Internet Trolls Explain Why They Do What They Do
An estimated 5.6 percent of people self-identify as online trolls, according to a recent survey. Considering how many people use the internet daily, that's a ton of people. It explains why the internet seems lousy with trolls, and social media feeds feel positively glutted with their presence. The proliferation of trollery seems to raise the question, just who are these people, and what’s their deal? More importantly, what drives them to do what they do?
It can be tricky to talk about trolling, if only because the word has become a catchall for online behaviors that differ so wildly as to be wholly incomparable. Trolling used be playful but annoying, a sort of virtual, comedic performance art with the end goal of getting under the skin of a selected online audience. Today the word is more often used to describe some of the most despicable behaviors we see on the internet and social media apps, from stalking and harassment to violent threats and expressions of racism, homophobia and misogyny.
There remain, in the ever-crowded trollscape, those who practice the art in its old-school form. These people are generally hilarious and creative, operating in a way that would make Andy Kaufman proud. Ken M, often hailed as the world’s greatest internet troll, told Vox that he plays a “well-meaning moron” on the internet, leaving a trail of dunderheaded, obtuse statements in comment threads that infuriate people who don’t realize his idiocy is all part of an exceptionally clever ruse. He says he started trolling when he “tried to engage with people seriously” online and “slowly realized that it was such a futile effort to try to have a rational discourse. I suddenly decided to make it as irrational as possible.”
“Sites that have the most dysfunctional comment communities are the ones that I go to,” Ken M says, highlighting Yahoo News. “Some of these interactions that I have, it’s like Borscht Belt stuff. I say one thing, and somebody’s like, ‘Whaddaya mean?’ And then I drop the punchline. There’s something so pure about that, like, corny, old-timey joke structure that I love. And then I love the fact that these people don’t know that they’re part of it.”
Jon Hendren tweets as @fart from what may legitimately be the funniest Twitter in the world. (Really. Go read it.) He’s been behind notable stunts before, like sending rapper Pitbull to a Walmart in a remote Alaska location and getting the lead singer from Smash Mouth to eat a “shit-ton of eggs.” Last year, Hendren became even more internet-famous when he accepted an invitation from cable news network HLN to take part in an ostensibly serious discussion about Edward Snowden, and spent the interview talking about Edward Scissorhands. The stunt effectively worked as a form of media criticism, pointing out how, in the chase for ratings in clickbait, the channel had failed to do the most basic due diligence in researching their guest.
“When the HLN folks emailed me, it was a very brief email. They just said, 'Hey, Jon. Do you have any thoughts on Edward Snowden on Twitter? We'll have you on and we'll talk about it,'" Hendren told me. “Some people thought that they were actually supposed to get [Al-Jazeera reporter John Hendren]. But, I mean, when they put @fart up on the screen there, it was pretty obvious that [I wasn’t him]. I think it was a cheap way to get a guest or a cheap way to find content, maybe a retweet out of somebody popular [on Twitter]. But I'm absolutely not an expert.”
“I do think Edward [Snowden] is a great guy and he should be pardoned in all these things, but I am not the person to talk about that on television,” Hendren continued. “It's just a bad decision. I decided to try to highlight how bad of a decision that was. They probably got yelled at by somebody, which is terrible. But also it's a flawed premise to begin with and I'm glad that show was canceled because it's not a great show. It was never going to be a great show.”
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"616666","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"210","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]]
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"616667","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"216","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]]
Trolls whose agenda is less purely comedic and more political have also become a familiar breed. One example is the founder of Modern Liberals, who goes by the nom de internet Manny Schewitz. He told me he’s been “trolling conservatives for years on Facebook, even before the 2012 election,” going back to the days of “message forums and elsewhere online where right-wingers spewed lies and hateful rhetoric.”
“I use trolling because trying to get through to most right-wingers with logic is nearly impossible,” Schewitz wrote me, via email. “I know, because I was raised in a very conservative household. If you troll them and get them off their script, you can then force them to do some really interesting mental gymnastics and maybe rethink their belief systems ever so slightly. You can't knock the wall down, but you can create dozens of little cracks in it. I'm not a nasty troll, although I can be utterly vicious when dealing with alt-right and white supremacist idiots.”
Schewitz's victories have included trolling a local woman who was making racist comments “until I had plenty of material I could send to her parish priest, which I threatened to do if she didn't knock it off. She did.”
“I like to have fun,” Schewitz told me, “but I have no problem screencapping someone's online comments and sending it to their employer, and yes, I have had people terminated from their jobs for things they've said online.” He’s also trolled Nigerian scammers, and succeeded in turning the con around on its perpetrator. He considers himself a white-hat troll, versus trolls of the nefarious, black-hat variety, and focuses on Facebook pages of targets from his local area. “I believe I'm doing it for good, and to protect others. Like the Nigerian scammers, I would prefer the bad trolls spend their time fighting with me, instead of someone who can't handle them. I sort of think of it as a guardian role, if that's the right term for it.”
“Trolling is also a form of therapy to me,” he added, when I asked why it was his method of choice. “It's fun to blow off steam at the end of a long day at work by making some conservative figure on Twitter lose their minds, or goad a racist on Reddit into saying things that get them banned by the mods.”
