Sometimes it can be entertaining or educational to employ humor, sarcasm, cynicism, and “snark” to make a point. Other times it can be malicious and destructive – even deadly. In this section of the site we do our best to break it down so you don’t get wrapped up in a time-wasting exercise…or buy in to deadly disinformation.
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The Bad-Faith Interrogator
The Bad-Faith Interrogator is a variant of the “just asking questions” technique often employed today by media personalities to make…
About “Know Your Troll”
Among the key media literacy skills in the 21st century world of “everything is online” is the ability to identify and neutralize “trolls.”
Contrary to popular belief, “trolling” didn’t start with the internet. One can readily see examples of the behavior throughout history.
For one classic historical example, there’s Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (Full title: “A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick”). We encourage the reader to take a look for themselves, but also the Wikipedia article on this essay does a thorough job of deconstructing the reasons why the troll was effective.
It’s hardly a “spoiler” three hundred years on to summarize: Swift first sets up a narrative decrying conditions of extreme poverty among the Irish while narrating in a tone intended to evoke distaste for the narrator, who is clearly intended to be of the “upper classes.” Then he slowly reveals through the narrative that the fundamental basis of the proposal is for poor Irish to sell their children to the wealthy and privileged…as food.
A little later in the same century some of the works of Benjamin Franklin, published under feminine pseudonyms “Silence Dogood” and and “Polly Baker,” continued this tradition, which extends to the present day.
Unfortunately as with nearly any worthwhile human endeavor one could point to lesser practitioners and those acting with malice and avarice have often appropriated and usurped these tactics to do considerable harm. This harm includes causing people to lose their jobs over fabricated accusations, sending police on fake calls that in the hopes they’ll go bad and someone will get hurt, engaging in other forms of stochastic terrorism on every level from the personal to the international, and even intentionally driving marginalized people already suffering from mental illness to self-harm and even suicide.
In a more odious and ominous example from the 20th century, the choice to label the unquestionably hard right wing fascist-totalitarian government of Germany leading up to and during World War II as the “National Socialist German Workers Party” represents a type of trolling as well – one that neo-Nazis to this day continue to lean on in attempting to support claims that the Nazis were leftists. Every single one of the disinformation tactics and strategies described by Orwell in “1984” of information manipulation can be found in the tactics of “trolls,” both online and offline, often with consequences as dire and severe as those Orwell described in his fiction.
For nearly any given identity or interest group represented online, the majority of those assuming related labels these days are, to be entirely blunt, frauds. Social media is flooded with “leftist” pages run by obvious crooks and thieves; ethnic identity groups selling t-shirts to those who romanticize and exoticize other ethnic groups (in a recent bit of investigative analysis for an article on another site, this author found only one “Native American” group that was provably operated by people of Native American descent; the rest are clickbait farms and t-shirt shops operating out of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Pakistan).
This section of Custode.Org endeavors to help the reader more readily identify and understand the various tactics of trolls and how those tactics are used to distract, delegitimize, and disempower those who are already marginalized, oppressed, and abused. While it’s true that some trolling is entirely harmless and humorous, it is a dark reflection on the human spirit of the twenty-first century how often these tactics are engaged to inflict serious harm on innocent people, often by the very systems and ideologies that were already oppressing those people in the first place.