5 ways in which trolling is ruining the football experience
Around the turn of the decade, social media giant Orkut began to steadily lose followers. The process had already been in motion in many other countries, and finally, it had started to lose followers from its trusted following in India and Brazil as well. Facebook's ascent was as steep as it was unprecedented – a few years later, it would be almost unheard of for an average person not to have a Facebook account.
Jokes, sarcastic comments, witty quips and insults have existed since as long as we care to remember. They used to reach us in the form of forwarded messages and forwarded emails – means of communication that while being effective, were still heavily personalised in nature.
With the emergence of the present decade, however, Twitter and Facebook have jointly contributed towards giving 'memes' a platform for their visual creation and propagation, setting in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to research findings in 2016 that more than 50 percent of American adults rely on Facebook as their primary source of news.
We football fans see these 'trolls’ almost on a daily basis. That is how most of us come to know about that dreadful open goal miss by a player, before even watching the highlights. That is how we come to know that it is statistically more likely for a nine-year-old dog in Japan to save a shot on target than it is for Claudio Bravo at Manchester City.
Trolls have completely altered the way football is experienced. We are being constantly exposed to a multitude of different opinions, often before we have even had a chance to develop our own unique view.
While there is a healthy amount of laughter involved, there is a strong case to argue that trolling has done more harm to the overall football viewing experience than good. Among others, Arsene Wenger recently hit out at social media, suggesting that personal dissentious views were getting a platform to come together and influence the rest of the fanbase.
We examine 5 ways in which trolling is ruining the football experience:
#1 Biased information and statistics
Mark Twain popularised the saying, “There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” The use of statistics to polarise a fanbase is shockingly common. “Moyes and Mourinho have the same number of points after X matches in charge of United,” choosing to conveniently forget that the former inherited a title winning squad and the latter a Europa league squad.
“Rodgers and Klopp have the same number of points after X matches,” conveniently forgetting that Rodgers had a stellar second season before things went astray.
Not just misleading information, completely false information may circulate through these trolls as well – particularly transfer rumours. When the real targets arrive, therefore, fans naturally feel disillusioned and disenchanted given the pedigree of the names they picked up from these unreliable sources. Injuries, internal disputes, business takeovers... all sorts of fabricated news gets propagated in this manner.