Dealing with Negative Nancy (or Ned!)

Undoubtedly, if you use social media in your classroom, you will have the occasional student who wants to troll. Internet trolls are the worst, but their behavior is not something that can be ignored, especially if you are promoting netiquette in your classroom. Internet trolls are those who intentionally try to antagonize others with negative or offensive comments. These comments often result in a flame war, which is exactly what the troll wanted.

In my classroom, anytime I expect my students to discuss something digitally, we have a conversation about trolling. We not only talk about what classifies as trolling, but we also discuss how to respond to those negative comments. Many teachers focus on those who make the comments and the consequences of trolling, but I also want my students to know how to handle those situations; I want them to know how to avoid a flame war and to how to keep their digital dignity, despite how awful others might behave. This is not something that comes naturally for humans. Naturally, most people want to engage with the troll in an effort to call out their awfulness or prove them wrong. This is pointless and causes you to fall into the troll’s trap. Because responding is so tempting, it is important to teach students alternate ways to handle the situation.

Forbes offers "10 Tips to Dealing with Trolls". Some of these tips can be adapted to fit your classroom needs. These tips will not only help prevent trolling, but also help you and your students handle trolling if it happens.

1. Establish a policy.

2. Ignore them.

3. Make light of the situation.

4. Unmask them.

5. Don’t provide a platform.

6. Use moderators and online tools.

7. Create a unified community.

8.  Listen.

9. Fight back with facts.

10. Correct mistakes.

In all honesty, if students who want to troll know that their audience won’t engage with their comments, they often don’t even attempt it. I rarely have an issue with a student posting negative or offensive comments and if I do, I have students who know exactly how to handle it so it has never resulted in a flame war.

As an extra, I always show my students this video by Madilyn Bailey. Madilyn is a singer/songwriter who is popular on YouTube. But as we all know, popularity comes with a lot of negativity and in her case, trolls. In this video, she wrote a song entirely out of comments made by trolls and I love the integrity that it shows on her part.