Abstract
This paper argues that community disruption can consolidate an online community’s beliefs regardless if their beliefs are for the overall good of society or the contrary. The psychology of internet disruptors will be analysed as they have been given greater access to broader and more unique communities through the internet growing progressively over the past 20 years. Alongside this, defensively engaged communities are now experiencing a greater level of pressure and condemnation upon their viewpoints than ever before seen in the modern age. My argument being that this leads the individual to become more immutable and deep seated in their original positions. This never ending conflict pushes many trivial issues to the surface of the internet.
Introduction
An online community consists of people who share similar ideals, interests and align within certain cultural conventions (Yuquig et. al. ,2012).Conjured turmoil being injected into strong, well based communities has been a consistent objective of internet disruptors or as they are more commonly known as, “Trolls’. Do these affected communities emerge stronger and bonded or do they bend to the disruptors and see truth to their criticisms and weaken their beliefs as a result. Trolls are seen as a community of misfits who may enjoy the backlash and exclusion they receive. The community has developed in such a way in which they seemingly have no targets and act almost as a regulatory body across communities. “Troll’s” in the sense of the word are seen as a negative force, yet in recent times they have been seen to be acting as a positive regulatory body in which communities can be humbled and lifted out of their entrenched or bigoted ideals that may lead the individual to be narrow minded in their views and outlook upon the world.
Poisoned Chalice
Biased assimilation is the likelihood to convert information into an already preconceived schema to best suit a person’s objectives (Lord, Taylor, 2009). In an online context, this phenomenon is most prevalent in the area of the spreading of misinformation. This spread causing riffs between parties and further consolidating groups. A person may gravitate towards a side in order to feel apart of a greater group, traditionally this person would have been more of a centrist yet with this added pressure adopts a stance they may not fully associate with. This can lead to what can sometimes be two misinformed communities arguing. The building of communities based on a foundation of lies is an event that has become more and more common with the perseverance of new wave “trolling” (Sen,2018).
Identity is a key part of online life, assessing those who are ambiguous in their display of their internet personalities are especially interesting. The internet offers an unprecedented stage for these community disruptors to act as someone else for the time they are online. Their anonymity giving them the ability to be harsher in their comments and judgemental in their outlook. A nihilistic viewpoint is favoured over one of positivity, this can be attributed to people seeing social media as a platform in which they don’t have to act or perform for people (Watson, 2023). They can simply and seamlessly integrate into their given community, forgoing their real life personality. This is not to say that social media isn’t performative, it is continuously documented as such with people feeling as if they have to look their best or say the right things. This steering people to have an identity crisis while online and in their real life.
A sense of community was developed upon by McMillan and Chavis in 1976, they stipulated that a community has four vital components. These were of membership, influence, shared emotional connection, and integration and fulfilment of needs. These components are still relevant to current online life as physical meeting grounds have transferred to online chat rooms. People that would traditionally not have influence upon a group now have the opportunity to be a leader in their own niche field of expertise (McMillan & Chavis, 1986).
Breaking the gate down
Traditionally, online communities offered an unparalleled frequency of positive reinforcement and affirmation. High fortified walls surrounding a community often made conjecture a blunt penetrating tool in the face of consolidated groups. Over time however we have seen the shift of groups now being infiltrated and no longer offering the exclusivity an online community once provided. Between 2008-2015, this type of activity reached its peak as “trolling” and creating controversy within communities, enrapturing most of the online communities attention. Misinformation spreading in online communities taught tight knitted communities to look for credible sources and people while searching the web (Zittrain, 2006). An example of which is that of “Tumblr” in 2014 who declared “war” on “4chan” as they disagreed with their far right leaning opinions The.”shutdown4chan” campaign began as “Tumblr’s” far left leaning ideals were quickly countered by “4chan’s” overtly racist, gorey and outright mean counterstrike. Flooding the Tumblr homepage with 18+ content, leaving the Tumblr community outraged. This interaction clearly depicted the polar difference between the two communities and further pushed each community further into their left leaning and right leaning principals (Hagan 2023). Incidents like this has contributed to the current political online landscape especially in the USA. A middle ground seems a thing of days gone by as politicians and their supporters continuously act brazenly.
Besieged
A company’s reaction to a trolling attack can determine the respect they are given by social media users. Social media administrators for these large companies are largely responsible for the way in which the company can represent itself. These efforts by administrators can often be misguided and picked apart by reactors. Resulting in real financial damage to a company. This is why companies often prefer to have an extremely sterilised social media agenda, avoiding most interactions with their audience. Examples of which typically involve vital context being ineptly left out of social media posting. Infamously Burger King posted on Twitter, “Women belong in the kitchen” , causing much uproar within the online community. This post was in association with international women’s day and related to a disproportionate population of women within the back of house industry, yet they only stated this after the post had gained backlash for its poor taste. Being socially sensitive is a key aspect of being a company on social media. Social media users prey upon these slip ups as their squeaky clean images change over a matter of seconds without the opportunity to permanently delete their wrong doings. Small online communities can quickly destroy a brand’s social media as groups can band together and overload a comment section with nasty, annoying and plainly false posts. These trolls consolidating in their shared humour of taking down a company can cause everlasting effects on brand associations.
