Trolling is a art

Trollface - the universal mascot of trolls.

The internet gives us a tremendous ability to experiment, particularly with our identities. Thanks to anonymity, we can play different roles without being discovered. Online relationships can become just as emotional and complex as in real life, and games like World of Warcraft have huge social factions. Sometimes our online selves are quite different; I have a friend whose mother got "married" to another player in EverQuest. Humans have long been obsessed with pretending and playing, but we're juggling more identities than ever. As Sherry Turkle discussed in Aspects of the Self, the freedom to have separate online personae can be a positive outlet and a means of self discovery, or it can exacerbate our worst tendencies.

We all encounter some degree of trolling in our daily browsing habits. Youtube comments are notorious for it (some people have even have taken combat mechanisms into their own hands). Pretty much every popular movie has a troll thread on IMDB. It's already difficult to determine the tone of communication on the internet, with subtler devices like sarcasm often getting misinterpreted. Sometimes it's difficult to tell when we're being trolled. Some forms of trolling can have very real effects on our lives, though, particularly when perpetrated by groups. Consider the recent case of Jessica Leonhardt (aka Jessi Slaughter). A foul-mouthed 11-year-old girl made a Youtube video that quickly made her the target of the infamous /b/ board (a sub-forum on 4chan.org where every poster is anonymous and where trolls often congregate). This lead to /b/ finding her family's personal information and barraging them with calls and even death threats. Did /b/ go too far? In this case, I'd say yes. Her family may have handled the situation poorly, but someone that age should be allowed to make a mistake. This is just one of many cases where /b/ has taken things to an extreme with serious real-life consequences. Though as we've seen in the case of Jason Fortuny, individuals can take things to an extreme as well. An anonymous group is much harder to regulate, though, and /b/ often feeds its own mischievous inertia.

So, what causes trolling in the first place? As Turkle discussed, the way our lives bleed into our play-acting (on the internet or elsewhere) can be very complex. A bad parental relationship could lead to a MUD player exposing other players' identities. These connections are completely invisible to those of us spectating on the internet. Most of the time, though, I think the cause can be formulated much more simply. To paraphrase Penny Arcade (warning - vulgar language), normal person + anonymity + audience = troll. The internet isn't the cause of trolling; it just provides the anonymity and audience in the equation. The impulse to troll has been around long before the existence of the internet.

Some have suggested "lifting the veil of anonymity" to combat trolling. As harmful as trolling can be, I disagree. As Mattathias Schwartz said in The Trolls Among Us, "All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate." We can't eliminate trolling without destroying free speech, and anonymity online has positive uses as well (whistle blowing and positive identity experimentation, for instance). To stop all insulting behavior is an unreasonable censure. I don't think there's any way to make trolls accountable without diminishing anonymity. Some have suggested the solution of majority moderation to flag harmful comments. For instance, letting users join together to flag or ban a commenter, much like the wizard's final solution in A Rape in Cyberspace. Sites like Reddit have a democratic system where every comment is voted up or down, and comments that are voted below a certain threshold are hidden from users. The problem with this is the resulting prevalence of the "hive mind." Non-troll commenters with unpopular opinions get crushed swiftly, leading to a rather single-minded mob mentality. Some checks and balances are good, but even that can go too far. I think the solution is ultimately a combination of education and common sense. Educated internet users won't be abused so easily. Teaching people how to make and store secure passwords will make them less vulnerable to hacking. Parents tracking their childrens' internet activity goes a long way. Since much of trolling is based on attention-seeking, simply ignoring trolls can solve the issue in most cases. As the classic adage goes, "don't feed the trolls."