“These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. And that could not be further from the truth,” says Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University and the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And maybe they do only a small percentage of the actual trolling.
At the end of July, feminist writer Jessica Valenti said she was leaving social media after receiving a rape threat against her daughter, who is 5 years old.īut maybe that’s just people who call themselves trolls. In June of this year, Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter, on which he had nearly 35,000 followers, after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages.
In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. In 2011, trolls descended on Facebook memorial pages of recently deceased users to mock their deaths. For complete access, we encourage you to become a subscriber. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.įor a limited time, TIME is giving all readers special access to subscriber-only stories. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. There’s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims.
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