Two revisions of a Wikipedia article shows a troll vandalizing an article on Wikipedia.
In internet slang, a troll is a person who starts flame wars or upsets people on the Internet by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion, either for the troll's amusement or a specific gain.
Both the noun and the verb forms of "troll" are associated with
Internet discourse. However, the word has also been used more widely.
Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment.
For example, the mass media have used "troll" to mean "a person who
defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to
families". In addition, depictions of trolling have been included in popular fictional works, such as the HBO television program The Newsroom,
in which a main character encounters harassing persons online and tries
to infiltrate their circles by posting negative sexual comments.
Usage
The advice to ignore rather than engage with a troll is sometimes phrased as "Please do not feed the trolls."
Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. Like any pejorative term, it can be used as an ad hominem attack, suggesting a negative motivation.
As noted in an OS News article titled "Why People Troll
and How to Stop Them" (25 January 2012), "The traditional definition of
trolling includes intent. That is, trolls purposely disrupt forums. This
definition is too narrow. Whether someone intends to disrupt a thread
or not, the results are the same if they do." Others have addressed the same issue, e.g., Claire Hardaker, in her Ph.D. thesis "Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions."
Popular recognition of the existence (and prevalence) of
non-deliberate, "accidental trolls", has been documented widely, in
sources as diverse as Nicole Sullivan's keynote speech at the 2012 Fluent Conference, titled "Don't Feed the Trolls" Gizmodo, online opinions on the subject written by Silicon Valley executives[11] and comics.
Regardless of the circumstances, controversial posts may attract a
particularly strong response from those unfamiliar with the robust
dialogue found in some online, rather than physical, communities.
Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective
way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore it, because responding
tends to encourage trolls to continue disruptive posts – hence the
often-seen warning: "Please do not feed the trolls". Some believe this
to be bad or incomplete advice for effectively dealing with trolls.
The "trollface" is an image occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture.
At times the word is incorrectly used to refer to anyone with controversial, or differing, opinions. Such usage goes against the ordinary meaning of troll in multiple ways. While psychologists have determined that the dark triad
traits are common among Internet trolls, some observers claim trolls
don't actually believe the controversial views they claim. Farhad Manjoo criticises this view, noting that if the person really is trolling, they are more intelligent than their critics would believe.
Origin and etymology
There are competing theories of where and when "troll" was first used in Internet slang, with numerous unattested accounts of BBS and UseNet origins in the early 1980s or before.
The English noun "troll" in the standard sense of ugly dwarf or giant dates to 1610 and comes from the Old Norse word "troll" meaning giant or demon. The word evokes the trolls of Scandinavian folklore and children's tales: antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travellers. Trolls have existed in folklore and fantasy literature for centuries, but online trolling has been around for as long as the internet has existed.
In modern English usage, "trolling" may describe the fishing technique of slowly dragging a lure or baited hook from a moving boat, whereas trawling
describes the generally commercial act of dragging a fishing net. Early
non-Internet slang use of "trolling" can be found in the military: by
1972 the term "trolling for MiGs" was documented in use by US Navy pilots in Vietnam. It referred to use of "...decoys, with the mission of drawing...fire away..."
The contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known attestation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1992.
The context of the quote cited in the Oxford English Dictionary sets the origin in Usenet in the early 1990s as in the phrase "trolling for newbies", as used in alt.folklore.urban (AFU).
Commonly, what is meant is a relatively gentle inside joke by veteran
users, presenting questions or topics that had been so overdone that
only a new user would respond to them earnestly. For example, a veteran
of the group might make a post on the common misconception that glass flows over time.
Long-time readers would both recognize the poster's name and know that
the topic had been discussed repeatedly, but new subscribers to the
group would not realize, and would thus respond. These types of trolls
served as a practice to identify group insiders. This definition of
trolling, considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the
term, was considered a positive contribution. One of the most notorious AFU trollers, David Mikkelson, went on to create the urban folklore website Snopes.com.
By the late 1990s, alt.folklore.urban had such heavy
traffic and participation that trolling of this sort was frowned upon.
Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a seriously
misinformed user, even in newsgroups where one was not a regular; these were often attempts at humor rather than provocation. The noun troll
usually referred to an act of trolling – or to the resulting discussion
– rather than to the author, though some posts punned on the dual
meaning of troll.
In other languages
In Chinese, trolling is referred to as bái mù (Chinese: 白目; lit.: 'white eye'), which can be straightforwardly explained as "eyes without pupils", in the sense that whilst the pupil
of the eye is used for vision, the white section of the eye cannot see,
and trolling involves blindly talking nonsense over the Internet,
having total disregard to sensitivities or being oblivious to the
situation at hand, akin to having eyes without pupils. An alternative
term is bái làn (Chinese: 白爛; lit.:
'white rot'), which describes a post completely nonsensical and full of
folly made to upset others, and derives from a Taiwanese slang term for
the male genitalia, where genitalia that is pale white in colour represents that someone is young, and thus foolish. Both terms originate from Taiwan, and are also used in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another term, xiǎo bái (Chinese: 小白; lit.: 'little white') is a derogatory term for both bái mù and bái làn that is used on anonymous posting Internet forums. Another common term for a troll used in mainland China is pēn zi (Chinese: 噴子; lit.: 'sprayer, spurter').
In Japanese, tsuri (釣り)
means "fishing" and refers to intentionally misleading posts whose only
purpose is to get the readers to react, i.e. get trolled. arashi (荒らし) means "laying waste" and can also be used to refer to simple spamming.
In Icelandic, þurs (a thurs) or tröll (a troll) may refer to trolls, the verbs þursa (to troll) or þursast (to be trolling, to troll about) may be used.
In Korean, nak-si
(낚시) means "fishing", refers to Internet trolling attempts, as well as
purposefully misleading post titles. A person who recognizes the troll
after having responded (or, in case of a post title nak-si, having read the actual post) would often refer to himself as a caught fish.
In Portuguese, more commonly in its Brazilian variant, troll (produced [ˈtɾɔw] in most of Brazil as spelling pronunciation) is the usual term to denote Internet trolls (examples of common derivate terms are trollismo or trollagem, "trolling", and the verb trollar, "to troll", which entered popular use), but an older expression, used by those which want to avoid anglicisms or slangs, is complexo do pombo enxadrista to denote trolling behavior, and pombos enxadristas (literally, "chessplayer pigeons") or simply pombos are the terms used to name the trolls. The terms are explained by an adage or popular saying: "Arguing with fulano (i.e., John Doe) is the same as playing chess with a pigeon: it defecates on the table, drops the pieces and simply flies off, claiming victory."
In Thai, the term krian (เกรียน) has been adopted to address Internet trolls. According to the Royal Institute of Thailand,
the term, which literally refers to a closely cropped hairstyle worn by
schoolboys in Thailand, is from the behaviour of these schoolboys who
usually gather to play online games and, during which, make annoying,
disruptive, impolite, or unreasonable expressions.[33] The term top krian
(ตบเกรียน; "slap a cropped head") refers to the act of posting
intellectual replies to refute and cause the messages of Internet trolls
to be perceived as unintelligent.[citation needed]
Trolling, identity, and anonymity
Early incidents of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming,
but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to
the creation of any content that targets another person. The Internet
dictionary NetLingo suggests there are four grades of trolling: playtime
trolling, tactical trolling, strategic trolling, and domination
trolling. The relationship between trolling and flaming was observed in
open-access forums in California, on a series of modem-linked computers.
CommuniTree was begun in 1978 but was closed in 1982 when accessed by high school teenagers, becoming a ground for trashing and abuse. Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by deindividuation or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals
Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often
unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group
According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational
psychology at the universities of Exeter, England, and Groningen, The
Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who
has studied online behavior for 20 years, "Trolls aspire to violence, to
the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to
kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and
outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure." Someone who brings something off topic into the conversation in order to make that person mad is trolling.
The practice of trolling has been documented by a number of
academics as early as the 1990s. This included Steven Johnson in 1997 in
the book Interface Culture, and a paper by Judith Donath in 1999. Donath's paper outlines the ambiguity of identity in a disembodied "virtual community" such as Usenet:
In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity ... The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter.
