
…en eliminated. In the psychological field, this is called “deindividuation”. The concept is simple. First, the online user discovers the news article or post in question; second, they read/skim it all while making initial judgements based on what they read; and third, they identify which position will be held as the ‘typical’ one, and therefore, they decide to “troll”- that is, they purposely provoke other users into emotional discord & unrest, often by posting inflammatory remarks which seek to derail a potentially civil conversation into a more extraneous one. Despite its commonality, the existence of “internet trolls” does not seem to be an issue of most so…