Internet Troll Quotes

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

The Dark Forces have created countless troll farms to relentlessly spam the Internet with their agendas. Trillions of fake accounts are used to create disinformation, create a fake majority opinion about topics, bully people who are putting out information the Dark Forces don’t like, and get people arguing with each other to create negative energy.

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

As if on a conveyer belt, there will be a never ending supply of idiots and jerks that come and go in your life. Whether you stop the belt to dance with any one of them is up to you.

As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and – the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on – my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ is, ‘You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.

So this is how cunts that never shag fuckin well live. A life oy impotence, resentment, anger and frustration; nae fuckin exuberance in life, forced tae become an Internet troll or a miserable drunk in a boozer.

One negative voice aimed at me has the incredible power to drown out a thousand positive ones. One of the greatest things I can achieve is to never let it.

He probably thinks pixies are a lesser species. Half-sentient, like gnomes and Internet trolls.

I remember a time where Trolls were a fictitious monster from fairy tales, not arseholes on the internet looking for attention.

It must be depressing to have your sole purpose in the universe be pointing out other people's mistakes. Am I right, Internet trolls, gossip columnists, and clergymen?

It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself: This is not normal. Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass. Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address. And that is not normal. It is fucked up.

Internet trolling wasn’t just a symptom, it was a canary. Trolls tested the boundaries of how far society would allow racism, misogyny, and transphobia to be normalized. Would anyone do anything? Would anyone take action? Would anyone powerful take this seriously? The answer turned out to be no. Those of us on the receiving end begged for help, and were told to grow a thicker skin, because the Internet “isn’t real life.” Until, surprise, the Internet became president, and we as a society were so inured to hate speech—our boundaries had been so thoroughly obliterated and “political correctness” so stigmatized—that we had no defense. There

When we hole up in our own trenches, we lose sight of reality. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind. Like the handful of anonymous internet trolls that are responsible for almost all the vitriol on Twitter and Facebook. And even the most caustic keyboard crusader may at other times be a thoughtful friend or loving caregiver.

What they get wrong is precisely this false belief that online prejudice is easily compartmentalized or categorized into, say, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism when really it flows freely between these various bigotries.

Look, I'm not here to lecture you about Eurocentricity or media bias; I just want to put forth the idea that maybe China has been the punching bag of the West for a very, very long time, and that nothing is gained from the continued demonization of its people... of my people. If you can accept that a single country can give birth to both a Donald Trump and a Donald Glover, a Steve Carell and a Stone Cold Steve Austin, you shouldn't have any difficulty accepting that the 1.3 billion people who call China home are just as varied in their ideologies and philosophies. There are the party officials, the pure-of-heart idealists, the Crazy Rich Asians, the activists, the social media influencers (smash that subscribe button!), the internet trolls and every conceivable thing in between–but perhaps most of all, there are the families like my parents, who simply did their best to stay out of trouble and survive from one day to the next.

There was something so unutterably ridiculous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of censorship that many other people began to protest.

Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.

The dream at the dawn of the internet age that giving everyone a platform would birth a new Enlightenment seems cringeworthy today, now that we are living with bots, trolls, flame wars, fake news, twitter shaming mobs, and online harrasment.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.

Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.

Are we all, at heart, just Internet trolls?

If people are hating on you it's often because they are: 1. Threathened by you, 2. Jealous of you or 3. Feeling like you're above them so they put you down to feel better about themselves. The greatest people have haters for a reason, so take it as a compliment. Haters gonna hate.

There’s no one thing that makes Caleb creepy. It’s not that he licks his lips until the skin shreds or that he talks incessantly about being “one of the nice guys” or even his habitual sweatpants boners. Rather, it is all of these things as a whole that lends to his overall air of Total Fucking Creep. An aura of Men’s Rights Activist. Eau de Internet Troll. Musk of Mansplainer.

I could certainly guess that your reading a book about internet trolls means you're interested in becoming one. I do encourage that, but only if you're going to don a white hat and promote the will of the real majority in civil tones.

