolls, typically coordinated in advance in *chan threads, and tends to persist over a long period of time, often across social media platforms. Unlike gendertrolling, aca-trolling is subtler, no more vicious than Reviewer #2, rarely utilizes threats, and is a general reaction not to women speaking out about sexism but to scholars working against phallagocentrism, from ecriture feminine to decolonialism to autoethnography. It is as politely prejudiced as the academy can be. Put differently, aca-trolling retains the gendered and racial overtones of its counterparts in staging itself as the gatekeeper or judge of valid forms of knowledge-making. More specifically, I believe what makes aca-trolling distinct from both generic and gender-based trolling are the following components:
[8] Aca-trolls react to nontraditional, interpretive, creative methodologies. Aca-trolls uphold knowledge production as a purely objective, rarefied process. They extol quantitative research with a measurable impact on the world. They want traditional rigor. They target the personal and poetic, the practitioners of epistemic disobedience. For example, autoethnographer Elaine Campbell, targeted for her methods and style of writing, [9] describes being harassed over her supposed “narcissism, lack of scientific prowess, and dullness.” She observes that this abuse echoes autoethnography’s scholarly detractors, who contend it reduces qualitative research standards. While no methodology should be beyond criticism, demeaning scholars’ intelligence, work ethic, or capability is designed to have a chilling effect on speech and to reify conventional, masculinist, research. Campbell’s list of common aca-trolling targets illustrates this: [10] “scholarship by queer black women, lesbian narratives, explorations of gender norms in hypermasculine spaces, autobiographical accounts by transgender persons, experiences of women of color in the academy, proponents of queer feminist theory, research into social construction of gender, and accounts of sexual harassment.” Essentially, scholars who resist the cultural violence and erasure of academic discourse.
[11] Aca-trolls conduct collaborative, ongoing, committed research. To determine “high knowledge threats” or scholars susceptible to “redpilling,” or ideological conversion, aca-trolls compile annotated bibliographies, perform consensus-based evaluations of authors’ research methods and rhetorical tendencies, and investigate authors’ institutional affiliation and academic status. This requires more time, dedication, close reading skill, and rhetorical craft than gender- or race-trolling, where insults regarding physical appearance are easily and quickly formulated. Furthermore, aca-trolls collect, store, and dissect articles that serve their agenda, discussing how to reframe or excerpt them using academically sanctioned language to “redpill” other academics or advance their view of knowledge production. These “digging” threads are promoted, archived, and referenced in coordinating future actions, and also function as a test of trolls’ resolve—gauged by whether they read and understood the articles, not, as is usually the case on the *chans, by possession of insider knowledge. (Really, these threads look like a self-moderated composition classroom, albeit one filled with trash talk.)
[12] Aca-trolls pattern their behavior after academic stereotypes and “civility.” Aca-trolling conforms to our disciplinary rhetoric, like Reviewer #2’s stereotypically harsh feedback, or the emphasis on theory and objectivity. For aca-trolls, academic stereotypes justify critiquing transgressive subjects and subjective writing, using politely phrased ad hominem attacks like the ones many of us may have received on evaluations or from reviewers, or that we see submitted to accounts like “Shit My Reviewers Say.” For example, [13] “I am afraid this manuscript may contribute not so much towards the field’s advancement as much as toward its eventual demise”; [14] “The authors are perpetuating misguided generalizations in the face of substantial experimental data to the contrary”; or [15] “This paper reads like a woman’s diary, not like a scientific piece of work.” The language differs, but the sentiment is the same: How dare these transgressors (that is, nontraditional, female, stupid) call themselves academics? Our normalization of this attitude—where even necessary critiques are written unnecessarily cruelly or in ways that prioritize one “right” epistemological project—bestows legitimacy on aca-trolls’ expression of the same. As Campbell notes, little attention has been paid thus far to the online abuse of nontraditional scholars, indicative, perhaps, of both academic values and the accuracy of aca-trolls’ portrayal of them. Campbell and Fiona Vera-Gray, who was targeted for her reflective, conversational recruitment processes as well as the feminist positioning of her research, describe the milder abuse they received from aca-trolls as comments designed to provoke ire in their followers and shame in the recipient, like “This is an academic with a Ph.D. Yes, really,” or “This is an accepted conference paper.” Vera-Gray also received cruder forms of aca-trolling that were compounded with gendertrolling: she was a “self-obsessed c*nt,” using the “tortured logic” of a woman, and was informed that [16] “Male scientists don’t get involved in these kinds of things because they are busy researching real things that may have an impact on the world.” These techniques of invalidation promote men’s reality as the basis for understanding experience and confer definitional privilege upon scholars, mostly male, who are not lazy, irrational, or fragile.
This commonality might be the linkage I mistook or bypassed last year, that gendertrolling and aca-trolling both seek to combat minoritarian interventions that would provide theoretical authority and narrative agency to marginalized voices. Phillip Vannini, Terry Caesar, Leonard Cassuto, Melanie Lee, and others have written about how authenticity, power, and institutional norms impinge on scholars employing nontraditional methods or formats. Additionally, gendered insults succeed because they mirror the culture of the academy: as Candi Olson and Victoria LaPoe find, “even before engaging with media, women academics face a system that prioritizes male voices over their own. The portrayal of educational pursuits as a masculinist endeavor has historically been silencing for women in academia.” But crafted like a reviewer’s comments, the ugly personal attack can wear the guise of civility and pretend to be as tolerant as the Ivory Tower is or isn’t. So “self-obsessed cunt” becomes “the navel-gazing characteristic of a woman’s diary”; “lazy” becomes “theoretically bankrupt.” Consequently, when academics protest aca-trolling, it resembles hypocrisy. The accusation is leveled back at us: How can we find fault with intellectual, gendered, and racial prejudice finding a home in online harassment, when we permit or even produce it offline?