Donath provides a concise overview of identity deception games which trade on the confusion between physical and epistemic community:
Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroup's or forum's members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.
Trolls can be costly in several ways. A troll can disrupt the
discussion on a newsgroup or online forum, disseminate bad advice, and
damage the feeling of trust in the online community. Furthermore, in a
group that has become sensitized to trolling – where the rate of
deception is high – many honestly naïve questions may be quickly
rejected as trolling. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who
upon venturing a first posting is immediately bombarded with angry
accusations. Even if the accusation is unfounded, being branded a troll
may be damaging to one's online reputation.
Susan Herring and colleagues in "Searching for Safety Online:
Managing 'Trolling' in a Feminist Forum" point out the difficulty
inherent in monitoring trolling and maintaining freedom of speech in
online communities: "harassment often arises in spaces known for their
freedom, lack of censure, and experimental nature".
Free speech may lead to tolerance of trolling behavior, complicating
the members' efforts to maintain an open, yet supportive discussion
area, especially for sensitive topics such as race, gender, and
sexuality.
In an effort to reduce uncivil behavior by increasing accountability, many web sites (e.g. Reuters, Facebook, and Gizmodo) now require commenters to register their names and e-mail addresses.
Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls
Organizations and countries may utilize trolls to manipulate public opinion as part and parcel of an astroturfing initiative. Teams of sponsored trolls are sometimes referred to as sockpuppet armies.
A 2016 study by Harvard political scientist Gary King reported that the Chinese government's 50 Cent Party creates 440 million pro-government social media posts per year.
The report said that government employees were paid to create
pro-government posts around the time of national holidays to avoid mass
political protests. The Chinese Government ran an editorial in the
state-funded Global Times defending censorship and 50 Cent Party trolls.
A 2016 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence on hybrid warfare notes that the Ukrainian crisis
"demonstrated how fake identities and accounts were used to disseminate
narratives through social media, blogs, and web commentaries in order
to manipulate, harass, or deceive opponents."
The NATO report describes that a "Wikipedia troll" uses a type of
message design where a troll does not add "emotional value" to reliable
"essentially true" information in re-posts, but presents it "in the
wrong context, intending the audience to draw false conclusions." For
example, information, without context, from Wikipedia about the military history of the United States
"becomes value-laden if it is posted in the comment section of an
article criticizing Russia for its military actions and interests in
Ukraine. The Wikipedia troll is 'tricky', because in terms of actual
text, the information is true, but the way it is expressed gives it a
completely different meaning to its readers."
Unlike "classic trolls," Wikipedia trolls "have no emotional input, they just supply misinformation" and are one of "the most dangerous" as well as one of "the most effective trolling message designs." Even among people who are "emotionally immune to aggressive messages" and apolitical, "training in critical thinking"
is needed, according to the NATO report, because "they have relatively
blind trust in Wikipedia sources and are not able to filter information
that comes from platforms they consider authoritative." While Russian-language hybrid trolls use the Wikipedia troll message design to promote anti-Western sentiment in comments, they "mostly attack aggressively to maintain emotional attachment to issues covered in articles." Discussions about topics other than international sanctions during the Ukrainian crisis
"attracted very aggressive trolling" and became polarized according to
the NATO report, which "suggests that in subjects in which there is
little potential for re-educating audiences, emotional harm is
considered more effective" for pro-Russian Latvian-language trolls.
The New York Times reported in late October 2018 that Saudi Arabia used an online army of Twitter trolls to harass the late Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other critics of the Saudi government.
In October 2018, The Daily Telegraph reported that Facebook
"banned hundreds of pages and accounts which it says were fraudulently
flooding its site with partisan political content – although they came
from the US instead of being associated with Russia."
Psychological characteristics
Researcher Ben Radford wrote about the phenomenon of clowns in history and modern day in his book Bad Clowns
and found that bad clowns have evolved into Internet trolls. They do
not dress up as traditional clowns but, for their own amusement, they
tease and exploit "human foibles" in order to speak the "truth" and gain
a reaction. Like clowns in make-up, Internet trolls hide behind
"anonymous accounts and fake usernames." In their eyes they are the
trickster and are performing for a nameless audience via the Internet. Trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Trolls take pleasure from causing pain. Their ability to upset or harm gives them a feeling of power.
