Wherefore trolls?
WHY does anyone do this? I would never go to, for instance, the Daily Kos and start denouncing progressives. Why would I want to spend my time doing that? I have a left wing friend who does it, deliberately picking fights with right-wingers, and it really puzzles me. I suppose it comes down to the fact that they get some kind of pleasure from it. Seems somewhat pathological. Definitely is in my friend.
I’ll take a stab at an answer or answers.
(1) Some are paid. But I actually don’t think there are many paid trolls who come here, because I think the paid ones tend to just paste boilerplate remarks and move on. whereas most trolls here are more engaged.
(2) The internet’s a funny thing, and it seems to encourage various forms of teasing and even cruelty. I think trolls are defined more by the first: tweaking and poking at one’s opponents to get a rise out of them. Must be satisfying for certain types of people.
(3) A sense of tremendous superiority drives many trolls. They believe they are showing off how much smarter, more well-informed, and just plain all-around correct they are compared to the troglodytes who frequent the site.
(4) They have time on their hands.
(5) Very few are open to persuasion; if they were, they probably wouldn’t be perceived as trolls. They don’t come to have their minds changed, and I believe very very few come to change anyone else’s minds. But they do want to make others waste their time trying to argue and persuade.
(6) I used to get more trolls who just came to sprinkle nasty expletives and move on. Perhaps the spam filter is more efficient at filtering them out, because it’s less common now.
The psychology of trolls is fairly well trodden ground and it aligns with your points. They mostly believe themselves to be clever and sardonic and have a high opinion of themselves. Many of them are immune to being humilated by objectively being proven wrong, choosing just to ignore points that they can’t easily respond to. They’ll tend to just move on if they don’t get the responses they desire, although some will persist under the false assumption that they’re actually accomplishing anything. After all, they’re not there to be persuaded (although it’s not unheard of that they can be). They only do what they do to disrupt and destroy. There are definitely far fewer of them around on blogs these days. Most of them concetrate their efforts on Twitter/X and other more populous social media platforms. In a way they sort of act as argument testers, although with the speed and volume of information of the modern age it’s far more difficult for them to find unassailable points of purchase in most discussions since they rely on informational ignorance to be very effective.
You forgot one:
The Internet allows you, in most cases, to avoid the consequences of your actions.
If you listen to the arguments of left-wing protestors in demonstrations, nothing they say makes any sense. But arguing with them as if they have a point, flawed perhaps, is a waste of time. They move on to something else, repeat, ignore. Not sure if they have a technique or if their minds just work that way. Or if they are pretending the issue is something it isn’t.
My personal belief is that a larger percentage of trolls are paid and/or dispatched than many people think. Admittedly I cannot prove this but I base it on their behavior, in addition to the fact there have been known such operations from the left eg Hillary’s “Correct the Record” (LOL).
I will say this opinion may be skewed by the amount of time I have spent on PowerLine which has always had numerous trolls, though much fewer now that they are requiring subscription to comment. I suspect they were a special target because of their success in debunking Dan Rather’s TANG memos in the 2004 election. Leftists never forget and never forgive. Neo may well have a lower proportion of paid trolls. Nevertheless I routinely accuse trolls of being paid because I think it is as important if not more so to point out their insincerity and dishonesty as it is to engage their arguments which leads to the diversion they are seeking in the first place. See neo’s point #5.
Being an ex-leftist and an ex-hippie, in the 2000s/2010s I ventured into such redoubts, attempting in good faith to communicate with my former comrades.
As a liberal I thought spirited exchanges were the lifeblood of the Enlightenment.
_________________________
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
–Voltaire
_________________________
Not surprisngly, Voltaire did not say that. Though it was in his spirit. Once upon a time good liberals would nod approvingly.
However, I discovered that as soon as my comrades realized I had changed sides, it was “Hold still, while we beat you up.”
Voltaire definitely did not say that.
Once upon an Internet, when there were about 113,000 nodes, most people got on via a university hookup. And when a new guy jumped in attacking furiously, we sent a note to the sysadmin, and he got called in for an explanation of decorum.
There was something about not facing your opponent that made people just go nuts.
And yeah, today there are troublemakers. It seems to me that nearly all of them come from the left. But maybe I’m biased.
“attempting in good faith”
That was your mistake right there huxley. The left and “good faith” do not inhabit the same universe.
Once when I unloaded a particularly vicious stream of vitriol on a troll in another blog a commenter on my side but more temperate asked modestly “Has xxx ever commented in good faith?” Indeed that defines the trolls. And the left.
TV show “homeland” had an episode which included a troll farm.
Eye opening. Comments there validate.
Short vid.
“Social media made y’all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” — Mike Tyson
Apropos to what Richard F Cook said above. And that quote is verified.
Troll seems to have an ambiguous definition. Are you a troll if you disagree with a post? Are you a troll if you post a comment outside the general opinion of most commenters on a site? If you post within the framework of, “you are wrong about ….because …..” are you ever a troll?
