Anyone who reads anything posted on high-profile Facebook pages and groups with a liberal bent will be familiar with this (in a comment on Biden’s COVID briefing):
what’s wrong with this picture?
If you’re like me, you’ll have had this as, at least, a constant annoyance for several years now. In some contexts it may make your blood boil. The right wing trolliverse has learned the power laughter can have to discomfit an enemy, and damage people in fragile emotional states. They come into any thread where people talk favorably about progressive leadership and values, or (worse) where people are grieving over damage done to people, to morality, to decency by outrages of the right. And they laugh. Two little clicks, and they can pwn the libtards, melt the snowflakes, say “I really don’t care, do U?” and express scorn for the lefty ideals of fair play, decency, honor, whatever they’re extolling this week.
Everyone recognizes this as the laughter of the bully, and that’s exactly what they want. They want us to know it, and to feel it as an attack. And we do — scrolling down a thread of heartfelt responses to a touching speech or a tragic event and seeing people laughing about it makes my blood boil. They know above all else how to push our buttons, like any bully. But there’s an easy fix.
Every one of those troll laughs I can remove from my feed is a win.
Instead of just clicking Like or Love, hover your mouse over that little bar of three emoticons. It will show you the relative numbers. If you’re on a popular progressive group like Daily Kos or The Other 98%, the numbers will often be hundreds of Likes, dozens of Loves, and maybe 10 or 20 Laughs. Maybe you’ll see a few of the newer Cares afterward.
But it shows the top three, no matter the proportions. That’s what they’re relying on, and it lets them magnify their impact. So you just have to vote with your emotes. Go look for the next most popular appropriate one after the Laugh, and use that instead. Usually, if your reaction would be Like or Love, Care will be acceptable as a response. Use that. (Sometimes Wow or Sad or Angry is more appropriate to defeat the trolls — whatever works.) If enough people do, one more laughing bully will be wiped out of the main feed, on that reply at least. Sometimes (especially now) the trolls are feeling less cocky, and you may be able to flip several comment reactions with your own responses, as I just did on the Briefing video (as presented by The Other 98%). In others, you’ll need the cooperation of others who know this trick, and are thinking strategically.
But there’s a lot of activists on here, who spend a lot of time online. Get into the habit of Caring Strategically, and through concerted collective action, with one of the easiest activist commitments you can make, you can start to make the comment threads a pleasanter place to look at, and pwn those trolls.
