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Sadly, no such spell exists, and it seems like, for all of Twitter's good qualities, it's stuck with them. The best advice for dealing with trolls is, as many people will tell you, ignore them.
If you engage with a troll, you're just feeding it, but if you found a
way to create a feedback loop that leaves one arguing with itself, you
would probably deserve a Nobel Prize.
the term "misandry" implies systemic oppression of men as a class, and as such misandry not exist— Liz (@arguetron) October 11, 2016
That's what 'Arguetron' is for, it's a Twitterbot developed by Sarah Nyberg with one purpose and one purpose alone - to bait trolls. Once every 10 minutes, it will tweet something which would generally be regarded as progressive, and the exact kind of thing that trolls, especially of the alt-right persuasion, love to jump on.
Said trolls then respond, Arguetron argues back, and it keeps going
back and forth until the aggressor either gives up, gets bored or
realises that they're squabbling with a machine and slinks away in
embarrassment. It wasn't specifically designed as a troll
counter-measure, more a way of highlighting how stupid it is to behave
in such a reactionary way online, but given that most reactionary types
are indeed trolls, the two things end up tying in.
@ScissorsMacG whatever you say— Liz (@arguetron) October 10, 2016
It's far from perfect, Arguetron is hardwired to respond aggressively to pretty much everything, which leads to situations where people tweet it saying 'hello' and get 'sounds like something someone from TumblrInAction would say' as a response. That's to be expected, though, and when it does work, it's amazing, as some of the exchanges end up being so long you could practically novelise them.
Nyberg herself used to be a frequenter of the 4Chan imageboards, a
ghastly hellpit where people basically learned how to be as horrible as
humanly possible online and then took all their newfound skills out into
the wider world. When GamerGate kicked off, she was very vocal about
how ridiculous and disgusting it all was, and as a result, she was
doxxed, and she ultimately responded by publishing an article under her
own name on Ravishly.
This took guts, especially given the extent of the harassment that Nyberg and others like her recieved during GamerGate, from death threats to encouragements of suicide to Swatting (look it up, seethe with rage). Nyberg clearly learned a lot from the experience, and with Arguetron, she made sure that everything
it said and did was inoffensive, that it never struck the first blow
and that it never attempted to defame a public figure.
It's still aggressive, but it uses factual information to argue, rather
than bile. Trolls love to disagree with provable facts, since this is
the internet and any source material you provide can just be met with
the blanket 'this is clearly biased' response.
What's really amazing, and telling, is how many people simply fail to figure out that what they're arguing with isn't human. This is probably the best example, a short excerpt of an exchange which went on for more than 10 hours. Equally fun is the near endless loop Arguebot has been caught in with Concedebot, who was seemingly designed to just want to have a nice chat. You couldn't make it up.
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