"Trolling" is a New Tactic for Powerful Corporations to Control the Message

While writing the final paper for our class on the use of social media in civil revolutions, I came across quite a few articles that talked about the response to the use of social media by governments being pressured to change.  One of the many critiques of the usefulness of social media in social revolution has been that these new tools and technologies can be used by government officials (not altogether different from our own issues with the NSA recently) to egregiously track, arrest, torture, and kill dissidents.

The problem with broadening both access to the communication medium and the ability to create it on an individual level, as the Internet does, is that it makes each creator responsible for their own communication.  Subsequently, the ability to track each person and target them is a real risk to participants.

On the same note, back-tracking against the use of social media for dissent does not then only apply to political upheaval against the state.  It also applies to upheaval against powerful businesses (I know, I know, there might not be much difference these days).  Aljazeera reports that, in the wake of British Petroleum's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP used a contractor to do what is called "trolling" to track, locate, and harass users on BP's Facebook support page.

The outsourced company, Ogilvy & Mather, created false profiles on Facebook in order to conduct attacks against anyone who would speak badly about the company or its handling of the disaster.  These attacks ranged from simply posting alternative information, to using strong and disrespectful language against individual who posted to the Facebook page, to harassment via instant message, and eventually to the serious use of language that was intimidating or violent in nature.  Death threats were sent to several individuals.  One user described the attacks this way,

"They were racist, sexist, and threatened me and others with legal action and violence. They've insinuated that some commenters are 'child molesters', and have often used the tactic of mass reporting with the goal of having their targets completely removed from Facebook."

At this time, investigations are being conducted to hold BP and its contractors accountable for these abusive methods to control the public message about their company's massive blunder.