internet trolls Q3 (kieron)

Internet trolls

An internet troll is a person who creates or does something usually off topic and can be offensive to another internet user or group to get an emotional response out of them. The online groups that are usually attacked are blogs, discussion forums and chat rooms. This act is known as ‘Trolling’; in the earlier days of the internet this was known as ‘Flaming’.

There are predominantly three types of trolls: ‘Mischievous Trolls’, ‘Mindless Trolls’, ‘Destructive Trolls’,

Mischievous Trolls:

A Mischievous troll will have a very small game and will not be that annoying and maybe even funnier, they have no intention to start a fight but just to be in and out with using just a picture or response.

This is an example of Mischievous trolling, a Reddit user has claimed that 4chan will always have better original content (OC), to this a group of playtime trolls have pretended to not know what OC stands for and flooded the thread with potential answers. This is not is meant to be malicious but a little bit annoying and funny.

Mindless Trolls:

Mindless trolls will write a post which will be so unintelligent that it will create a response from the user group, normally one of annoyance but can also be funny. These kind of trolls can also destroy a site, for example Yahoo Answers which was developed to ask and answer questions has been mostly taken over by mindless trolls who use it to create funny stories and questions to anger or make people laugh.

This is an example from Yahoo answers of someone who has put a ridiculous question up; because of this mindless trolling, serious questions can often be overlooked or misunderstood. These types of trolls have given birth to a new kind of troll called the anti-troll, these are trolls that troll trolls e.g. they will reply to a statement made by a troll with an even more brainless answer.

Here the troll has asked a silly question of how to win a Facebook poke war and the anti-troll has reply with an impossible suggestion to win thus shutting down the original troll. Anti-trolls are also known for making fake videos to annoy other trolls or make up a myth e.g. the Slenderman. On June 8th 2009 a paranormal Photoshop picture contest was held on the ‘Something Awful’ forum, the idea was to take a normal photo and make it look creepy and the winning picture would be posted on paranormal themed sites and blogs with full credentials. One contestant submitted two images containing a mythical being that was named the Slenderman, this was then accidently pick up on 4chan’s /x/ board and spread. On June 20th 2009 the YouTuber ‘Marble Hornets’ started to upload video’s of tapes that his friend who was being stalked by Slenderman had made, this gave ‘proof’ that Slenderman existed. This freaked out and fooled so many people including myself and is still one of the best examples of an anti-troll at work.

Destructive Trolls:

Destructive trolls can be very dangerous they will usually be in groups and target one person or a site until the site or person is forced offline. A case of destructive trolls targeting a person is the Jessie Slaughter case. Jessie Leonhardt was a micro celebrity in the StickyDrama community on YouTube known for her attention seeking behaviour. A user on YouTube made up a rumour about her to which she replied to via video, this got posted on 4chan (the home of trolls). Soon she started to get trolled by Anonymous and 4chan and she made the mistake of replying to them personally saying negative things about 4chan and its users, this led to Anonymous finding out where she lived and her phone number, this lead to her getting prank calling and things getting delivered to her house, but she kept replying to the troll and got her dad to reply which just added fuel to the fire and soon she started getting death threats, this lead to police getting involved and Jessie being not allow online for three days this only made her create an apology video.

There are a number of websites that are home to trolls, the main one is ‘4chan’. ‘4chan’ was started on the 1st of October 2003 by 15 year old Christopher Poole, 4chan is an image posting site with 52 boards. On the internet it is known as /b/ which is the name of one of its boards called ‘Random’ this is a board with no rules where a lot of trolls will plan attacks on sites. 4chan are famous for high profile trolling attacks one example of this was when they hacked into the ‘Google’ website and planted a Nazi Swastika on the hot trends page, this was there for a few hours before Google could remove it. Although 4chan are responsible for a number of these trolling events they also keep an eye on inappropriate material and have been known to ban users and give info to the police about users who act inappropriately.

I believe that trolling can be playful and funny but can also be very serious. I think that if the serious trolling leading to police investigations keeps happening that the internet might have to be regulated, yet this would stop the whole point of the internet and its freedom of speech.