Trolling

In slang, trolling is when a person posts deliberately offensive or provocative messages online (such as in social media, a forum, a chat room, an online video game) or performs similar behaviors offline. The methods and motivations of trolls can range from benign to sadistic. These messages can be inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic, and may have the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perceptions, 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. Trolling behaviors involve tactical aggression to incite emotional responses, which can adversely affect the target's well-being. In this context, the noun and the verb forms of "troll" are frequently associated with Internet discourse. Since at least the 2010s, media attention has equated trolling with online harassment. The Courier-Mail and The Today Show have used "troll" to mean "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families". 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.

Usage Application of the term "troll" is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as "trolling", while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. More potent acts of trolling are blatant harassment or off-topic banter. However, the term "Internet troll" has also been applied to information warfare, hate speech, and even political activism. The "Trollface" is an image occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture. Sometimes "troll" is incorrectly used to refer to anyone with controversial or differing opinions. Such usage goes against the ordinary meaning of troll in multiple ways. While psychologists have determined that psychopathological sadism, dark triad, and dark tetrad personality traits are common among Internet trolls, some observers claim that trolls do not believe the controversial views they claim. Farhad Manjoo criticises this view, noting that if the person is trolling, they are more intelligent than their critics would believe.

Responses

One common strategy for dealing with online trolls is to ignore them. This approach, known as "don't feed the trolls", is based on the idea that trolls feed on attention and reactions. By withholding these, the troll may lose interest and stop their disruptive behavior. This is considered by psychologists to be the best way to stop trolling. Although after ceasing contact, disruption may occur in greater frequency due to an extinction burst.

Origin and etymology There are competing theories of where and when "troll" was first used in Internet slang, with numerous unattested accounts of BBS and Usenet origins in the early 1980s or before. The English noun "troll" in the standard sense of ugly dwarf or giant dates to 1610 and originates from the Old Norse word "troll" meaning giant or demon. The word evokes the trolls of Scandinavian folklore and children's tales: antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travelers. Trolls have existed in folklore and fantasy literature for centuries, and online trolling has been around for as long as the Internet has existed. In modern English usage, "trolling" may describe the fishing technique of slowly dragging a lure or baited hook from a moving boat, whereas trawling describes the generally commercial act of dragging a fishing net. Early non-Internet slang use of "trolling" can be found in the military: by 1972 the term "trolling for MiGs" was documented in use by US Navy pilots in Vietnam. It referred to use of "decoys, with the mission of drawing ... fire away". The contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known attestation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1992. The first usage of the term was on Usenet in the early 1990s as in the phrase "trolling for newbies", as used in alt.folklore.urban (AFU). Typically, this refers to a gentle inside joke where veteran users post overdone topics that only newcomers would take seriously. For example, a veteran might post about the common misconception that glass flows over time—long-time readers would recognize both the poster and the tired topic, while new subscribers would respond earnestly. These types of trolls served as a practice to identify group insiders. This definition of trolling, considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the term, was considered a positive contribution. One of the most notorious AFU trollers, David Mikkelson, went on to create the urban folklore website Snopes. By the late 1990s, alt.folklore.urban had such heavy traffic and participation that trolling of this sort was frowned upon. Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a seriously misinformed user, even in newsgroups where one was not a regular; these were often attempts at humor rather than provocation. The noun troll usually referred to an act of trolling – or to the resulting discussion – rather than to the author, though some posts punned on the dual meaning of troll. The August 26, 1997, strip of the webcomic Kevin and Kell used the word troll to describe those that deliberately harass or provoke other Internet users, similar to the modern sense of the word.

In other languages

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