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A timely article in the NYT today on trolling....
I think it gives a lot of insight:
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word ?troll? to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a ?pseudo-na?ve? tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, ?If you don?t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.?
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling ? for provoking strangers online ? have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
?Lulz? is how trolls keep score. A corruption of ?LOL? or ?laugh out loud,? ?lulz? means the joy of disrupting another?s emotional equilibrium. ?Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,? said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: ?You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.?
Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works ?typical Clark Kent I.T.? freelance jobs ? Web design, programming ? but his passion is trolling, ?pushing peoples? buttons.? Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as ?experiments,? sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a ?str8 brutal dom muscular male.? More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the expos? ?the Craigslist Experiment.? This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she?d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan?s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story ? respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl ? was a media sensation.
In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls? crosshairs. Their personal information ? e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers ? spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words ?I did it for the lulz.? Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan?s classmates, the blog called Megan a ?drama queen,? so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. ?Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.? In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.
This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog?s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public?s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan?s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff?s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. ?What?s he going to sue me for?? he asked. ?Leading on confused people? Why don?t people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it?s true??
Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation?s Web site. Trolls had flooded the site?s forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.
WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.
HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins intentionally left enabled is hacking?
WEEV: it?s hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral line somewhere.
Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. ?Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,? he told me. ?Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.?
?So the message is ?buy a helmet,? and the medium is a bat to the head?? I asked.
?No, it?s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you?re on the Internet, you need to take precautions.? A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.
On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on the hill.
We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.
?You have green hair,? he told me. ?Did you know that??
?No,? I said.
?Why not??
?I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.?
?That?s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you?re a terrible reporter.?
?What do you mean? What did I do??
?That?s a very interesting reaction,? Fortuny said. ?Why didn?t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?? If I were certain that I wasn?t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling ?victims? to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
Re: A timely article in the NYT today on trolling....