Troll (internet)

For the Wikipedia essay, see "What is a troll?".
For other uses see Troll (disambiguation)

A troll is someone who tries to make people angry by saying things on the Internet.^[1] The purpose is to excite strong emotion in an online community.^[2] This is to get a reaction from other online users,^[2] or to cause problems.^[3] In social networks platforms, a troll is a user who make inflammatory or inappropriate comments for the sole purpose of upsetting other users and provoking a response.^[4] If someone acts like a troll, this is called trolling.

Sometimes trolling can get a user banned from a website or platform as it can be disruptive. Some users do it to be humorous when they know others will be angry. The best solution is to ignore trolls and to not give them the attention they want. This has become known as "don't feed the trolls".

In October 2012, the internet news site Gawker, publicly revealed the name of an internet troll who had called himself "Violentacrez".^[5] Michael Brutcsh had collected photos of young girls from Facebook, often in bikinis or short skirts, and them posted them on the site Reddit.^[5] He also posted photos of women, taken without their permission, which focused on their breasts or bottoms. His actions made many people very angry. Brutsch said he was an internet troll because "...I just like riling people up in my spare time."^[6]

There are a lot of efforts to detect and ban trolls on social network platforms such as "TrollSpot"^[4] in which Li a user of the website and other members of the team whom are also users of the social media website use machine learning techniques or what is known as a computer robot to propose a wide approach to detect trolls.

The "Trollface" is an image that is occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture.^[7][8][9]

The term troll is subjective, meaning that it depends on interpretation. Trolling usually involves joking around to mess up other people or communities.

Sometimes, people may think a certain post is considered trolling, while others claim it is constructive, no matter how controversial this post is.^[10] Some strong acts of trolling involve harassment,^[11] but some acts of trolling are considered funny off-topic jokes.^[11]

The term Internet troll has also been applied to information warfare (competition for winning fame by taking advantage of the internet), hate speech, and even political activism.^[12][13]

According to Dr. Ashley Anderson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Trolling, or "Uncivil commentary" has the ability to strengthen the opinions of those who either are skeptical or supportive of a topic. The research also found that supportive commentary had no effect.^[14]

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