Farhad Manjoo criticises this view, noting that if the person really is trolling, they are more intelligent than their critics would believe. 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 actually believe the controversial views they claim. Such usage goes against the ordinary meaning of troll in multiple ways. Īt times the word is incorrectly used to refer to anyone with controversial, or differing, opinions. The " Trollface" is an image occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture. Some believe this to be bad or incomplete advice for effectively dealing with trolls. Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore them, because responding tends to encourage trolls to continue disruptive posts – hence the often-seen warning: "Please don't feed the trolls". Regardless of the circumstances, controversial posts may attract a particularly strong response from those unfamiliar with the robust dialogue found in some online, rather than physical, communities. Whether someone intends to disrupt a thread or not, the results are the same if they do." Popular recognition of the existence (and prevalence) of non-deliberate, "accidental trolls", has been documented widely, in sources as diverse as Nicole Sullivan's keynote speech at the 2012 Fluent Conference, titled "Don't Feed the Trolls" Gizmodo, online opinions on the subject written by Silicon Valley executives and comics. That is, trolls purposely disrupt forums.
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Īs noted in an OS News article titled "Why People Troll and How to Stop Them" (25 January 2012), "The traditional definition of trolling includes intent. 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. Trolling online can be seen in many different forms. 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.
The advice to ignore rather than engage with a troll is sometimes phrased as "Please don't feed the trolls."Īpplication of the term troll is subjective. 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. 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". Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. īoth the noun and the verb forms of "troll" are associated with Internet discourse. Even so, Internet trolling can also be defined as purposefully causing confusion or harm to other users online, for no reason at all.
This is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or manipulating a political process. In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as social media ( Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog), with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception. A revision of a Wikipedia article shows a troll vandalizing an article on Wikipedia by replacing content with an insult.