Troll (slang)
These messages can be inflammatory, insincere, digressive,[2] extraneous, or off-topic, and may have the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses,[3] or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur.
The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people.
[6][7] 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.
[24] The word evokes the trolls of Scandinavian folklore and children's tales: antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travelers.
It referred to use of "...decoys, with the mission of drawing...fire away..."[29] The contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s,[30][31] but the earliest known attestation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1992.
[43][failed verification] 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.
[citation needed] In Korean, nak-si (낚시) means "fishing" and refers to Internet trolling attempts, as well as purposely misleading post titles.
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.
[45] Early incidents of trolling[46] 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.
[49][50] 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.
[54] 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.
[55] 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.
[58] 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.
[59][60] The report said that government employees were paid to create pro-government posts around the time of national holidays to avoid mass political protests.
[59] A 2016 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence on hybrid warfare notes that the Russo-Ukrainian War "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.
"[61]: 70, 76 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.
[61]: 76 A 2016 study on fluoridation decision-making in Israel coined the term "Uncertainty Bias" to describe the efforts of power in government, public health and media to aggressively advance agendas by misrepresentation of historical and scientific fact.
[63] 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.
[66] Studies conducted in the fields of human–computer interaction and cyberpsychology by other researchers have corroborated Radford's analysis on the phenomenon of Internet trolling as a form of deception-serving entertainment and its correlations to aggressive behaviour, katagelasticism, black humor, and the Dark tetrad.
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.
[82] 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.
In February 2010, the Australian government became involved after users defaced the Facebook tribute pages of murdered children Trinity Bates and Elliott Fletcher.
[85][86][87] According to journalist Swati Chaturvedi and others, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) runs networks of social media trolls tasked with intimidating political opponents.
[89] Though the death sentence of convicted terrorist Yakub Memon was criticized by "many", including human rights activists and a former Supreme Court chief justice, Bollywood star Salman Khan received "overwhelming" online anger for expressing the same views; the trolling spilled over into real life, with some protestors burning his effigy.
[102] 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.
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).
The character 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.
[108] 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.
[122] In 2021, the Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, author of Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018), described the American far-right exclusively male organization Proud Boys, the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and podcast host Joe Rogan as political commentators who have mastered "the art of trolling as a far-right recruitment strategy" by preying upon the American male insecurities, mediocrity, and fragility.
[127] On November 22, 2024, a Twitter account impersonating online streamer, Cheesur, posted inflammatory statements toward the Mexican Jalisco New Generation cartel and its leader El Mencho.