If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.

Nearly all internet trolls are narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, difficult, uncivil, or toxic in other ways. Don’t descend into their mud puddles. Over time, if people stop giving oxygen to their fires, they will retreat back into their caves.

Back then, she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff's been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.

Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. Let’s be clear. There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. People who are indifferent are lame and scared. They’re couch potatoes and Internet trolls. In fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they give way too many fucks. They give a fuck about what everyone thinks of their hair, so they never bother washing or combing it. They give a fuck about what everyone thinks of their ideas, so they hide behind sarcasm and self-righteous snark. They’re afraid to let anyone get close to them, so they imagine themselves as some special, unique snowflake who has problems that nobody else would ever understand. Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices. They hide in a gray, emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitying, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life. Because here’s a sneaky truth about life. There’s no such thing as not giving a fuck. You must give a fuck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck.

There was one that was very clearly creepier than the rest of the normal creepiness. It is amazing how disconcerting a single vile, manipulative person can be even if you have never and (hopefully) will never see them. The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing. This was not the first time someone had made me feel this way, but it was the first time it had happened through the internet, and it was enough to make me want to withdraw from the whole thing for a moment.

The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.

there is no guarantee that an anonymity-free Internet would be a kinder, gentler Internet.

Trolls do not build.

Stay cool is the netiquette rule, if flamed. Responding is for a fool. NetworkEtiquette.net

Social Media and Internet is the new government. We are all members of the parliament. Be careful what you post, because it might change a life or it might take a life.

(My wife has a theory, but I won’t put it in print. Honestly, some days I feel more pity than disdain for the man.)

Flamers play chess, trolls poop on tic-tac-toe boards.

Pinky Kumar knew who she was - a social justice warrior. She wore that metaphorical badge with pride, laughing at those anonymous Internet trolls who used the phrase as a slur. What was wrong with being passionate and fiery and outraged? What was wrong with wanting the world to change, to expand its collective mind, to dig a little to find the last dregs of empathy it could find?

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

I have come to realise that the most critical of the social media accounts are the least verbal in real life and I can assure you that most social media trolls have no physical troll land to dwell.

Don't let yourself be swayed by stupid internet trolls and men too up their own asses to recognize that an eighteen-year-old girl's looks and actions and love life have no bearing on her professional abilities. Don't be a martyr because the shit you've faced in the past has convinced you that you don't deserve better this time around. You deserve it all and you should let yourself go after it.

There’s no “winning” when it comes to dealing with Internet trolls. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want? Are you sure they care what we do at all? From where I’m sitting, if I respond, I’m a sucker for taking the bait. If I don’t respond, I’m a punching bag. I’m the idiot daughter of an embarrassed dead guy. On the record. Forever.

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.

For me, pressure to lose weight from thin loved ones hurt more than even the harshest jibes from strangers or the cruelest internet trolls. It’s easy to disregard strangers: we know one another for only moments at a time. Few things sting like rejection from those we love most, or conditional love offered with the insistence that they just want to help. “I love you” doesn’t ring so true when it’s followed by “I just want to fix you.

Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem.

Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma.

Trolling does not say anything about the person you are trolling, but it is saying a lot on what kind of a person are you. It exposes you, your personality and your life. How you are raised, what are your values, thoughts, believes and where are you in life?

[When asked about the dangers of Internet trolls being able to say whatever they want because of false profiles] What interests me (if you ask me) in phenomenon – not only Facebook, but generally, this, let's call them 'staged identities' [...] – is how there can be more truth in the mask that you adopt than in your real, inner self. I always believed in masks; I never believed in the emancipatory potential of this gesture of 'let's tear off the masks.' [...] Let me give you a simple example. Let us say that I'm in reality a shy, impotent, stupid person, afraid...but then, in Internet reaction, I adopt a screen persona of a brutal, racist guy who humiliates people, beats women and so on...It's too easy to say, 'Oh, I'm really a coward, but there I imagined to be a powerful macho.' What if it's the opposite? What if I really am that brutal guy – but in real life, because of social pressure and so on, I oppress it...so that the true mask is my authentic, real self? And the truth comes out precisely in the guise of a fiction.

