 I can't think of a better way to open the conference than a talk from our first keynote speaker, Josie Fraser. Josie, like me, has worked for many years in what is now the home of the Premier League champions. And their own right to stardom in Leicester has followed a similar approach to our footballing underdogs. I remember first meeting Josie at Altsy many, many years ago. And at that time she was running the slightly subversive effort, if no one remembers that, a fringe event to Altsy proper. But since then she's done the sharp suit and has been championing the digital rights of children and adults across the city and in the wider country for many years now. Leading work with the Wikimedia UK Foundation for Open Knowledge, heading up the technology and digital literary strand of a major rebuilding programme for all schools within Leicester City. And most recently leading a fight against child bullying issues, sort of UK-wide through her work with ChildNet International. So without any further, Dili Ding, Dili Dongs, let's raise the roof for Altsy's very own Premier champion, Josie Fraser. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction and I'm really, really thrilled to be here today. This is one of the communities that I really feel like I belong to and I connect to and I know how much I personally have benefited from being a member of over the years. Also really delighted to see so many new people here today, partly because you've never seen an old keynote before. So this is going to be the best old keynote you've ever seen at least until this afternoon. So I'm going to enjoy basking in that. Also, you're going to think this is normal. It's another great thing. So I'll take full advantage of that. I'm going to be talking about trolls, which isn't like the most cheerful topic in the world. So to try and keep in a little bit with the gaming theme, I am going to talk about games, but the games that I'm talking about aren't necessarily fun games. There is a game in my keynote. So one of my slides is a picture from a relatively obscure film. So if somebody tweets the film, the correct film that the slide is from, you will get a very small, very, very disappointing prize. So I'll wait and good luck to you all with that. So I'm also really excited that Ian Livingston speaking this year. It's fantastic because like many people in the room, I grew up on these adventure books and Ian very, very kindly let me deface the cover of one of them for my keynote talk today. OK, so I'm going to start with Tay. Tay is Microsoft's artificial intelligence bot and she was launched on Twitter on the 23rd of March in 2016. The text on Tay's official website, which actually isn't accessible at the moment, stated, Tay is an artificial intelligence chat bot developed to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay, the smarter she gets. So the experience can be more personalised for you. Within 16 hours Tay had become a racist conspiracy theorist sex bot and Microsoft had to take her offline. So how did this happen? First of all, Microsoft, the Microsoft account was targeted by Twitter users who basically fed Tay on H speech discrimination, conspiracy theories, a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of lewd text as well, which he then mimicked and reproduced. So Microsoft did seem to pick up on the fact that this might be a bit contentious and they did seem to put some blocks in things. So I think Gamergate was one of the kind of keywords that they blocked against. But they didn't seem to consider the possibility of Tay being targeted by a wider range of inappropriate interactions of being trolled. So in Tay, Microsoft ended up releasing a mostly filter free curator and amplifier of the language of the users that interacted with it. And many users were lightning quick to understand and make use of this to turn Tay into a mouthpiece for hate and obscenity. And then the story was quickly picked up on news sites who gleefully reported their outrage at the depravity of trolls and at Microsoft's bot becoming, amongst other things, a Holocaust denier within a couple of hours of being live. So while the account was shut down, screenshots of Tay posting and mouthing really grim things were spread all over the internet for our entertainment. So Tay is actually currently back up because it's the screenshot I took yesterday. But as you can see the account is now private on Twitter and you can't follow Tay or access her tweets unless you've been approved by the Microsoft people who are managing that account now. OK, I'm beginning with that story because it's pretty representative of a range of trolling motifs. It is practically a troll morality tale and I know before people say it nobody likes a morality tale. It is not possible to say what the range of motivations of all the people involved with that Tay story are. We can speculate that some of them were interested in attacking Microsoft or suspicious of the commercial motivations behind privatisation and personalisation. Some people might have seen this as an opportunity to get discriminatory messages up and spread misinformation. Lulls though are what drive trolls. Lulls are the currency of trolls, the social and cultural artefacts of trolls. So Whitney Phillips released an excellent book last year called This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which I recommend to you all. And that book looks at Lulls obviously and she defines them as Lulls as LOL transfigured through the anguish of the laughed at victim, which is a pretty good description. And Lulls are what knit together a disparate and autonomous group of people who may only meet each other anonymously, who may only meet each other once or twice in passing or may never meet each other at all. So using extremism obscenity and conspiracy theories, the corporate experiment in AI was taken down within hours and the trolls got their handiwork reproduced and publicised globally. And this gaming of reporters and social commentators, the manufacturer views, is a win for media outlets because they need quick to read outrage to increase their traffic. Trolls love to troll the media and trolls love to get their stories and memes reproduced in the media. And the media loves to promote sensationalistic and outrageous stories even if the number of actual people involved or