Internet trolls are at best a nuisance and at worst a menace. They can be vicious, mercilessly hounding those whom they happen to target, and they use their anonymity to their advantage, using reckless language without fear of repercussions. Dealing with them is not easy. While they can be banned in a few situations, the more determined trolls can find ways around such barriers and if they gain allies in their pursuit, the resulting swarm can be hard to contain. The attacks on feminists and others over what has come to be known as Gamergate is an example.
For some reason, a woman named Brenda Leyland took it upon herself to hound the family of Madeline McCann, a British child who has been missing for some time and whose case has aroused widespread attention in the UK. Using the Twitter handle @Sweepyface, the 63-year old Leyland, described as a “church-going mother of two”, sent about 5,000 thousand messages aimed at the parents and their two other children. The news story goes on to describe other people who pick on targets for seemingly trivial reasons and then attack them mercilessly, even if they have no personal stake in the issue.
Why do they do this? A study titled Trolls just want to have fun described in Psychology Today says that it arises from a combination of a “”Dark Tetrad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.”
Internet trolls are horrible people.
…Trolls truly enjoy making you feel bad. To quote the authors once more (because this is a truly quotable article): “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!”
So what can one do if one becomes the target of trolls? The recommended advice is to ignore them (“Don’t feed the trolls”) and not to let them have the satisfaction of thinking they have drawn blood. But this is easier said than done, especially if the troll escalates to actual plausible threats and gains converts to their cause. Then the authorities have to be alerted. But unless it goes that far, it is hard to know what to do without embarking on a program of limiting people’s rights on the internet by criminalizing speech, as Jonathan Turley is concerned about.
As for Leyland, she came to a tragic end. On October 4, she was found dead in a hotel room, two days after she was asked on TV about her role. Suicide is suspected. You can see the confrontation with her and read some of her tweets here. While her tweets reveal an obsession with the McCann case, they were apparently not threatening, and reveal someone who saw herself as doing a public service and correcting a miscarriage of justice. This kind of self-righteousness is not uncommon with such people. Even the people involved in Gamergate apparently think that they are on some sort of crusade to restore ethics in journalism.
Was Leyland a troll? I am not sure she fits the bill of a sadist, someone who wanted to merely make the victims feel bad or delights in causing pain in others. She seems to be an otherwise regular person who somehow became obsessed with the idea that there was a miscarriage of justice and that the parents of Madeline McCann were getting away with something. Why this middle-aged mother, living in a quiet rural town, became fixated on this particular injustice and chose this particular method of trying to redress it is something we may never know. But it shows that not all trolls, if she can be labeled as one, are adolescent or young adult males with weird fantasies.
Sounds like righteous indignation addiction as hypothesized by David Brin:
http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html
Leyland is not the only one.
Several people have stalked and hounded the surviving family of the Sandy Hook school shootings and the Aurora, Colorado Batman theater shootings. Claiming that they were hoaxes and their kids and family members weren’t really dead.
And they have been arrested for it. For making threats and in the Sandy Hook case, stealing signs from memorials.
Then there are the 9/11 so called “truthers”.
You can call them trolls just not internet trolls.
(Copying from a post I made elsewhere.)
I’ve always felt most trolls I’ve encountered are sadists and sociopaths who get off on the emotional distress they cause people. Seems pretty obvious. The normal human response when someone is upset is to comfort them, not to mock and attack them. People who do the latter tend to be pretty sick.
This study may confirm what many suspect, but I have noticed that trolls often use the same terms and concepts that you see in a lot of mass media propaganda, such as calling people “lazy” or “entitled” and telling them to stop “whining” whenever they make valid criticisms or reach out for support.
The goal of the sociopathic troll and the propagandist seems to be the same: to generate direct and vicarious sadism by gratuitous and cruel attacks against others as well as to create hostility and hatred at those who are perceived to be a threat to perceived authorities.
We tend to see trolls as individuals, but there is also a tendency for like-minded groups to launch into vicious attacks or dogpile on people simply for expressing unpopular views. In these instances people with unpopular views are often accused of being trolls themselves who somehow provoked the attacks against them and therefore merit the abuse and censorship. There is a sort of “Lord of the Flies” mentality where it becomes morally acceptable and righteous to do anything so long as you do it as part of the group.
I wonder to what extent the desire to censor “trolls” is really about censoring unpopular views, however loathsome they may be. The sadism of groupthink dogpilers if often far in excess of the alleged “trolls” they wish to control. The brutality of the police and government vastly exceeds the harms caused by sadists trolling the internet. There are existing laws about making deaths threats or harassing people online, so I don’t see the merits of new laws giving government more powers to censor and punish people for being assholes.
@Raven
Then there are the 9/11 so called “truthers”.
In what way are those who question the government’s official position on 9-11 “trolls?” If anything, it is the people who launch into ad hominem attacks without ever examining the arguments they make that strike me as being the trolls. I don’t know what to believe about 9-11, but the official story is a highly improbable load of shit. Pointing out the obvious and calling for a true impartial investigation hardly qualifies you s a troll.
You are a lunatic fringer. Polykook most likely, who believes ten impossible conspiracies before breakfast.
But thanks for letting us know that. We all have busy lives and better ways to spend our time.
@Raven
Thanks for proving my point.
I call them bugsquishers.
It’s less inflammatory and more descriptive of the useless, petty cruelty that those people engage in.
So what? The crimes of government probably exceed anyone else’s crimes ever, sadists or not. That’s true for pretty much everything. Why even bring it up?
Because when governments create new laws to “protect” people from drugs, trolls or unruly schoolkids, they often make matters worse instead of better, or use the powers they derive towards other ends. Do I need to provide evidence of what a resounding success the War on Drugs or zero tolerance policies in schools have been?
The UK’s new laws on trolling seem a good example of this. Existing laws already apply to people who make death threats, but this law extends the definition of “troll” to those who give “false information,” whatever that is. It is not to hard to see people questioning establishment dogma falling into this category.
Under the act, which does not apply to Scotland, it is an offence to send another person a letter or electronic communication that contains an indecent or grossly offensive message, a threat or information which is false and known or believed by the sender to be false.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29678989