6Days -- kill the trolls!
An electronic mail message, Usenet posting or other
(electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect,
but not overtly controversial (compare flame bait), or the
act of sending such a message. Trolling aims to elicit an
emotional reaction from those with a hair-trigger on the reply
key. A really subtle troll makes some people lose their
minds.
I am truly baffled by the amount of trolls in 6Days' Letters to the Editor. It's as if someone is saying, "Hey, this is a completely ridiculous letter. The writer must just be trying to mess with us! Let's mess back with them and actually publish it!"
Well, it gets published and then people start writing about how outraged they are. For someone looking into this from the outside of the UAE, they would think that a bunch of morons live here. While I do not want to get into such a debate, I would simply say that there surely are better ways to keep a couple pages of a tabloid paper interesting. Perhaps publishing actually intelligent letters might work?
Not to bash on 6Days alone, Emirates Today is no better. Their solution is better. They say, let's publish stuff that says how great life here is. Super! So now we have a newspaper that publishes complete absurdity and another that is entirely delusional. Makes one wonder. I'm not even going to try and look at KT or GN.
(electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect,
but not overtly controversial (compare flame bait), or the
act of sending such a message. Trolling aims to elicit an
emotional reaction from those with a hair-trigger on the reply
key. A really subtle troll makes some people lose their
minds.
I am truly baffled by the amount of trolls in 6Days' Letters to the Editor. It's as if someone is saying, "Hey, this is a completely ridiculous letter. The writer must just be trying to mess with us! Let's mess back with them and actually publish it!"
Well, it gets published and then people start writing about how outraged they are. For someone looking into this from the outside of the UAE, they would think that a bunch of morons live here. While I do not want to get into such a debate, I would simply say that there surely are better ways to keep a couple pages of a tabloid paper interesting. Perhaps publishing actually intelligent letters might work?
Not to bash on 6Days alone, Emirates Today is no better. Their solution is better. They say, let's publish stuff that says how great life here is. Super! So now we have a newspaper that publishes complete absurdity and another that is entirely delusional. Makes one wonder. I'm not even going to try and look at KT or GN.
posted by Dubai Media Observer at 11:41 AM
3 Comments:
Yeah, I did a quick blog piece on the two spoofs the other day, and there's another one in today's paper.
They're so obviously spoofs that I can only assume the editor puts them in deliberately to create controversy and to generate more letters.
Well-said. The LtE are a joke and sometimes it amazes me how editors can allow these letters to be printed, without proof-reading them for basic errors in English; the ten exclamation marks are an example.
I know for a fact that Emirates Today writes its own letters. 90% of letters published in the paper are written by the paper's staff. Regular emails from the managing editor are sent out telling everyone to write 2 letters..
7 Days as far as I know, does the same.
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