About a week ago I had someone make a series of comments on my reviews of a horror franchise over at Alex on Film. The comments didn’t come with a link to someone’s own web-page and the email seemed like a bot. They weren’t just spam though, as they were written in response to things I’d written and, more directly, to comments that others had made. They also made some relevant points. Not points I agreed with, but ones that I could shrug at and consider fair enough.
After holding them in my queue of comments awaiting approval though for about a week I decided to delete them. I don’t mind bad language (I use it myself), or even the expression of outrage, but the hostility seemed out of place. I won’t reproduce them in full, but here are how a few of them started:
“Fuck off cunt.”
“Imbecile. You don’t know shit.”
“Fuck off all you cunts . . . ”
As I say, the commenter goes on to make what are at least somewhat on-topic responses to the threads. At the same time, they just feel like someone trolling for a reaction and I didn’t want to bother. I guess this is common enough behaviour, but (assuming a human actually wrote the comments) it seemed to me like a line was being crossed.
I really don’t like deleting comments made by anyone, but at the same time I think we all have standards. I also wonder at how some people choose to interact online, and whether it’s a response to how they’re treated in real life and if it colours how they speak to people they meet in person. It would go some way to explain the increasing rudeness in behaviour that I see almost every day.
Alex Good 
There’s no need for all that really. I blame twitter. Troll city there and they bleed over into Facebook and sometimes here too. This is the world we live in now, sigh.
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Sadly, I suspect this was a Brit. We really don’t refer to people as cunts in North America. At least I rarely hear it. We have other bad words.
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Do you call Canada North America?
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Sometimes we allow the U.S. and Mexico to be included. But we’re most of North America.
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🤣🤣
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Ah, but what you don’t realize is that several years ago a new “scientific” study was released that said that people who curse are more intelligent than people who don’t. This, in fact, was one of the “studies” that illustrated to me how much of what we call science is political. For at the time, one side had fallen in love with cursing, and they happened to dominate social media at the time. (I say “one side” because I’m not trying to be political, but merely pointing out something I watched in real time.)
Did that study change much? Directly, I don’t think so. I am certain, however, that it validated the behavior of certain people with large followings and so there was a trickle-down effect. It’s only one of many, many reasons for the increase in this kind of talk, but it’s one I’ve always found interesting because of the “science” angle.
I agree with you, of course, that it’s inappropriate.
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I hadn’t heard of that study. Sounds kind of dodgy to me.
I always wonder in cases like this when someone takes things up to 11 for no reason at all how they express themselves when they’re genuinely angry about something important.
I used to swear a lot more than I do now and one of the reasons I stopped was because I’d got to the point where the words I was using just didn’t mean anything anymore.
But I have to admit, I was smarter back then.
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Just to be clear: “dodgy” is my point. It’s bullshit. (Ha, ha)
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I used to think these were unhinged people, but after a while I began wondering if they were ai bot programs being worked on. Because while they seemed to respond to points in the post or comments, everything else was so completely out there.
I still don’t know for sure though, so I just delete them when they pop up. I hope they don’t keep bothering you…
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I wonder about that myself. The email address is just random letters. The “name” doesn’t match up with anything (it’s actually a female name). But the poster did seem to be addressing the reviews and the comments that were already up. Now I know advanced AI can fool anyone into thinking it’s human but usually it’s directed toward some end, like burying a link in the comment somewhere to a diet program or car insurance. This just seemed like shitposting.
Yeah, I ended up deleting them. If it was a real person they were an idiot.
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Well, when it comes to weird, nothing beats an unbalanced human brain. Sad as that is…
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