This article draws on British newspaper reports in order to demonstrate that trolling, and the media's subsequent framing of trolling, involves "silencing strategies". It is important to examine how trolling is discussed within the media to understand how it might frame public opinion, debate and action, and implicitly victim blame. The article presents findings on: the forms of (online) abuse and behaviours related to trolling in media reports, including rape threats, death threats and body shaming. It also explores the media portrayal of victims of trolling, and the advice given concerning how to respond to trolls. To comply with the message to women, which is propagated in media and popular discourses: "do not feed the This is a pre-print version of the article published in Feminist Media Studies Vol.17, No.6 (December 2017).2 troll", means that "symbolic violence" is exercised with the complicity of the victim(s) of trolling, which has broader implications.
IntroductionThis article focuses on the framing of trolling in British newspaper reports. Trolling is a form of gendered and "symbolic violence" (Pierre Bourdieu & Loic J. D. Wacquant 1992) as it is performed in relation to women and other minority groups on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (Lumsden and Morgan forthcoming). Media reports, public debate and academic research concerning the 'dark side' of the web have focused on the rise of online abuse including trolling (Whitney Phillips 2015), hate crime, Islamophobia (Imran Awan 2016), cyber-bulling, revenge porn, stalking, and sexting. However, the media's framing of trolling and online abuse has been largely overlooked in academic studies. Jane (2014a: 532) argues that "extravagant invective, the sexualized threats of violence, and the recreational nastiness that have come to constitute a dominant tenor of Internet discourse", should be a priority for academic analysis instead of being treated as a moral panic. She also points out that not reprinting examples of online abuse can undermine how academics understand the nature of trolling, as it is then deemed "unspeakable". It is important to examine how trolling is discussed within the media to understand how it might frame public opinion, debate and action, and implicitly victim blame via "silencing strategies". The tactics employed by trolls, including rape threats and death threats, can be viewed as examples of "silencing strategies". "Silencing strategies" attempt to remove the individual This is a pre-print version of the article published in Feminist Media Studies Vol.17, No.6 (December 2017).3 from participation in (online) public space (such as on social media sites), or dissuade them from engaging in further public debate (by responding to or challenging an offensive "tweet" on Twitter or photograph on Instagram). The media portrayal and framing of trolling can be said to reinforce these "silencing strategies". For example, as we will show, the advice given to those who are victims of online abuse -"do not feed the...