Stoning frogs….

It’s okay. The frog isn’t real….

While not nearly as well known as other Greek Philosophers as Aristotle or Plato, Bion of Borysthenes does have a few saying that are worth repeating.

One of the best known is this: “Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.”

This, in a nutshell, is the way women are often treated. Yes, there are still places in the world where the stones are thrown literally, but these days, the stones are frequently verbal or online, with boys casting stones at women.

“But it was a joke,” they’ll say when someone stands up to them, but if it flies like a stone and hits like a stone, it is actually a stone. In the same way, an internet troll may say they’re calling you names in jest, but if it hurts just as much as it would have if it was an actual attack, IT IS ACTUALLY AN ATTACK. The weight of the impact is the same.

When I was a kid, there was a big pile of dirt and sand and gravel near my house; after it would rain, the dirt would form into clods as it dried out, and me and my friends would go and have dirt clod wars, scrambling over the pile, laughing as the clods of dirt would explode into clouds of dust.

That is until one day I through a clod of dirt at a friend and it failed to harmlessly explode; instead, the rock inside knocked the breath from him and sent him home in tears. Did I intend to harm him? No. But I did.

In the same way, trolls taking aim at women online might say they’re just being funny, but the damage they cause is just as severe as if they did it in malice; indeed, many people are unable to separate humour from malice, having been taught that the way to be funny is to do things that elicit a reaction, and the easiest way to elict a reaction is to attack.

We talked about Gamergate a few days ago. Instead of ignoring the people trolling her, Zoe Quinn pursued legal action. This was only moderately successful, as one judge decided not to issue criminal harassment charges against the man who orchestrated an online harassment campaign. “Just get offline”, she was told.

But as Quinn wrote in her book Crash Override, “The internet was my home…Telling a victim of a mob calling for their head online to not go online anymore is like telling someone who has a hate group camped in their yard to just not go outside.”

Back in 2018, the editor of Brietbart, Milo Yiannopoulos called for the shooting of journalists.

Two days later, a gunman walked into the Capital Gazette in Maryland and opened fire, killing five people.

“But it was a joke,” Yiannopoulos said.

This is the heart of trolling. “I wasn’t serious, I didn’t really mean it.

Something needs to be done. Things are being done, but not fast enough. And there are larger societal problems—like toxic masculinity—that can’t just be legislated away.

But we can’t just let the internet be run by the people who shout the loudest. We need to fight to claim space for decency. We need to carve out our own spaces—however small—and say “this will not be tolerated here.”

How does that work? Well, that’s the hard part, because there is no one answer. I’ve seen stories where a troll, being responded to with kindness but firmness has seen the error of his own way. One of the most notable examples is the story of Daryl Davis, a black musician who spent time talking to Klansmen, and managed to convince many of them to step away.

But it’s hard, and many have been ground to dust in the pursuit of simple human decency. And too often, the trolls win because the game is rigged in their favour. They have the power to cause hurt, deeply and profoundly.

When it comes to how we respond to them, our tactics can and will vary, and may involve anger, humor, love, tolerance, blocking, or maybe even some productive discussion. But ultimately, if we care about abuse, we cannot care most about whether we have comforted, converted, or even fed them.

We need to care about the people that have been hurt by the trolls. To go back to our original metaphor, we need to teach the boys not to throw stones, but we also must work to heal the frogs, because in this case, the frogs are metaphors, and the people being hurt are often the most vulnerable among us.