impacted is very, very small. And in some cases even if the story is totally made up. So also typical of this story is the lack of interest on all sides as to what is actually going on here or because trolls. Because trolls is always a win for trolls because it means journalists are taking them at face value, journalists are missing the joke and journalists are becoming a part of the joke. Of course not all trolling involves hate speech, discrimination threats, obscenity or conspiracy theories. The most universally agreed on aim of trolling is to disrupt, to confront and to provoke individuals and communities online for the purposes of a movement for Lils. And trolling runs from very innocuous pranking so we can think of Rick Rowling which is like an old person's meme reference so everybody in the room should have heard about it. To behaviour which challenges general sentiment of belief or a group to online harassment and bullying. And some trolls indeed only target other trolls which are probably my favourite trolls. In the vast majority of cases trolls will make use of anonymity. They may pretend to be other actual or invented people. They may act out being sympathetic. They may take entirely opposing viewpoints to what they would hold in their day to day life. They might ask very naive questions or swear blatantly untrue facts are true in order to frustrate you or to make you seem like an even bigger idiot for taking them seriously. They might provide misleading or bad advice or perfectly just talk off topic. But understanding this is also not to be naive and not to imply that the extremism we see in a lot of trolling is just coincidental or arbitrary or part of the kind of troll arsenal. Trolls are a really diverse group, their interests, ethics and actions are not alike. This means that while some trolls are genuinely racist, homophobic, sexist or otherwise discriminatory, equally there will be trolls who are using hate speech and extremist views because they know this is what will get them out for age, offence and upset reactions. In this view the sentiments being fed to the bot were inconsequential in themselves. They're just the weapons that were closest to hand. Some might even view the use of abusive language as part of a bigger game. The only idiots would agree with the sentiment being expressed in mouth by tail. Some will frame it in terms of a characteristically insincere idea of freedom of speech. It's not surprising at all that very soon after the takedown the hashtag free te was born. That was used to protect against the corporate lobotomisation of te and her censorship. You can look on Twitter now, there's still free te people trying to get te back into the realm of language that everybody uses on Twitter including the trolls. The key problem with this kind of equivalence though, saying that it's just a kind of tool in the arsenal of Stalin to use abusive discriminatory hate speech, those kinds of languages. It's essentially one form of attack, of insincere attack, is as good as any other, or all groups are treated equally through attack. The problem with it is that there's no room for acknowledgement that specific groups are actually being harmed on a daily basis by discrimination. The reproduction of hate speech, whether it's sincere or not, adds to what is already there. It helps to normalise marginalisation and it obviously may be the cause of fresh antagonism and harm. Te is a safe example. Te is not a person. It doesn't have feelings, it doesn't have a history, it doesn't have personal doubts and anxieties. It isn't sometimes a bit tired and a bit short-tempered and it doesn't struggle to interpret subtly codified online behaviour or take sexist, racist or face targeted abuse personally. Many of us here today appreciate and have benefited from working in open contexts online, whether it's through blogging, online courses or through our learning networks on social media sites. Talks in the conference today have been streamed so that people who aren't here with us today in person can watch online. People in the room, people viewing at distance and people who aren't viewing can follow the conference, all of the talks using the hashtag on Twitter as well. The video and the tweets will be provided access to people who can't join us at this point in time. We're ringing as a community as much possible value out of the hard work, insight, effort of everybody involved. We're creating new resources that are going to be shared and developed. This isn't to say that there's no place for closed conversations or that everything that we do as educators must be done in the open. But it is a recognition of the enormous value that sharing our practice, thoughts and resources accessibility, discussing and developing these collectively can provide for us as individuals. A commitment to open education is an ethical gesture. It's a commitment to the importance of access to education, research, debate and ideas for all. Not just those within designated education communities and not just those within our known networks. It's a commitment to the value of co-production and the development of work across not already established networks. It's an understanding that our work might be a benefit to people we don't know in ways that we can't imagine, as well as to an understanding that we may benefit from the insight of strangers. It's also a commitment to putting ourselves into context that we don't necessarily control, having our views challenged and disagreed with, to being interpreted in ways that we may not be happy with. And its most basic open educational practice is about creating, using and sharing work accessibility, which typically means online, across network publics. It goes beyond just using and producing openly licensed resources, OERs, but OER remains essential to it as a practice. Open licenses give permission with some requirements for others to interact, take on, make use and develop your work. Open educational practice is about making our work accessible to others, not just the people who agree with us. I'd extend the definition to include practice that is concerned with who gets to publicly engage, who gets to speak and be heard in our context. Trolls are typically anonymous or pseudo-anonymous. This doesn't mean that anonymity is a bad thing. People who are not trolling use