Matt Saccaro wrote about his youthful exploits in trolling in a 2015 piece titled, “I Was a Libertarian Internet Troll—How I Turned My Mind Around.” He describes his adolescence as someone who frequented the OT (off topic; non-game related) subforum, mostly to troll it:
I posted threads sure to provoke hundreds of scathing responses. Perhaps my favorite was one examining whether America needed the “fascism” that liberal types accused George W. Bush of to triumph over its enemies at home and abroad (keep in mind, this was during the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom). One poster asked me about the identities of the “enemies at home.” I said liberals. The thread went on for dozens of pages.
I asked him why he indulged in trolling, and he suggested attention, boredom and loneliness all played a factor.
“If I had to guess, I think I started trolling because I had no real outlet of any kind in real life, be it creative, emotional, or otherwise,” Saccaro wrote me. “I was, essentially, sad and miserable and didn't have many friends. But nobody knew that on the internet, so they took what I had to say seriously—at least for a time. Moments of success made me feel almost giddy, like I couldn't stop smiling. I felt a bizarre kind of power, too... I loved making them—the other forum posters—into my little action figures in that I was controlling by making them react to all these ridiculous posts. Bizarre, I know. Eventually I made a few friends but enjoyed trolling so much that I just kept doing it. Nothing made me feel the same way.”
Saccaro, who described the roots of his conservative thinking as a young adult in another article (“I Was a Teenaged Fox News Robot”), left trolling behind after he graduated from college. He says that while “getting banned from any forum I actually wanted to post on helped” with his decision, he also “realized how pointless it was.” He began writing, which filled the need for validation trolling had previously occupied. “Then, of course, there is the revelation that pissing people off on the internet accomplishes nothing. Why hurt someone? What does that do? I get that it's all 'for the lulz' [lols, or laughs] but there were no more lulz to be had for me.”
I asked him if, as a former libertarian troll, he has any insight into the thinking of the often-abusive alt-right trolls who now fill 4chan and 8chan messageboards.
“I'm no expert on any of this, particularly political philosophy and the psychology behind libertarianism, so take what I say with a grain of salt,” he wrote. “But I think some trolls are just people who don't have a lot going for them IRL [in real life] like I did: few if any friends, unpopular, suboptimal home life, etc. So perhaps some of this comes from people looking for any kind of validation/attention they can find. Any harassment these people do could perhaps be interpreted as lashing out, though I'm not a therapist! Though there are also people who seemingly have it together IRL but still resort to libertarian dogma....Libertarianism can be extremely appealing to white men as it absolves them of all guilt, and in their own minds, elevates them. Toxic masculinity is a part of this as well, at least recently. The slur 'cuck' wouldn't be as widely used if it wasn't.”
While trolls are overwhelmingly white and male, there are outliers. Jessica Moreno, formerly of Reddit, used to run Redditgifts, the site’s Secret Santa-style gift exchange. Personal information provided by those who took part in the program offered insights into their offline lives. Moreno says just because a user engaged in trolling didn’t always mean they fit the popular image of a troll.
“The idea of the basement dweller drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos isn’t accurate,” Moreno told Time Magazine contributor Joel Stein. “They would be a doctor, a lawyer, an inspirational speaker, a kindergarten teacher. They’d send lovely gifts and be a normal person.”
Isabella Tangherlini wrote about her trolling past, which started when she discovered troll wiki Encyclopædia Dramatica as a teen and ended with her uneventful trolling of Chris-Chan, “a 24-year-old, high-functioning autistic man who made videos... about his fan-made comics and figurine collections” who somehow became a primary target for 4channers back in 2010.
I asked what she got out of trolling during the years she participated in it.
“I feel like it was my fascination with 4chan, and that kind of culture, and my age, and the fact that I was depressed, and I was going through an abusive relationship, and I had all these internal problems,” Tangherlini told me. “I would definitely say that it's almost like a cliché that the bully online, or the bully in school, is actually having a tough home life, but I would also feel uncomfortable suggesting that everybody on 4chan, or everybody that does this kind of thing, is depressed or somehow neurodivergent.”
In her writing, Tangherlini describes how one's internet personality and one's everyday personality ultimately meld, which had implications on her behavior away from her computer:
The thing about being an internet troll, though, is that eventually who you are online and who you are offline start to blur together. And when you post on places like 4chan, those two personalities meld into something uniquely unpleasant. To be short, I was a really mean high school sophomore. I would openly bash my Jewish classmates. Despite being [an out] member of the LGBT community myself, I freely used the word “faggot” in everyday speech... I saw nothing wrong with what I was doing or who I had become. For me, everyone was in on the joke. It wasn’t my fault if they couldn’t detect the sarcasm in my voice, or tell that I wasn’t really anti-Semitic or racist or homophobic. As far as I was concerned, the uninitiated were beneath my notice—4chan was like a secret club that only a few people could join, despite the millions of users worldwide who posted there.
“It starts with the language, but it doesn't really progress into a mentality for some. For me, it never really stuck, and today, after everything that I've done, everything I've gone through, everything I've learned in school, I guess my morals and my views align more with a social justice warrior, as they like to call it,” Tangherlini told me, referring to the supposed slur so-called men’s rights activists and like-minded types use against those who disagree with them. “It's kind of funny to me. I started off as one of these awful, awful trolls or awful 4chan-ers, and now I'm an SJW, and it's like, okay, call it what you want, but I'm still someone who spends too much time on the internet."
