Troll Psychology: A discussion on ‘internet bullying’

An interesting suggestion was put forward to me on Yahoo answers the other day by ‘Patricia’ who said that I should write an article about internet bullying and more specifically why the internet bullies; or trolls are compelled to purposely to post inflammatory comments on websites in the first place. Please be warned that this article does contain some strong language, if you are easily offended please do not read any further.

What is a troll?

Before we begin we need to define exactly what a troll is. According to Wikipedia a troll is “In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

The definition in my opinion is spot on but it certainly doesn’t tell us what motivates an internet troll. Not being one myself I can not really tell you with any kind of first person experience. I can offer you the opinions of others though.

Why so aggressive?

In my own opinion I do not think there is any singular reason why people feel like they need to be trying to insult others on the internet but rather a combination of a number of factors. A very nice article about exactly this came from Michael Marshall of the prestigious New Scientist publication back in 2007. You can read the full post here but here are some points that I found interesting:

“Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity; a process called deindividuation, we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting“, when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.”

“Another obvious factor is that, if you insult someone online, it’s unlikely you’ll face any physical retaliation for it. Epley compares the resulting psychological distance to being isolated inside a car, another situation that seems to make people more prone to abusiveness.”

Anonymity

John Gabriel of Penny Arcade sums up the apparent effects of anonymity on the internet nicely with his 2004 illustration titled “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory”.

Be glad for anonymity, it’s why you still have teeth.

Anonymity on the internet is what makes the internet so great but dangerous at the same time. The internet brings freedom of speech to everyone without fear of any kind of physical consequence. We can say exactly what we are thinking on the internet without any inhibition at all. It is almost comparable to being drunk. After a few drinks most people tend feel a lot less socially inhibited and socialise freely, after a few more drinks some people may start saying things that they wouldn’t normally in a sober state. This quite often leads to violence or social rejection, something that doesn’t have to be considered when dealing with strangers on the internet.

With freedom of speech and anonymity we are able to escape all of societies rules. We are able to disregard what it is to behave in a socially acceptable manner. So absolutely anonymity is the enabling factor in such behaviour as that of an internet troll.

But the question “Why do it?” still remains. It seems that even the trolls themselves are unable to answer the question:

“I’ve been a professional troll and hater for like 10 years. My favorite is on halo microphone, victims can hear the tone of my hate too. I never knew why I was like this. – Posted by anonymous”

So I went troll hunting to see if I could get an answer to my question. So far I have been unsuccessful in finding one that is willing to talk, or atleast offer any kind of valuable insight.

“Looking for a reformed internet troll!?” read the headline on Yahoo! Answers. Here are the responses I received so far.

“Sense of pride and superiority that everyone is looking/reading your question. – Black British”

“Its funny and the @ssholes on here are only here because of the trolls. We make their pathetic lives more interesting. – Ben-A”

“Sorry don’t know any losers. – ILUV@MAK”

“Ask Sydney @ Level 3 – ?Freefr?…”

So far the responses I have had are pretty mediocre so if you are a self-confessed troll let me know your opinion in the comments below or send me and e-mail via the contact page.

eHow.com has provided a bit of a tongue-in-cheek  article titled “How to become an internet troll“. With such handy advice as:

Contribute nothing of value to the discussion forum. As a good troll, your goal is to abuse the members psychologically and provoke negative reactions out of them. Go big or don’t go in at all. Have fun with it, when someone counter-attacks, get playful with them–nothing pisses off someone in a rage than when you joke around with them.

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54 Responses to “Troll Psychology: A discussion on ‘internet bullying’”

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  1. Steve W says:
    December 19, 2012 at 4:42 pm

    The way I see it, it’s pretty simple. Those that are unable to gain attention with intelligent, helpful, or even witty banter turn to the lowest common denominator to gain that attention. In reading some of the responses here, that becomes very apparent. Pretty simple. However I do sympathize with Part Time Trolls post and think it was the most insightful look into the exception to the rule.

  2. Steve W says:
    December 19, 2012 at 5:10 pm

    In rereading my post I realized I left out the word ability. Thus “Those that lack the ability to gain attention with…” states my intent more clearly.

  3. One Time Troll says:
    February 6, 2013 at 6:15 am

    Why do people do it? Depends on the person. For a segment of folks though, it’s a mixture of boredom, disbelief at the kind of persona people will create for themselves online, and an interest in a kinda evil amateur applied psychology.