This is a larger, more endemic problem, one we can’t redress overnight. So in the interim, I think we can develop a phronetic sensibility with regards to aca-trolls by looking at how they craft their rhetoric, and what kinds of rhetoric stymies them. [17] Judging by the comments in crowdsourcing threads, aca-trolls expect researchers to lurk long enough to fully grasp the subject of study (for instance, being able to differentiate between *chan slang in onsite and offsite contexts); [18] they appreciate a sense of humor; [19] and they seem willing to be surprised by quality research and writing. When gathering articles to study the enemy, they search for trigger words like “misogyny,” “abuse,” or “autoethnography” and count the number of uses before examining context; they look at the author’s citations to find evidence to the contrary; they sort their sources to fashion arguments about academic bias and the need to defund qualitative departments. After coordinating on the *chans, Reddit, or alt right backchannels, where generic forms of trolling are still performed and appreciated, they export their practices and beliefs to sites like Twitter, where the discursive practices most cultivated and rewarded are characterized by simplicity, impulsivity, and discourtesy. Despite the incivility of their tweets, the intrinsic value of cleverness and play, inherited from 4chan’s onsite trolling ethic, lingers. It’s evident that aca-trolls’ focus on academics with specific rhetorical tendencies, from troll scholars to autoethnographers, criticizing their position by exploiting their craft: writing like them or like the dense, theoretical, “objective” writing they oppose. It also suggests, with the right kind of wordsmithing and layered tones, we can exploit them.
So, what can we personally, practically, take away with regards to preempting aca-trolling? [20] I want to return to my blog for a minute, to a post that was singled out by aca-trolls. I had tagged it “autoethnography,” which is probably why they decided to pick it apart. In this post, I criticize the academy while acknowledging I’m part of the machine, and therefore, potentially, part of the problem. I include a photo of a dream log in my bullet journal. I talk about creativity and artistic integrity. Despite all these red flags, certain phrases, words, and stylistic flourishes—putting quotes around “research” or “scholarly research”; alternating between sincerity and dry sarcasm in describing my experiences with the clinic and academy; asking point-blank “what counts as evidence”; and using “linear, rational, orderly” as negatives to be reconstituted. Despite categorizing the post as “autoethnography,” I only use the word twice in the post itself. What is foregrounded is that the academy is arbitrarily limiting and this needs to change. So while the post superficially lines up with aca-trolls’ search terms, it also, partly, aligns with their philosophy. [21] According to the aca-trolls, if you read this post one way I’m like any other liberal feminist pozzed academic; but read another way, I’m a /pol/lack, an insider, a troll seeking to dismantle institutional norms from within.
If I had to distill it down, lurking, thoroughness, and “writing like a troll” protected me. In the aca-trolls’ analysis, my writing style flexibly accommodated a serious academic tone and the ironic tone of an Internet troll. Additionally, in terms of format, my near-miss suggests that aca-trolls may ignore identity factors if the content is “fair” and the paper well-written. Some of these aca-trolls failed to do the additional work of reading my name, Googling my name, reading my bio or blog posts, or reading my other publications. The ones that did, seemingly did it after reading the article, after I had unintentionally won them over. [22] At that point, the most they could say was “maybe she can be a feminist and still claim her own opinions?” From all this, maybe some rhetorical tips include:
[23] Fairness and thoroughness is not the same as being nice. In my article on 4chan, I offered a historical account of “tits or GTFO” that looks at misogyny as a subcultural practice, while rejecting the premise that misogyny is okay. This article was praised for actually trying to understand a phenomenon that the academy resists understanding or is comfortable misrepresenting. [24] We can take advantage of their use of ctrl-F. As in any given classroom, you can’t always count on everyone reading an entire article, let alone comprehending it in the same way. Many aca-trolls use search terms to arrive at preconceived notions before they read. Sentence constructions that begin with the promise of contrast, like “Although bigotry,” or “Despite the appearance of misogyny” may put suspicious, defensive readers at ease. [25] By that same token, we should begin with positive constructions when critiquing repulsive phenomena. Phrases like “subcultural practice” or “communal norms” are received warmly, as an indication of the researcher’s commitment to fairness and ability to differentiate between mainstream and subcultural norms. [26] As one aca-troll comments, “It’s incredible how [the authors] failed to mention that the “hate” words they listed are often very neutral, or even affectionate in context.” In that coordination thread, this failure was prioritized more than the fact that some of the authors were Mexican, again suggesting that aca-trolls model their vetting of articles after our blind peer review processes. [27] Finally, wherever possible, we should play. A sense of humor, a coded message, contextually correct use of memes where appropriate, self-deprecation, or sarcasm all go over well with aca-trolls given their heritage of pranking and identity deception. Examples might include using an initial instead of an obviously gendered first name, or a pseudonym with coded significance; tonally shifting between identities; use captions and footnotes cleverly and self-critically; using pop culture references or memes; or crafting a text that must be read in ways that presuppose technical proficiency.
[28] Challenging aca-trolls’ tactics on their own terms may best guard against them while allowing us to research and write about subjects that may imperil us online. In terms of content and voice, maybe I’ll leave it at this. They’re dissatisfied with academia. Lacking a permanent, centralized repository for their history, they are concerned with preserving an accurate representation. Framed appropriately, our dissatisfactions with academia, and our desire for our histories to be heard, can work to our advantage. [29]