The relatively small company of Cracker Barrell, a chain restaurant, fell victim to this siege of vicariously motivated individuals.On February 27th 2017, Bradley finds out that his wife (Nanette) has been fired from her local cracker barrel after 11 years of service. Bradley then creates a facebook post condemning the company for alleviating her of her duties. A month later, on his birthday, Bradley posts again, “Today is my Birthday. Why did you fire my wife?” (Reid Byrd,2017). Quickly, people jumped onto the trend of “#JusticeforBradsWife”, swamping the restaurant’s social media, condemning Cracker Barrel along with calling up the store asking for Brad’s wife to be rehired. Social media and physical protests took place. The vast majority of comments on Cracker Barrel’s social media were directly related to Nanette’s dismissal, spinning everything the company did into remarks about the event. Till this day, the company has not escaped this scandal, while competitors such as Wendy’s and 100’s of other food based companies benefited through posting a job offering to Nanette (Kirkland, Payne and Mazer, 2019). The social media frenzy gave the feelgood ending of Nanette having almost endless opportunities in her next workplace choice. This case study shows the power “internet trolls” can have against companies and how they can derail a companies social media if enough of them band together to share a joke. At the height of this campaign, the stock of Cracker Barrel fell twenty USD between February 2017 to August of the same year (Kirkland, Payne and Mazer, 2019).
Winning
It would be expected for the company to continue this trend as people continued to boycott the store, instead in early 2018, the chain made a recovery and surpassed their pre scandal stock price. It could be argued that the community of Cracker Barrel trudged through this adversity and then realised they had to separate themselves from their customer associated identity as a traditional western style restaurant. They did this by trying to appeal to millennials in early 2018 (Lazar, 2018). Adversity in this case made the restaurant realise they were seen as conservative and unappealing to younger generations, this allowing them to shift their branding and cater to a larger demographic.
On the other side of this, when an administrator/company toes the line of what is acceptable, mass media engagement can largely pay off for a company. User generated content is a key aspect in social media branding as it can help a company create communities. This however must be monitored as internet users can often take it too far.
Large food firms such as Wendy’s, Burger King, Mcdonalds and Chick-fil-A started internet conflicts using social media as the means to degrade other firms and users. A deeply personal and funny side was given to these lifeless companies which in turn allowed social media users to gravitate towards a certain chain (Lui, 2017). This disruption of the status quo allowed users to join in these wars of attrition through them affiliating themselves with a certain in which they deem to be funnier, have better food or a higher status.
Events like these where companies contrive conflict are extremely clever in terms of a marketing standpoint. User generated content allows for the disruption they create to mutually benefit all brands reputation as they are all seen as in good humour.
Water under the bridge
Online communities often conjure ideas of a group that spreads love and admiration of a particular subculture. Hatred and bigotry is often swept under the rug and kept to the far corners of the internet. When brought to the forefront a barrage of disagreement and insults may be encountered by the prejudiced party. In these tight communities, they can often encounter adversity and become entrenched in their ideals further distancing themselves from a balanced viewpoint (Kappes, 2019). This constant fulfilment of an individual’s beliefs are fueled by the breeding ground a like minded community can create. Confirmation bias and belief perseverance are common in this space. According to Anglin 2010 “belief perseverance research often suggests that people maintain or even strengthen their beliefs in response to disconfirming evidence”.
Some may argue that people are far more dismissive in their approach towards what they see on social media. Instead of being actively engaged, people use social media as a device to pass time. Their communities lie within the real world and their opinions are not often changed by hearsay of the internet. It is the common consensus that real life connections and communities are much stronger and binding then online communities (Lee and Saharia, 2012). Facial reactions and gestures are an important feature of what help builds a community, mainly that of trust. We are innately programmed to detect falsehoods. When these social ques are taken away from us, do we trust blindly on what others say online.
The evidence this paper presents aligns with the notion that community disruption does consolidate a community’s beliefs. Whether their beliefs be for the collective good or the latter. A unilateral experience can be shown across communities where nobody is safe in the modern internet age. The unique platform of social media has given disruptors an unparalleled opportunity to infiltrate any given group at any given moment. This creating an “us versus them” mentality in which many online communities feel as if they are being subjugated and attacked from all directions. These communities are then more likely to adopt a sense of community in which they can create an archetype in which criteria a person must meet to be accepted as a member of the group. This gatekeeping often pushes fan groups to the extremes as they try to outdo each other and become the ultimate fan/member. The extensive network of internet disruptors have in a sense created a community for themselves. They can be held partially responsible for the current online climate in which online communities are more close than ever as they defend their platform and other like minded individuals.
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