I’ve dealt with trolls since the early days of the web, and they haven’t changed much. They want a reaction, and every time you give them one, they win. I don’t find trolls funny, and I’ve never understood the people who defend them as harmless pranksters. There’s a real person on the other end of every attack, and the troll picked that person because they’d feel it.
What is an internet troll?
In 2012, Gawker exposed “Violentacrez,” one of the most notorious trolls on Reddit, who had spent years posting offensive content under the protection of anonymity. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed The exposure revealed a person with a real job, a real family, and a hobby of making the internet worse for everyone around him.
A 2014 study by Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhus found that internet trolls often exhibit traits linked with the Dark Tetrad of personality: sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. They enjoy the chaos they generate.
That finding doesn’t surprise me at all. I think we spend too much energy wondering what trolls are trying to say and not enough admitting what they’re after. They want to hurt someone and watch it happen.
In her book “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” scholar Whitney Phillips describes trolls as “agents of cultural digestion” who turn our media environment’s output back on itself.
What Does Internet Trolling Look Like?
Trolling ranges from the harmless to the devastating.
The 2007 “Rickrolling” trend, where users were tricked into clicking links to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” was frustrating but nobody got hurt. The coordinated trolling during the 2016 US Presidential Election was something else entirely: fake accounts stoking controversy, disseminating misinformation, and turning political discourse into a hostile wasteland. As one self-proclaimed troll told The Guardian in 2012: “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh.” That quote captures the core motivation. Trolls derive amusement from other people’s distress. The scale varies. The intent doesn’t.
What tactics do internet trolls use?
Trolls are skilled at blending into communities. Reddit’s “Unidan” was a respected ecology expert who used multiple accounts to upvote his own posts and downvote competitors. Reddit eventually exposed and banned him, but for years he operated as a trusted member of the community while manipulating the system underneath.
Multi-account trolling is common. In 2012, the BBC discovered that a single person using 38 different accounts was among the most prolific commenters on its website. Each persona interacted with the others, escalating discussions into arguments that appeared organic but were entirely manufactured.
Subtlety is the most effective weapon. As Jamie Bartlett, author of “The Dark Net,” puts it: “The best trolls are the ones that can’t be distinguished from sincere, well-meaning participants.” They’re provocative enough to get a rise out of people and careful enough never to get flagged. It’s a craft, and a nasty one.
“Sealioning” is another tactic: deliberately misinterpreting arguments while maintaining a veneer of polite inquiry. The term originates from a Wondermark comic strip where a sea lion persistently pesters a human for a debate, relentlessly civil while being thoroughly exhausting.
What Is the Psychology of an Internet Troll?
According to the Buckels study, trolls frequently display signs of sadism, deriving real pleasure from discomfort they cause others. A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that trolls are more likely to be young and male, correlating with the general demographics of online harassers. The gendered dimension is significant.
Gamer Zoe Quinn became a high-profile victim during the GamerGate scandal, where coordinated harassment campaigns targeted women in the gaming industry. The attacks went well beyond disagreement about game reviews. They included death threats, doxxing, and sustained campaigns designed to drive women out of public participation.
What happened to women in gaming during that stretch was disgusting, and the platforms were far too slow to treat it as anything more than a spat between users. The targets paid for that slowness with their safety and their careers. The harassers were at fault, and so were the companies that kept handing them a megaphone.
Real Consequences
Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager, took her life in 2012 after an online stalker relentlessly bullied her. That’s the extreme end of the spectrum, but it isn’t an isolated case. Trolling damages mental health, poisons online communities, and in its organized forms can distort public discourse on a national scale. Corporations are targets too. In 2017, McDonald’s faced a troll-driven backlash when their promotional “Rick and Morty” Szechuan Sauce ran out, turning a marketing stunt into a reputational crisis. The incident showed how trolls can amplify minor events into major problems when they decide a target is worth attacking.
What is state-sponsored trolling?
Some of the most damaging trolling operations are funded, organized, and directed by foreign governments.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St. Petersburg, employed hundreds of people to create fake American social media accounts and post divisive content designed to inflame political tensions in the United States. The operation was active for years before the 2016 presidential election and continued afterward. The IRA created fake Black Lives Matter pages, fake conservative groups, and fake local news accounts, all designed to make Americans angrier at each other. A 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed the scope of the campaign across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit.
China works a similar apparatus. The “50 Cent Army” (so named because participants were reportedly paid 50 cents per post) floods Chinese social media with pro-government commentary. Researchers at Harvard estimated in 2017 that the Chinese government fabricates roughly 448 million social media posts per year. These operations have expanded beyond domestic platforms to target Western social media during politically sensitive moments, including discussions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and COVID-19 origins.
Iran, North Korea and other governments run their own troll farms, aimed at their own people and at ours. It’s infuriating how well it works.
The common thread is that state-sponsored trolling is information warfare conducted at scale, designed to destabilize trust in institutions, amplify existing divisions, and make democratic discourse harder to sustain. Nobody’s doing it for the lulz.
Individual trolls can be ignored. State-sponsored troll farms can’t, because they work with budgets, shift schedules, performance metrics, and strategic objectives. Anyone who still treats them as ordinary internet mischief is doing them a favor.
How Do You Fight Back Against Trolls?
The oldest advice is still the most effective: don’t feed the trolls. Deny them the reaction they want and most will move on to easier targets.
Platforms have developed their own tools. Reddit uses a voting system where users can downvote offensive content into invisibility. Twitter introduced mute and block features. None of it is perfect, but it gives you some control back, and after years of this garbage, I’ll take it.
Legislation is catching up slowly. In 2014, South Korea implemented regulations requiring users to verify their real names before commenting. The UK and Australia have enacted laws against online harassment. The landmark case of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) established that online speech gets the same First Amendment protections as offline speech, but those protections don’t extend to harassment, threats, or coordinated abuse. I think the basic flaw in how the internet was designed is that it’s anonymous. People can do shit without any repercussions, and if it weren’t anonymous, the internet would be a lot safer and a better place.
Education matters too. Programs like Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” teach children how to recognize and disengage from trolling behavior. The earlier people learn to identify the pattern, the less power trolls have.
The Evolving Threat
Trolling has evolved from individual mischief into coordinated campaigns with real-world political consequences. The pro-Brexit trolling campaigns in 2016 showed that organized trolling can influence national elections. In the same year, trolls manipulated Microsoft’s AI chatbot “Tay” into generating offensive tweets within hours of launch, revealing how artificial intelligence creates new attack surfaces. The technology changes.
The human behavior behind it doesn’t. As cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier put it: “Security is a process, not a product.” The same applies to managing trolls. There’s no permanent solution, only ongoing adaptation by platforms, legislators, and the people who use the internet every day.
Block, report and move on. The troll is counting on you to stay and fight, and the best thing you can do for your sanity and your work is refuse.
I also think the platforms deserve more of the blame than they get. They built systems that reward outrage with reach, then act surprised when people farm outrage for fun or for a foreign government. Until that changes, the burden keeps landing on the people being attacked, and I think that’s a disgrace.
Frequently Asked Questions
For the full taxonomy, see 16 troll behaviors and how to recognize them.
