In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chatroom, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. — Wikipedia
In these days of social media, many people share everything: their politics, religion, sexual preferences and acts, and plenty of other tidbits that are often better left unsaid. These things deserve real caution in a public forum, and I’m constantly amazed at how freely people hand them out to total strangers.
The problems with having online discussions and posting about extremely personal beliefs, conditions and thoughts are (among other things):
- ➤Regardless of your “privacy” settings, it’s possible, albeit with some effort, for your employer, spouse, friend, enemy, or whomever to see what you’ve written. This can effect your employment, credit, insurance, friendship, marriages and any other part of your life.
- ➤Personal beliefs tend to attract trolls. Especially strongly held beliefs.
There was a man I knew, let’s call him Tim, who delighted in replying to posts all over the place with both covertly and overtly negative responses. He was the perfect example of a troll.
You’d post a paragraph about Obama, for example, and Tim would reply with a covert response, something that begs for an answer, but isn’t exactly negative.
This is the hook to get you (or others in the thread) to reply. You reply, perfectly logically to explain your position or respond to Tim’s question or whatever. He’d reply, a little more negative this time, and this pattern would go on and on until you’re ready to explode, and Tim is rubbing his hands in glee.
Watching Tim work was infuriating. He never said anything you could point to as outright nasty, so every time someone called him on it, he got to play the wounded innocent while the thread burned down around him.
The covert pattern a skilled troll repeats until a thread burns down, as Richard saw Tim do it.
How a skilled troll works
If the troll really knows what he’s doing, he’ll make it appear he’s innocent because he’ll stir up so much negativity in the conversation that no one knows who began it all. His comments may appear totally innocent on first glance, but if you follow things back and read carefully, you’ll find Tim covertly egging on the responses so that the argument feeds upon itself until there’s so much negativity and anger that the thread is deleted or the conversation dies in frustration.
A less skilled troll simply posts negative responses or pointed questions designed to enrage the members of the conversation.
Feeding the trolls
Responding to a troll in any way at all is called “feeding the trolls,” and it’s exactly what they want. Every reply, every patient explanation, every angry comeback is another meal. I wish more people understood that, because the urge to answer is the very thing the troll is counting on.
It’s important to understand you can in no way win in any conversation online with trolls. They don’t care about you or the conversation. Their goal is simply to upset anyone they can upset, to enrage people and to destroy communication.
Now, if you ask them outright, they’ll plead innocence.
They’ll tell you they’re just trying to educate you, or keep you from harm, or some other mindless justification. Don’t be lulled into complacency by their lies. They exist to make anyone and everyone they can wrong, upset, unhappy and depressed, and I don’t have any patience left for the innocent act.
The only winning move
The best thing to do is ignore them, and if you can, delete them from the conversation or, better still, ban them entirely. On platforms such as Facebook, I’ve found the best solution is to block them permanently. I don’t warn them, I don’t argue with them, and I don’t lose a minute of sleep over it.
| Response | Result |
|---|---|
| Patient explanation | Another meal for the troll |
| Angry comeback | Another meal for the troll |
| Asking them outright | They plead innocence and claim to be educating you |
| Ignoring them | The best thing to do |
| Deleting or banning them | Better still, if you can |
| Blocking permanently | The best solution Richard found on Facebook |
I know it sounds cruel, and I know it sounds like censorship.
But there are people in this world, and the internet makes them far bolder than normal, who exist only to sow discord and destroy any attempt at reasonable communication. I’ll block one of them without a second thought. Your conversations will be better without them, and your sanity will be better for removing them from the scene.