Many have already been in the middle of it, and some have even been a target of it themselves: shitstorms!
A possible German translation for this would be “Aufregerwelle”, but that doesn’t sound nearly as spectacular as the English original: Shitstorm, in German: Excrement Storm. But what causes shitstorms and how do you escape them?
The data analyst Luca Hammer from Altenbeken has dealt with the topic.
At the beginning is the statement
Shitstorms often arise from the statement of a person who either intentionally (these are usually “trolls”) or unintentionally writes something on a social medium such as Twitter or Facebook that upsets or provokes a certain group of people to take a stand against it.
Shitstorms often develop, especially when it comes to much-discussed topics. So if you make a provocative statement about climate change or various politicians, you can almost expect a shitstorm to arise. So-called “trolls” really enjoy doing this, want to cause a shitstorm and grin while doing it.
Others trigger shitstorms completely unintentionally. For example, the simple statement that mathematically every person only has a square of land with a side length of 140 meters can cause a lot of excitement:
There is nothing provocative in the statement, but it was used as an opportunity to accuse racism, since the small calculation contained the fact that a white man was implying that there were too many dark-skinned people (even though the account had never made any racist statements).
Others quickly attach themselves to this interpretation and a shitstorm is born!
Who likes to rush?
According to Luca Hammer, these are often politically motivated groups that are strongly networked with each other and attack anyone who makes critical comments about a particular party. This is usually kept within limits, but when a party retweets the criticism, such shitstorms are really blown up.
But individual accounts, mostly recently created and either without or with a clear profile picture, can trigger entire shitstorms if enough of them react to certain statements and it becomes more widespread in the filter bubbles.
How can you protect yourself?
This is actually almost impossible. The best thing you can do, says Luca Hammer, is to distance yourself from a platform until the situation calms down again. On Twitter, it often helps to “lock” your account, i.e. put a virtual lock on it so that only followers, not everyone, can read the tweets. At least non-followers can no longer attack the account holder directly.
Here you can watch a video with Luca Hammer and his statements about the Shitstorms problem:
Article image: Shutterstock / By asiandelight
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