Concern troll
A concern troll is a false flag pseudonym created by a user whose actual point of view
is opposed to the one that the troll claims to hold. The concern troll
posts in web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts
to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed "concerns". The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt within the group often by appealing to outrage culture. This is a particular case of sockpuppeting and safe-baiting.
An example of this occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a staffer for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass's opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire
blogs, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH". "IndyNH" expressed
concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on
Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable. Hodes eventually won the election.
Although the term "concern troll" originated in discussions of
online behavior, it now sees increasing use to describe similar
behaviors that take place offline. For example, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair accused a conservative New York Daily News columnist of "concern troll" behavior in his efforts to downplay the Mark Foley scandal. Wolcott links what he calls concern trolls to what Saul Alinsky calls "Do-Nothings", giving a long quote from Alinsky on the Do-Nothings' method and effects:
These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, 'I agree with your ends but not your means'.
The Hill published an op-ed piece by Markos Moulitsas of the liberal blog Daily Kos titled "Dems: Ignore 'Concern Trolls'".
The concern trolls in question were not Internet participants but
rather Republicans offering public advice and warnings to the Democrats.
The author defines "concern trolling" as "offering a poisoned apple in
the form of advice to political opponents that, if taken, would harm the
recipient".
Concern trolls use a different type of bait than the more stereotypical
troll in their attempts to manipulate participants and disrupt
conversations.
Troll sites
A The New York Times article discussed troll activity at 4chan and at Encyclopedia Dramatica, which it described as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore". 4chan's /b/ board is recognized as "one of the Internet's most infamous and active trolling hotspots".
This site and others are often used as a base to troll against sites
that their members can not normally post on. These trolls feed off the
reactions of their victims because "their agenda is to take delight in
causing trouble".
Places like Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous message boards are prime
real-estate for online trolls. Because there’s no way of tracing who
someone is, trolls can post very inflammatory content without
repercussion.
The French internet group Ligue du LOL has been accused of organized harassment and described as a troll group.
Media coverage and controversy
Mainstream media outlets have focused their attention on the
willingness of some Internet users to go to extreme lengths to
participate in organized psychological harassment.
Australia
In February 2010, the Australian government became involved after
users defaced the Facebook tribute pages of murdered children Trinity
Bates and Elliott Fletcher. Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy
decried the attacks, committed mainly by 4chan users, as evidence of
the need for greater Internet regulation, stating, "This argument that
the Internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to,
that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west."
Facebook responded by strongly urging administrators to be aware of
ways to ban users and remove inappropriate content from Facebook pages. In 2012, the Daily Telegraph
started a campaign to take action against "Twitter trolls", who abuse
and threaten users. Several high-profile Australians including Charlotte Dawson, Robbie Farah, Laura Dundovic, and Ray Hadley have been victims of this phenomenon.
India
Newslaundry covered the phenomenon of "Twitter trolling" in its "Criticles". It has also been characterising Twitter trolls in its weekly podcasts.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, contributions made to the Internet are covered by the Malicious Communications Act 1988 as well as Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, under which jail sentences were, until 2015, limited to a maximum of six months. In October 2014, the UK's Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling,
said that "Internet trolls" would face up to two years in jail, under
measures in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill that extend the maximum
sentence and time limits for bringing prosecutions.
The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications had earlier
recommended against creating a specific offence of trolling. Sending
messages which are "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or
menacing character" is an offence whether they are received by the
intended recipient or not. Several people have been imprisoned in the UK
for online harassment.
Trolls of the testimonial page of Georgia Varley faced no
prosecution due to misunderstandings of the legal system in the wake of
the term trolling being popularized.
In October 2012, a twenty-year-old man was jailed for twelve weeks for
posting offensive jokes to a support group for friends and family of April Jones.
United States
As Phillips states, trolling embodies the values that are said to
make America the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, due to the
liberty and freedom of expression it encourages.
