SPEAKER 1: Bullying and just general aggression online are one of the things that teenagers experience in social media environments.

SPEAKER 2: The troll is taking some enjoyment out of upsetting someone else on the internet.

SPEAKER 3: The important thing to understand about free speech on the web is that we haven't clearly delineated who makes the tough decisions.

SPEAKER 1: We find that cyberbullying is a very popular buzzword.

Sometimes we see bullying going on on Facebook walls.

We see nasty comments, arguments within comments sections.

But we find that young people often don't categorize a lot of online aggression that goes on as bullying.

Often, they'll refer to it as drama.

It's easier for young people to blow off stuff that goes on online to minimize its impact on them.

There's a term called the online disinhibition effect, which says that people are less inhibited online, because they can't see the person that they're talking to.

And there really is a sense of that protection of anonymity that allows people to give rise to these aggressive speech acts.

But on places like Facebook, where every identity is tied to a real name, there's still a lot of aggressive speech acts.

So I don't think it's as much about anonymity as it is about the distancing fact of the computer screen in front of you.

Online and offline bullying are often part of the same social dynamic, that somebody who's getting bullied face to face in the hallways at school may also be experiencing aggression online.

For most young people, face to face bullying is more stressful and has more emotional weight than quote, unquote, "cyberbullying."

And focusing just on cyberbullying ignores a whole range of other dynamics online that young people might find really difficult and really hard to deal with.

The tragic cases of teen suicide are really complicated.

We do know that in a number of these cases, the young people involved had asked for help and they weren't supported.

So rather than telling teenagers they shouldn't be putting content online, I think it's about supporting young people in their day to day lives.

It's not just about regulating their online behavior.

SPEAKER 2: Essentially, trolling is about disruption, the deliberate attempt to frustrate, confuse, or infuriate a chosen target.

It can run the gamut from redirecting someone to an absurd image or video clip, for example, Rick Astley's "Never Going to Give You Up" all the way to going after the friends and family of murdered teenagers, and everything in between.

In the mid-2000s, trolling began to take on a specific subcultural connotation for self-identifying trolls.

And the hotbed was 4chan's Bboard.

Self-identifying trolls claim to be motivated by what's called LULZ, a corruption of "laugh out loud."

It implies amusement at the laughed-at victim.

Trolls believe that nothing should be taken seriously.

If you take something seriously, then you deserve it.

One of the most problematic forms of trolling is memorial page trolling.

They'll post incendiary materials onto the Facebook RIP pages devoted to the recently deceased.

SPEAKER 4: This is three days after the accident.

I'm trying to organize a funeral for a 15-year-old girl.

Destroyed us.

SPEAKER 5: I went and made a new page, because that's terrible for anybody to do to anyone that's passed away.

SPEAKER 2: Other trolls are implicitly critiquing media narratives surrounding these deaths, specifically people who are regarded as grief tourists.

So strangers to the deceased who post condolence messages on the Facebook pages.

A lot of memorial page trolls are targeting those people.

The troll is able to set the rules of the game, set the tone of the game.

It is fundamentally asymmetrical.

But that courtesy is not extended to the target.

The target does not get a say.

It is often very upsetting and very problematic and arguably very damaging.

But it also has the potential of opening up dialogues that otherwise wouldn't be opened up.

And regardless of what the troll is actually trying to accomplish, it has the ability to make people think.

So what do these behaviors mean?

What do they say about the culture of which they arise, and how does this fit into a larger cultural realm?

SPEAKER 3: The internet has been an amazing development for free speech in general.

This has toppled governments.

This has helped elect presidents.

But anytime you give anyone the ability to speak, there's always the chance that they could abuse that ability.

Free speech means something very different online than it does offline.

When you're talking about speech offline, what you're usually talking about is interference with your speech by the government.

But when it comes to just private censorship, what the First Amendment provides is just the benefit of history.

Online service providers can have a lot to learn from the courts struggling with these issues when they set their rules within a community.

Take the example of "The Innocence of Muslims" case.

The video was put up online and it prompted protests throughout the Arab world.

I certainly do not envy Google at all.

They had to decide in the moment the value of the video as a provocation for further discussion with the legitimate danger to life and limb that the reaction to that video will engender.

There's this weird fiction that equates free speech with speech without criticism.

That is not only wrong, it's somewhat antithetical to what the First Amendment is all about.

I think the most productive solution will always be making people understand how their words affect you.

So solutions on anonymity have to recognize that the people we're trying to protect by forcing people to reveal their true names online are often the people that are speaking anonymously online.

Think of the kid who is gay and is in a high school where that revelation would lead to physical abuse for him.

You can take the example a victim of domestic violence.

You can take the example of a dissident fighting against a foreign government where their identity would cause the government to simply find them and kill them.

I don't think there's anything about the internet that turned us all into evil people.

We are perhaps seeing more about each other.

Whenever you confront bad speech, you have to think about, why is that person saying what they're saying?

The future of speech online is largely going to rest on we decide to govern what goes on the web.

SPEAKER 2: I refer to trolls as agents of cultural digestion.

You can look at what the tools are doing and extrapolate out what larger trends are going on.

SPEAKER 1: So it's not necessarily about trying to fix the internet.

It's about taking a long look at the culture in which we live in and our values and seeing how those play out in technical spaces like the internet.

SPEAKER 3: In cases of free speech online, who makes the tough decisions?

Right now it's resting on the corporations.

And while they've been very careful to date, there's nothing structurally that limits them from taking a different approach in the future.