You got to pay the Troll’s Toll
What is a troll? Well, Trolls are totally different from what they used to be. See, before the creation of the internet, Trolls used to be seen as people who live under a bridge who charge you money to pass over the bridge. As scary and creepy as they are usually portrayed to be, most trolls ironically are portrayed as very short creatures. Above is the Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Frank Reynolds (played by Danny DeVito) acting as a Troll in a play. Most trolls are portrayed similar to him as short creatures who are mean and extremely angry.
As for the new, modern age Internet troll. South Park had a very interesting take on what a troll may look like. As you can see from the GIF above, most of the trolls appear to be deformed. Then, we are introduced to the most gifted troll, Gerald Broflovski. Broflovski is considered the main troll the show chooses to follow. He goes by the name “Skankhunt42”. The eye-opener that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are trying to prove is that anyone, I mean anyone, can be a troll. You never know who it will be. Broflovski is a successful lawyer, with a loving wife and two children; one of his kids, Ike, is adopted. His character background is that he is a nice, happy, successful and “normal” adult male. However, what he does behind closed doors, is rather graphic. He trolls his entire town and even made it to the national stage. He actually trolled a Danish athlete into killing her self. I say all of that to say that Trolls are not what they used to be and it is not always who you think it is either. The “usual suspects” are most of the time innocent. It is those that you least expect. Now, I am not urging or advising you to confront the people you never thought of but it is an interesting thought.
As for the actual topic of this post, the community I selected was the Baltimore Beatdown. In this blog community, Trolls exists in many different forms. Sometimes, they can just attack you for your opinion/take regardless of what they believe. They just want to get a rise out of the writer by simply harshly disagreeing. However, sometimes they take it one step further and attack the writer personally. We had an issue where a writer was attacked via a troll. What we did, and surprisingly the rest of the commenters did, was block the username, alert the site in which they banned his IP address from making an account/commenting and move on. The rest of commenters ignored his out of place comment and moved on. Most of the community did not feed into his trolling because thats what the troll wants. The troll wants attention, they want to see people get upset/angry. If you do not feed into them, they will go away. In essence, if you do not cross the proverbial bridge, you will not see the troll for too long. Whitney Phillips talks about this in, “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”. She says, “almost immediately, troll profiles began friending other troll profiles…forming an antisocial network of sorts”. Misery likes company and trolls need attention from anywhere they can get it.