    We live in an age where tons of people don’t think about the information they’re presenting to the entire world via the web. What happens are that aspects of their true personality comes out in the kind of things/way they express online, even while they attempt to create an alternate persona. There are a LOT of presumptuous personas out there that like to pretend that the internet is their own private party, when in reality you’re just showing a large segment of the population who could care less about you that you’re projecting something–and a select few are just curious or bored enough to strip away some of the artifice to figure out exactly why you’re doing that. It’s twofold: first, it’s a reminder to watch yourself online. The information you put out can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and can reveal things about yourself that people can use to take advantage of you, either for lulz or for more serious things like identity theft or stalking. Next, it’s a reminder not to take yourself so damn seriously, particularly when you’re not being true to yourself in the first place. My story follows:

    I was a bored young man of 19 years who had just moved to Halifax; no friends, a crap job, just filling the time trying to figure out what to do with myself. One night, I’m cruising around the Facebook groups based in Halifax and I come across a hookup (strictly sex-based) group. Wondering who would be desperate enough to use a hookup service that links your name, life, and other revealing details to the world at large, I started clicking around. I discovered that most people were “doing it right”: they had updated privacy settings so that people couldn’t link to their profile without a friend request, they used alternate accounts specifically for that use, didn’t allow their pictures to be shown or used replacements, etc. etc. All very good stuff. Except for one.

    This one girl had not updated her privacy settings; her account details were in full view of anyone who cared to check, picture, work/school details, and a very revealing attempt at self-projection which tried to cast her as “misunderstood intellectual with a dark past, and interests well beyond the mainstream which make me special, including stuff I don’t wanna talk about.” I saw this, and shook my head: what bullshit. Obviously, this was a self-aggrandizing construction, one that basically screamed: “LOOK AT ME, I’M SPECIAL AND INTERESTING.” I wondered: based off of the personality traits that I read in this text, can I write something that will get this person to reveal more stuff about herself that she may not want to reveal? Will she respond in a way that illustrates how her defense mechanisms work at a deeper level? Will the only one in this group who projects themself as intelligent do the intelligent thing and block me and change her settings so that this never happens again? So I wrote. It was a message specifically designed to arise a mixture of ire and confusion: deliberately presumptuous, haughty statements regarding the oddness of an ok-looking young polyamorous girl turning to a group of rather dim-seeming folk to try and get laid. I sent, and I waited. Sure enough, I got a reply: she revealed that she had a self-esteem problem, that she was in her final years at university taking psychology, all coached in language that illustrated her defense mechanisms (stereotyping, use of diminutives (when you are feeling small, you try make others feel small), appeals to authority (“Targeting someone older than you with a degree in psychology won’t garner much” – oh, how wrong you are). This is all information that, had I been truly malicious, I could’ve used to destroy her life: I knew where she went to school, what department she was in, what she likes to project, how she responds to perceived threats–all freely given with a few words designed to poke the right spots. With this knowledge, if I had wanted to, I could have approached her after a shave and had a clue upon first meeting how to manipulate her to revealing even more information. What I found the most interesting was that when I went to end the conversation, she had to have the last word, revealing even MORE information about herself. Luckily for her, I did it for the lulz and to illustrate a point: if you don’t want people to mess with you, don’t freely give them the ammunition. I was blocked a week or two after the exchange; hopefully, this was as much a function of her recognizing “Hey, maybe my private information shouldn’t be available to any dickwad with a keyboard” as it was dismissing one particular dickwad.

    So basically, I did it because I was bored and saw self-deception projected to the whole world without being punished. I wanted to know just how much that information could be used to get even more, just by manipulating characters on the page. Now I know, and the implications are terrifying. To everyone out there hating on trolls, just remember: if you’re lying to the world about yourself, people will come by to knock you down a peg, whether it’s in real life or over the web; people can see through it. It becomes even more dangerous on the web, because phrases can be manipulated to hide intention and invoke certain responses that put your personal information in danger, without your being able to rely on other communicative factors to detect intention. To sum it up: Don’t feed trolls, protect your information, and don’t project false personas online. Failure to do this will lead emotional distress and revealing your triggers and defense mechanisms to a stranger (hey, you react the way you do because anonymity is a two-way street, but where a troll manipulates, an incensed target often becomes more candid – to an aggressive stranger, this can potentially put you into serious peril).

    Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

  4. UnderTheBigBlackSun says:
    May 9, 2013 at 7:48 am

    In regard to One Time Troll’s treatise on trolling:

    Pity he didn’t consider what his own post might reveal. I think it’s a prime example of how many (most even?) trolls have sociopathic tendencies. His is a long look at the topic from someone who, in arrogance and a sort of social disconnect/detachment, sees the world as his laboratory and “misguided” (or intellectually or commonsensically inferior) people as his playthings upon whom to conduct social-psychological experiments. After all, One Time Troll might have just contacted the young woman and warned her about revealing too much information or making herself too vulnerable. Used his intelligence for altruistic purposes. Instead, he chose to toy with someone he already guessed was vulnerable from her presentation– whatever rationalizing excuses he gives for doing so. It was creepy, on the one hand, to read this account in all its grandiosity, cold judgement, and absence of conscience, but on the other it does offer good insights on the thought processes and anti-social impulses behind trolling (and sociopaths, for that matter). So cheers for that, I suppose. Maybe not the effect he intended, but useful nonetheless.

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