and need anonymity online. They're anonymous so they can talk openly and frankly about issues that they otherwise wouldn't. They use anonymity to keep themselves safe. They're anonymous to guard their privacy, to avoid online surveillance and commodification. They use anonymity to play or to protest against ideas or governments they don't agree with. They're anonymous to make comments and joining conversations that they otherwise would not. Many of us here today have had the luxury of not having to grow up online. It's unsurprising that anonymous, for example 4chan and ephemeral, for example Snapchat, online platforms have grown in popularity at the same time that the importance and the increasing insistence on online authenticity has flourished. While there are professional and personal benefits to being yourself online, these may depend on if the kind of person you really are is the right kind of person. If that person fits in, being yourself online linked to a physical identity may actually be a risk or it may actually be a privilege. How do we address this? How do we address this knotty issue of trying to maintain space, trying to ensure that people whose voices are getting marginalised by mainstream discourses by how interactions commonly occur online are able to take part in their conversation while respecting the fact that not everybody is always going to agree with us and respecting the fact that that's actually a good thing. So there are a few resources that have come out of particularly Gamergate, which happened last year. If you don't know about the history of Gamergate then it's dizzying, but I do advise you to take a look and try and work your way through a little bit. These two resources speak up and say safer from feminist frequency are designed basically to support women, but everybody, they're good for everybody, in taking steps and thinking about how you keep yourself safe online, how you prevent things like doxing where information that you might not be aware is publicly available about you, like your phone number, like your home address, is publicised through various attacks, but also more generalist security measures and steps as well about online engagement. The other trollbusters resource that's listed here is a site that's come about recently, which is an interesting idea. It mobilises peer support, particularly for women writers who are being attacked online. It's an interesting model, I think, of supporting people on those platforms in a just-in-time kind of way. Perhaps more interestingly, or more interestingly to me, is a kind of a framework digital literacy approach. One of the ways that we can consider navigating these differences is through the idea of digital wellbeing. This image here will be familiar to quite a few of you. It's Helen Beatham's work on JISC's digital competency framework. I'm particularly interested in how Helen positions and prioritises digital identity and wellbeing in relation to the other competencies that we have here. You can see it's on the outer circle. It washes across the different contexts that are there. She picks out how our lives are saturated with and lived through digital environments within and across loads of participation. In the same kind of vein, the Welsh Government is taking a similar approach to supporting children and young people through the new national digital competencies framework, which is made up of four strands, one of which is digital citizenship, which includes identity, digital rights and online behaviours. It's an amazing piece of work that's being pushed out in Wales. If you haven't seen it, please do go and have a look online. It's a little bit clunky to navigate, I think, at the moment, but it's an incredible country-wide approach to actually looking at and taking forward digital wellbeing. We're living in a time that a lot of people can characterise as kind of post-truth at the moment, and it can seem that everyone and everything is trolling. Certainly a huge range of groups, including political and corporate groups, have adopted the aesthetics and the tactics of trolling. These include political and corporate groups who are trying to infiltrate communities, who are trying to disrupt them, who are trying to sway public opinion and to generate attention and discussion, to generate money and clicks. I think it is really, really important that we do stop labelling all behaviours that we don't like as trolling. It's a way of minimising the harm caused and the unacceptability of some activities without actually addressing it. The range of troll behaviours and motivations makes pinning down trolling extremely difficult. At the same time, it makes calling all behaviours online that we find offensive, so bullying, harassment, death threats, other threats of violence, trolling. Not just these though, but also political disagreement, defence of other freedoms and viewpoints that aren't our own. All of these get wrapped up and dismissed as trolling at time. The ways in which trolling is currently being used, equating trolling with something that we don't agree with or take offence at, should immediately alert us to some of the dangers here. Solutions that work by taking away our anonymity and erode privacy to stop trolls typically boil down to all of us being presented with a blunt threat of if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide. When so much trolling exacerbates and adds to inequality, how we address that inequality needs to focus very strongly, I feel, not just on the trolls, troll behaviour, banning trolls, stopping trolls, but actually on those people who are being silenced, and not just on the people doing the silencing. So the solution we take is to close accounts, to use only protected forums for conversations, to have our identities verified. It can't be the best solution that we have to offer people in those spaces. One of the things that I think we need to take forward is really seriously looking at these issues together and coming up with broader, more creative, more effective solutions. Thank you very much. I'd love to take questions if anybody's got any questions. If you could raise your hands if you've got any questions, they'll help us with that. And if you could let us know who you are and where you're from when you have a crisis, then that'd be great. Hello, thanks for