— Richard Cook
Oh yes. You can be snarky, insulting, rude, etc. and there are rarely consequences of any sort. It fits with an old quote from, of all people, Conan the Barbarian (by Robert Howard):
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.”
This observation esp. applies to the sort of troll who just seems to want to insult for its own sake. I’ve always thought that that particular subtribe is made up mostly of people who wish they could behave like that in person, but know better than to try it.
— jvermeer51
No, not unless you’re doing it simply to get a reaction.
Another parallel to the ‘troll for its own sake’ type: even when I was a teenager, I never understood the impulse to smash mailboxes. But some teenage (and occasionally a bit older, but usually teens, and almost always guys) love to go down the road smashing people’s mailboxes. I suspect the impulse has a simialr root.
Coincidentally, Peter Heck at Not The Bee Takes suggests that hating the opposition is the source of a big dopamine hit.
In re Neo’s point (2) trolling of some types is perhaps delivering the same kick.
https://notthebee.com/takes/are-we-becoming-devils
Add the rush from operating “on the enemy’s ground” and trolling can be more than just an entertaining amusement.
I think there will be many more of (1), (5), and (6) but now coming from AI troll farms.
PS – I have been out on vacation for two weeks and haven’t read Neo’s “back issues,” so my comments may be disconnected from the zeitgeist for awhile.
Welcome back, AesopFan (1:46 am).
I trust that your vacation was (far) better for your equanimity than is dipping your toe in the zeitgeist now/soon.
M J R
And they’re true believers. Anything said in opposition regardless of it being true is “evil”
period.
There are some particularly persistent trolls on a couple of sites that I follow, or contribute to who are – to put it kindly – unbalanced. Or, unkindly – bughouse nuts. They fixate on the blogger or regular commenter and go to town with the insanity.
That kind of troll scares me – and is the reason that I have always blogged and commented consistently under an identity that would be very hard to link to my legal name and location. Another female writer/blogger that I am friends with personally keeps her own address/location in the US secret for the same reason.
I had some brushes with this kind of insanity in my days as a radio DJ, and it always frightened the hell out of me. I’m old enough to remember the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer at the hands of an obsessed creep.
D. Fritsch is out of jail and recently seen on X going after Gad Saad, though to little effect so far as can be told as yet. But yeah, still bugfuckingnuts.
I got in trouble (mild trouble, no HR involved) at work a couple of years ago for making a point about internet culture.
I was talking to the person who had trained me, a young woman who fit the TV Tropes term of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In a conversation about Kanye, who was just leaning into his anti-semitism, I expressed the opinion that social media has been a colossal mistake. When she asked me to explain, I said that the anonymity prevented the kind of punishment men deliver to one another when one goes too far in an argument: physical violence.
As her brow furrowed, I explained what I cribbed from Jordan Peterson (pre-crazy suit Jordan Peterson), that men punish each other with violence, and women punish each other with emotional violence, like gossip and character assassination. Consequently, the discourse in social media is female-coded.
She checked out of the conversation and the next day I had a chat with my boss, who suggested Manic Pixie Dream Girl might be a little too sensitive to deal with what I said, and I agreed to keep it strictly business from there on out, not hard because I was disappointed with the weakness she’d displayed.
I don’t think I’m wrong, though. Men feel handcuffed by combat online because our only recourse for bad behavior is ignoring it. You can’t put your fist in the face of a troll.
Trollio, Trollio, wherefore art thou,Trollio?
Hard to tell the difference sometimes between a troll and an idiot. What a troll does is performance art, and it’s in bad faith, just there to provoke people. Idiots are sometimes too dumb to follow an argument, understand what they read, express themselves clearly, or know things. They can write similar things.
For example
accompanied by an image of Gandalf, is posted by a troll.
This “Shakespeare” quote, is posted by an idiot:
The commenter who probably kicked off this discussion, “David Clayton”, seems more likely to be in earnest than to be a troll. He doesn’t know what any of us actually think and so he reacts to what he thinks we think based on his carefully filtered news feed, and he seems to think that we just haven’t heard the sound bites he shouts at us and if he increases the volume a bit more we’ll get it.
But one never knows. Poe’s Law applies to a lot of trolling despite its originally narrow application.
Umberto Eco’s taxonomy of idiots–morons, cretins, fools, and lunatics–is possibly of service. Only lunatics and morons are found online, usually.
Templars!?!?!?!
@Sennacherib:Templars!?!?!?!
Eco’s book came out about 15 years before The Da Vinci Code. As Eco later said,
Well the priory de sion which is the crux of the story was bandied about a century before they were debunked but leigh and tubing still caught up to it although there are some intersections with eco who ended up in some dark places with the prague cementary about the writings of the protocols of zion about 20 years later
The merovingian made it into that coffee clatch of paranoia the matrix
The AI that is dan brown has another tome about a secret society set in prague hm thats curious
>Jordan Peterson (pre-crazy suit Jordan Peterson),
What makes JP crazy besides his suits?