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Internet trolling on social media. Is this the turning point?

Have you ever been an internet troll? What do they look like? Could you spot one in the street? Perhaps the reed thin guy in a grey anorak with thin lips set like an underscore to his face? Are they a close knit group who check their troll members newsfeed to see who could do with a good kick in the guts online and then round on them using any one of thousands of Twitter handles or Facebook profiles like a swarm of bees sticking barbs into the most vulnerable of people?

Or perhaps trolls become trolls when they face personal hardship and want to spread the pain that bit more before reverting back to being a normal human being once they have dealt with their own problems. Either way, being on the receiving end is appallingly upsetting.

Last week Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter made a highly unusual admission of culpability for such a big corporation.

'We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing.'

It's going to be tough finding the way forward with his intention to start kicking the trolls off and it will be interesting to see how much support he gets. Although there are great number of individuals responsible for abuse such as @pimpstory who hounded Zelda Williams after her father's suicide, prompting her to step out of the Twitter-sphere, some heavy handed companies get involved too.

Last week Coca-Cola ran a campaign around the Super Bowl aiming to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”. It converted negative tweets into happy pictures with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Online gossip site Gawker set up a bot @MeinCoke and fired sections of Hitler's Mein Kampf at Coke who reprinted them all using their picture encoding system. They pulled the campaign the next day stating “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

It is so disappointing to watch hatred and mean spiritedness gather momentum. Perhaps Dick Costolo finally got ground down by the negativity which pervades Twitter. It will be interesting to see how the policing of abuse takes shape and what level of support it gets from individuals, corporations, councils and governments.

Jenny Rudd spent 6 years as a trader in London before returning to New Zealand in 2007 making the transition from numbers to letters by heading up the content team at MOSH, New Zealand's leading social media agency.

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