User blog:3krok/About Trolls and Trolling

This blog'll tell you about what essentially is --trolling--.

What's a troll?
Essentially, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. The noun troll may refer to the provocative message itself, as in: "That was an excellent troll you posted."

While the word troll and its associated verb trolling are associated with Internet discourse, media attention in recent years has made such labels subjective, with trolling describing intentionally provocative actions and harassment outside of an online context. For example, mass media has used troll to describe "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families."

Identity and anonymity
Early incidences of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to the creation of any content that targets another person. The Internet dictionary NetLingo suggests there are four grades of trolling: playtime trolling, tactical trolling, strategic trolling, and domination trolling. The relationship between trolling and flaming was observed in open-access forums in California, on a series of modem-linked computers in the 1970s, like CommuniTree which when accessed by high school teenagers became a ground for trashing and abuse. Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by deindividuation or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals, Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group.

According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter and Groningen, Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who has studied online behavior for 20 years, "Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."

In academic literature, the practice of trolling was first documented by Judith Donath (1999). Donath's paper outlines the ambiguity of identity in a disembodied "virtual community" such as Usenet

Donath provides a concise overview of identity deception games which trade on the confusion between physical and epistemic community.

Donath's Paragraph
Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroups members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group. Trolls can be costly in several ways. A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the newsgroup community. Furthermore, in a group that has become sensitized to trolling – where the rate of deception is high – many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trollings. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon venturing a first posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations. Even if the accusation is unfounded, being branded a troll is quite damaging to one's online reputation.

Troll Sites
While many webmasters and forum administrators consider trolls a scourge on their sites, some websites welcome them. For example, a New York Times article discussed troll activity at 4chan and at Encyclopedia Dramatica, which it described as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore". This site and others are often used as a base to troll against sites that their members can not normally post on. These trolls feed off the reactions of their victims because "their agenda is to take delight in causing trouble".

Gold Memberships
So-called Gold Membership trolling originated in 2007 on 4chan boards, users posting fake images claiming to offer upgraded 4chan account privileges; without a "Gold" account, one could not view certain content. This turned out to be a hoax designed to fool board members, especially newcomers. It was copied and became an Internet meme. In some cases, this type of troll has been used as a scam, most notably on Facebook, where fake Facebook Gold Account upgrade ads have proliferated in order to link users to dubious websites and other content.

Speaking of which, Click here to get your Chill Sonic Fanon Gold Membership.

Controversy in the USA
On March 31, 2010, the Today Show ran a segment detailing the deaths of three separate adolescent girls and trolls' subsequent reactions to their deaths. Shortly after the suicide of high school student Alexis Pilkington, anonymous posters began trolling for reactions across various message boards, referring to Pilkington as a "suicidal slut", and posting graphic images on her Facebook memorial page. The segment also included an expose of a 2006 accident, in which an eighteen-year old fatally crashed her father's car into a highway pylon; trolls emailed her grieving family the leaked pictures of her mutilated corpse.

Controversy in Australia
In February 2010, the Australian government became involved after trolls defaced the Facebook tribute pages of murdered children Trinity Bates and Elliott Fletcher. Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy decried the attacks, committed mainly by 4chan users, as evidence of the need for greater Internet regulation, stating, "This argument that the Internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west." Conroy has been noted in the past for his advocacy of Internet censorship. In the wake of these events, Facebook responded by strongly urging administrators to be aware of ways to ban users and remove inappropriate content from Facebook pages.

Controversy in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, contributions made to the Internet are covered by the Communications Act 2003. Sending messages which are "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" is an offense whether they are received by the intended recipient or not.[31] As of September 2011, two persons have been imprisoned in the UK for trolling. Several high profile cases of trolling have been reported in the United Kingdom, with there being wide disparity between the action taken against assailants. In the case of teenager, Natasha MacBryde, who died a tragic death, the troll of her testimonial page, Sean Duffy, was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison and banned from using social networking sites for five years. This compared with Jamie Counsel being sentenced to four years for trying to incite riots and those who trolled the testimonial page of Georgia Varley facing no prosecution due to misunderstandings of the legal system in the wake of the term trolling being popularized.

Trolls on the Chill Sonic Fanon Wiki
A troll on Chill is a person who cannot take being kicked, banned or blocked by yours truly, so they pussy into a contributor and vandalise a bunch of pages nobody edits anymore.

"Feeding the Trolls"
However you like to put it, feeding the trolls is actually acknowledging the user that they are a troll/trolling, if you see a vandal on Chill, don't acknowledge them as a troll, because that's what they want.