that. I'm Karen Kerr from the Open University UK. I'm not sure I describe it as trolling, but one of the issues we are facing is the handling situation where our students of our online forums seem to be taking over and calling rather than present atmosphere. I don't know, do you think the things that you were talking about accept the person, any advice to offer? I think they very much apply to that situation and it's a very, very difficult one because I think one of the things that is one of the things that's kind of happening I think at the moment with e-safety and online kind of responsibility narratives and education is a view of specific types of engagement being legitimate and other types of engagement not being legitimate. And predominantly and slightly worryingly those kinds of legitimate behaviours are kind of professionalised. So what would your employer think about your online behaviour and how would that shape? And how should that shape and inform how you actually act online? How about that kind of narrative going on? And as I said, I think that's, you know, there's certainly a relationship with the kind of pressures on younger people to present themselves in specific ways and the increase in rise in the use of anonymity and the use of kind of ephemeral media. But at the same time nobody wants to be at the party and somebody really horrible and somebody is putting people off speaking and somebody is moving people away and that's precisely the kind of crux of what I'm talking about this morning and what we need to address those issues. So while we do have significant issues around trolling our significant issues are to do with quite severe things that are and aren't trolling that are things like abusive behaviour, death threats. Things like that actually fall outside of concerns around trolling that do need to be taken really seriously. What else we have is this kind of low level attitude that may bar some people. But the struggle that we've all got is to allow people to be actually online and for us to not necessarily like them that much and not necessarily agree with them all the time while at the same time supporting other people from being and feeling comfortable in those environments. So thanks for raising it as an issue and I'm sorry that that's one of the things that you're struggling with. I think everybody who's run an online community at any time or participated in any kind of online discussion will have come across something very, very similar and it is very concerning if you're the person who needs the waters and manage that. All I would say is that the ideal thing is not to make everybody behave in that way. The idea is to make people enjoy constructively engaging with each other rather than just keeping the peace and keeping consensus. Hello. Hi Josie. Over here. Hello. Sheila. Hi Sheila Waneol from Glasgow Caledonian University. I think you've probably answered the question I was going to ask but thank you so much for that keynote. I think you touched on so many things that we all struggle with and I think particularly around about open education and how we can actually educate the next generation to make sense of the world that they're living in. It's really difficult so as I say I think you've probably answered it but do you have any suggestions for those of us who may be trying to do things that might seem quite scary, particularly to some of our management in terms of the fear of what's out there but our students are going to go out into the world they need to know how to interact online so I'm just wondering if you had any more words of wisdom for us. Just in practical terms the best advice is in terms of dealing with trolls or dealing with uncomfortable situations the best advice is very, very simple it's ignore, block, report. The thing is with troll trolls you can't win, you can't win because the game that they're playing is that everything that they do is the joke, everything that they do is part of the game and they win those games by getting you to believe in that game and to engage in that game and get upset by that game. You cannot win in those situations so if at all possible don't engage. Everybody has their moments of weakness though and all of us have started talking to somebody and then realised, oh no I'm going to be here all year talking to somebody who's going to go on and on and on about these points that neither of us actually care about it's just the form of online torture so at a very basic level that's really important I would say is in terms of that confidence is to make sure that you actually feel reasonably safe in the world so a lot of the women that got attacked through Gamergate left a very bitter taste in many people's mouths and you can kind of compare it to the way that women don't go out at night and feel comfortable walking around on their own at night so they don't feel comfortable doing that in those spaces and the effect of those kinds of episodes serve as a kind of warning to other people to shut up stay in line, keep quiet in those spaces One of the things that we can do to try and counteract that I think is really important is make sure that we are looking after our own identity and wellbeing online by kind of how we interact with people by kind of knowing a bit about trolls and being able to recognise them but also quite simple things so if you've registered a domain name have you put your personal details private on that domain name you have to pay extra to conceal the address that you've registered the phone number that you've registered but if you don't do that and somebody does decide they want to find out something about you it's very, very easy for them to so there's quite a few simple things that you may not have considered about your own personal safety and wellbeing that you can actually do and I think the resource that I put up earlier is a great place to get started with that it's very straightforward and it takes you through those kind of simple steps so being prepared and I think the other thing is recognising that there is no such thing as risk for the environment there's risk for all of it me standing here something could go horribly wrong at any moment I am prepared to take that risk for you all today but that's that's as a result of my considered judgment and my preparations do everything possible to make