Not all Trolls live under a Bridge
Recently I watched a documentary on BBC 3 called “Troll Hunter” which followed the adventures of powerful internet personality and victim of pretty brutal online harassment Em Ford, a YouTube makeup artist and blogger, most famous for her viral-ish video where she addresses her many, many “haters” and the comments made about her face and acne, she then took it one step farther by taking part in a documentary where she would hunt down and publicly shame the infamous online Trolls and these aren’t your everyday challenge your sexual orientation or claim to have carnal relations with your mother type Trolls, oh no. These are the heavy rape threats to your family or create websites dedicated to their hatred of you type of Trolls, this show would put an end to their reign of tyranny, sounds pretty cool right?
Well… not exactly.
Most of the documentary only really tackled what an internet Troll is and how evil and immoral these Horny keyboard worriers are, rather than the actual underline thought process behind their Troll like behavior, however there was something that caught my eye, once you skip past the 50 minutes of specialists explaining what a Troll is, and CSI level investigation tactics, you get to something pretty interesting.
Em and her gang of “Troll hunters” (see what I did there) tracked down a notorious online bully who has been attacking famous British author Louise Mensch with their powerful rape threats on twitter and other various social Media, and somehow got him to agree to an interview, the answers he gave were pretty interesting and kind of delusional, talking as if he was part of some kind of major revolution and goes as far to compare himself to Zorro, boy would that of changed the movies, and treats his online profile like a weird golden baby, but the one answer that really peeked my interest was right at the end.
Do you think you’ll ever stop doing this?
Well the short answer was no, but his reasoning was honestly pretty sad, stating that he’s in his 40’s now and stuck in a dead end job, that he gets nothing for everything he does, pretty much straight up saying that his past time trolling is the only victory in his life if you can call it that, the one thing he can be proud of in his life, the pinnacle of his achievements, is sending softcore porn and inappropriate messages at celebrities that pissed him off in one shape or form.
Now I know what you’re thinking, why is this surprising? Internet Trolls tend to be sad sacks of shit, they’re just taking their anger out on the rest of the world, or they’re saying assholely things online because they want to say it in real life but don’t have the balls, however I disagree, I believe it goes a lot deeper than that.
Something about seeing each other through computer screens twists our perception of one another, we let what we observe of someone online dictate who they are and what they are like as a person, think about the guy on Facebook who goes to a new country every week or that rich woman on Instagram who seems to have all the money on the planet, when in reality their lives are never that perfect.
So when a Troll sees a profile post something that they strongly disagree with, be it a Facebook post, YouTube video or even a medium article they’re going to think the poster is the scum of the earth, and will react accordingly, by sending callous and hurtful comments to people they don’t truly know.
If a Troll were to meet their online enemies in the flesh things wouldn’t go down anywhere near as angrily, take the encounter I mentioned from Troll Hunters for example when Louise Mensch had a run in with her online aggressor, did the guy get enraged when he saw her? Did he start yelling rape threats and present her with more softcore porn?
Hell to the no.
If anything it was just super awkward, both parties were just standing there wondering what the hell to say to one another, I mean this is supposed to be the grand finale of the show but it looked like one of those awkward run ins with a family members whose name you can’t remember, just sort of standing there hoping that they’ll leave.
So if Trolls aren’t compete dicks in real life, how exactly do you distinguish Trolls from ordinary people? Well I’m glad you asked random person, a study done back in 2014 by the University of Manitoba sought to discover just that, and boy did they.
Researchers conducted a personality test on hundreds of internet users and found that 5.6% of these users self-identified as internet Trolls and enjoyed the act of trolling, researchers noticed a recurring trend within this 5.6% personality tests, the people who enjoyed trolling as a pass time tended to have higher rates of “dark traits” such as narcissism, psychopathy and everybody’s favorite sadism aka the enjoyment of inflicting or observing the pain of others.
Now despite how it sounds these dark traits are not just exclusive to murderers and rapists, in fact internet trolls normally come under a category known as “everyday sadism” what is everyday sadism I hear you cry, well it’s pretty much exactly as it sounds, someone who still enjoys basking in the pain of others, but to a lesser degree, take for example people who enjoy watching people beat the crap out of each other in boxing matches, or people at the work place who act like an asshole for no real reason, hell even people who are really into BDSM, you know who you are.
So if Trolls aren’t sadistic assholes how exactly do they act in real life? Well as far as I can tell they’re just like you and me, they love, they hate (a little too much), they fear, they’re people, people trying to find something meaningful in their lives, just like everyone else, sure it’s through an online persona that seems completely stupid and excessive to me, and believe me I’m not justifying the things they say or do, but it’s their way of expressing themselves, kind of like me writing this article.
A Troll is less of a person and more of an expression of ones emotions or opinion projected on to a computer screen, much like them we only see one side of the real person, we only see their misguided attempt at garnering attention and not the person who truly needs it.