On 31 March 2010, NBC's Today
ran a segment detailing the deaths of three separate adolescent girls
and trolls' subsequent reactions to their deaths. Shortly after the
suicide of high school student Alexis Pilkington, anonymous posters
began performing organized psychological harassment across various
message boards, referring to Pilkington as a "suicidal slut", and
posting graphic images on her Facebook
memorial page. The segment also included an exposé of a 2006 accident,
in which an eighteen-year-old fatally crashed her father's car into a
highway pylon; trolls emailed her grieving family the leaked pictures of
her mutilated corpse (see Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy).
In 2007, the media was fooled by trollers into believing that students were consuming a drug called Jenkem, purportedly made of human waste. A user named Pickwick on TOTSE posted pictures implying that he was inhaling this drug. Major news corporations such as Fox News Channel reported the story and urged parents to warn their children about this drug. Pickwick's pictures of Jenkem were fake and the pictures did not actually feature human waste.
In August 2012, the subject of trolling was featured on the HBO television series The Newsroom. The character of Neal Sampat encounters harassing individuals online, particularly looking at 4chan,
and he ends up choosing to post negative comments himself on an
economics-related forum. The attempt by the character to infiltrate
trolls' inner circles attracted debate from media reviewers critiquing
the series.
The publication of the 2015 non-fiction book The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett, a journalist and a representative of the British think tank Demos,
attracted some attention for its depiction of misunderstood sections of
the Internet, describing interactions on encrypted sites such as those
accessible with the software Tor.
Detailing trolling-related groups and the harassment created by them,
Bartlett advocated for greater awareness of them and monitoring of their
activities. Professor Matthew Wisnioski wrote for The Washington Post
that a "league of trolls, anarchists, perverts and drug dealers is at
work building a digital world beyond the Silicon Valley offices where
our era's best and brightest have designed a Facebook-friendly" surface
and agreed with Bartlett that the activities of trolls go back decades
to the Usenet "flame wars" of the 1990s and even earlier.
In February 2019, Glenn Greenwald
wrote that a cybersecurity company New Knowledge "was caught just six
weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll
accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was
working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times,
when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of
its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation
that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on
social media by a Russian botnet.'"
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders
has faced criticism for the behavior of some of his supporters online,
but has deflected such criticism, suggesting that "Russians" were
impersonating people claiming to be "Bernie Bro" supporters.
Twitter rejected Sanders' suggestion that Russia could be responsible
for the bad reputation of his supporters. A Twitter spokesperson told CNBC:
"Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor
Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them.
As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence of state-backed
information operations, we’ll disclose them following our thorough
investigation to our public archive — the largest of its kind in the
industry." Twitter had suspended 70 troll accounts that posted content in support of Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign.
Examples
As reported on 8 April 1999, investors became victims of trolling via
an online financial discussion regarding PairGain, a telephone
equipment company based in California. Trolls operating in the stock's Yahoo Finance chat room posted a fabricated Bloomberg
News article stating that an Israeli telecom company could potentially
acquire PairGain. As a result, PairGain's stock jumped by 31%. However,
the stock promptly crashed after the reports were identified as false.
So-called Gold Membership trolling originated in 2007 on 4chan
boards, when users posted fake images claiming to offer upgraded 4chan
account privileges; without a "Gold" account, one could not view certain
content. This turned out to be a hoax designed to fool board members,
especially newcomers. It was copied and became an Internet meme.
In some cases, this type of troll has been used as a scam, most notably
on Facebook, where fake Facebook Gold Account upgrade ads have
proliferated in order to link users to dubious websites and other
content.
The case of Zeran v. America Online, Inc. resulted primarily from trolling. Six days after the Oklahoma City bombing,
anonymous users posted advertisements for shirts celebrating the
bombing on AOL message boards, claiming that the shirts could be
obtained by contacting Mr. Kenneth Zeran. The posts listed Zeran's
address and home phone number. Zeran was subsequently harassed.
Anti-scientology protests by Anonymous, commonly known as Project Chanology, are sometimes labeled as "trolling" by media such as Wired, and the participants sometimes explicitly self-identify as "trolls".
Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer orchestrates what it calls a "Troll Army", and has encouraged trolling of Jewish MP Luciana Berger and Muslim activist Mariam Veiszadeh.
In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian
started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos
chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at
speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted
starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.