it not too much of a risk that's how the world is so we do need to support organisations and bring brave in those ways and there's been a massive change in organisations if you look at the last five years in how organisations have gone from being very, very shy of network publics and online public spaces to actually understanding the value understanding the usefulness of working in those ways so there's and I don't think these things are stopping that I think that these issues are actually the next step that we need to look at in terms of continuing to take advantage of those spaces to be able to work openly to continue to be open education practitioners Hi Josie, down here I was expecting it I can move James Clay here I just wonder if we're all trolls a spectrum of trolling I'm just reflecting really on the way that some people I'll probably have Stockholm syndrome with GWR but if you read their replies and read the way that people treat GWR maybe the trains are late and dirty but actually I just wonder is there a spectrum of trolling we're all trolls in some way or other sometimes we don't realise we are subcultural phenomenon I think it consists of a very very wide range of different people different ways of interacting with it but actually at its core there are identifiable things that bind that community together and make that community recognisable to each other recognisable to themselves and kind of form the language of that particular group I think the problem is with saying we're all on a continuum is sometimes people troll not me obviously ever but sometimes people will be purposefully annoyingly stupid online just to wind people up that's a form of trolling sometimes people will engage in that kind of behaviour but it's dangerous I think to start saying it's all trolling so saying that Donald Trump is a troll is actually not useful at all because Donald Trump is a very scary man in many ways and just by saying well it's about trolling it's trolling you're putting it in the same category as nothing I do is to be taken seriously because that's the kind of troll perspective you take it seriously and you get upset by it but actually I'm taking no responsibility for anything and nothing I do is actually real and if you get upset by it well then you're the one with the problem so I understand what you're saying and I think that the the twistiness of trolling and defining it makes it very easy to do that I don't think it's helpful Nicola Whitten two questions first one I'm really interested in is the motivational aspects behind it and you did touch on this so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about why people troll and whether there's any research on that and the second question is what did trolls do to get their lolls before the internet I'm going to do the second question first if you don't mind I don't know if people here know this story but there was an organisation called King Mob that was a British situationist anarchist group in the 70s and one of the things that they did was one of their members dressed up as Santa Claus and went to Selfridges which is obviously quite an upmarket very respectable kind of store and distributed gifts to children and these children had to witness Santa being taken off by the police and having their gifts taken back off them by the police so it's a very very big troll there it's not something that you as a parent might really be happy about happening to you but they are making statements about how society is working how how little people actually question convention and I think that is one of the really really valuable things about trolling as a whole it's that engaging with issues that people take for granted or issues that people believe are true it's very very annoying to have your beliefs questioned but actually it's also very very healthy to be in that situation so that answers the second part of your question a bit obviously the little thing is a really tricky one because it's you know it's a whole thing it's a whole thing in itself it's a world in itself and it's difficult I think for people outside of that to understand but it's the kind of thing that builds up and builds up and builds up and I think one of the things about it is around ownership and belonging and having languages so for example Pepe the Frog pepe the frog is very very old mean again been around for a long long time particularly on 4chan and the kind of joke of it was pepe's very rare and pepe's it's a very very obscure joke what happened a couple of years ago is that the mainstream discovered pepe and kind of pop stars and other people started putting pepe out and talking about pepe and joking about pepe and the trolling community got really really upset by this really really upset by this although who knows whether this story is true or not it's just not possible to know the story is that the trolling community got so upset that they then supported the far right and far right people into making pepe into a kind of scary far right extremist symbol now this is a kind of an example of how memes move how lolls get moved forward how they change so what you'll see now is Donald Trump tweeting Donald Trump as pepe and you'll have a lot of trolls laughing at that and saying ha ha ha ha but then you'll have a lot of quite right wing people using pepe very earnestly as their kind of thing so it's the language the belonging the understanding is all very much part of that subculture time for one last question it was Alice by a Czechoslovakian Czechoslovakian animator 1970s did anybody get it hey disappointments coming that person's way very soon very quick last question for you Joseph Sarah Knight from Jesse and thank you for a really thought provoking presentation I think what struck me is the real role and responsibility we have to work with our young children and parents in particular to educate children at a younger age about the dangers and to be more prepared and more aware of their appropriate online behaviours so I think it's just a plea really to say that it's all our responsibility really to sort of take that forward and to work with communities to really support them through this so thank you thanks for that comment I think that adults need a lot of help as well though that was my comment about parents and the importance of educating parents thank you