A lot of my friends are very active on Facebook and often express their opinions concerning women’s rights and gender perception. One friend in particular popped into my news feed this week with a post meant to challenge people’s perceptions about the double standards around sex. The desired reaction was likely thought and discussion amongst users who saw it.
The video in the second screen cap is a song from Garfunkel and Oates, which you can find here(warning NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ36S3d1CaU.
Personally, I perceive this post to be pretty uncontroversial, probably do to my own social context. I’m totally aware of the double standard and I think I have been for most of my life. I also think that spreading awareness is one of the actions necessary for diminishing this disparity. When I see a post like this, I pretty much nod in agreement and move along, though I might stop to wonder how a lot of people, in 2013, would still disagree with this.
The first two comments seem pretty standard to me, but the third requires a little unpacking. First, the user implies that the post is “crap,” but then seems to support the views stated. The focus of the agression appears to be on the method of acting upon those views, making them “public” by putting them on Facebook. They seem to be trying to express a sense of acceptance, as long as someone isn’t expressing their views to other people.
In the fourth comment we see a video posted which is an example of the use of comedy to support political views. It should be noted though, that the song can be highly offensive. At first I thought this comment was a counter attack, using a relatively immature, but comedic, tactic to offend the writer of comment three.
The post author responds in the final comment, revealing a bit more about her motivation for writing the post.
One of the interesting things about this thread is that the troll only posted once, not returning to the thread to defend their position. This is a pattern I’ve seen a lot in similar threads. Trolls post an inflammatory, usually irrational comment and then another user invalidates their comment with a well thought out, logical response. I’m curious about the relationship between the occurrence of a logical response to the frequency of a troll’s comments within a thread. Do these responses actually discourage the troll? Or do trolls usually have limited activity on political threads?