The display, which was called 'Can Democracy Survive the Internet?' was dedicated to a 'global election management' company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica claimed to have gathered 5,000 data points on every American voter online: what you liked and what you shared on social media; how and where you shopped; who your friends were... They claimed to be able to take this imprint of your online self, use it to understand your deepest drives and desires, and then draw on that analysis to change your voting behaviour. The boast seemed to be backed up by success: Cambridge Analytica had worked on the victorious American presidential campaign of Donald Trump; it had also run successful campaigns for US Senator Ted Cruz (twice); and others all across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America.

The internet has more or less been in its present form, technology just had to catch up. Trolls, death threats, porn, riveting discussion, free multimedia, art, fandoms, hacking, crimes against humanity and lonely people at your fingertips even on AOL, Compuserve or Prodigy.

Life would be so good when people choose to talk to each other instead of talking about each other in the wrong ways before finding out the facts, life would be so better when someone chooses to not give the hate speeches with no deep understanding, life would be great without internet trolls. One must always remember that destructive criticism is dangerous and instead, we must know that we always get to choose our reactions no matter what the situation is thus, always maintain your calm and avoid saying the hurtful words to another person when you have nothing to do with their life.

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. We

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardshop, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred is never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. The Republican Party of the 19th century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America's newly freed Black slaves were concerned; it is my belief that the Republican Party of the 21st century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embrace all things abhorrent to nonwhites. David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remain the same; white supremacist/ethno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What change were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke politics while Republicans embraced him.

Interesting fact: Though the Calm Act was unprecedented in stripping U.S. citizens of their basic Constitutional freedoms, it was surprisingly well-received in most areas of the country. In particular, its Internet censorship managed to kill off spam and trolling on the social networks. The sharing of cat videos continued undisturbed. For

Socratese was a famous IRL troll of pre-internets Greece credited with inventing the 1st recorded trolling technique and otherwise laying the foundation of western philosophy. Accounts of his successful trolls are in the form of TL;DR copypasta on Plato's livejournal. They have been causing all manner of butthurt and ass disaster for thousands of years in philosophy 101 classes around the world

In tone, the administration said that the NSS was all about championing America, but I wondered what America that was: the national/nativist state defined by blood, soil, and shared history? Or America the creedal nation, the Madisonian embodiment of Enlightenment ideals? I suspected that it was the former, since the champion, Donald Trump, had already alleged that American elections were “rigged,” three million people had voted illegally (all against him), the seat of government was a “swamp,” the free press was the “enemy of the people,” crime was at record rates, and the American judicial system was a “joke.” In all that, he sounded a lot like an Internet troll on a botnet controlled from Saint Petersburg. Or like Vladimir Putin. Whom he never could quite admit had worked to get him elected. But Putin had. And then some.

Where do you get your confidence?” is a complex, dangerous question. First of all, if you are a thin person, please do not go around asking fat people where they got their confidence in the same tone you’d ask a shark how it learned to breathe air and manage an Orange Julius. As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and— the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on— my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, “Where do you get your confidence?” is, “You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.

Be Impeccable with Your Word. This is not the same as radical honesty where you just spew everything out of your mouth that is “honest.” It just means if you say you will do something, do it. If you feel like you have to lie to make excuses, then just don’t say anything at all. Don’t Take Anything Personally. This is valuable advice in this era of Internet trolls and “outrage porn.” Don’t Make Assumptions. If someone is upset at you, for instance, who knows what might be going on in their life that you have no idea about? Also, don’t assume you won’t get a raise, or that someone doesn’t like you. Be curious. Ask questions. Be simple about finding out the truth in a situation before you jump to any assumptions. Always Do Your Best. If you know you aren’t cutting corners and always doing your best, then guaranteed you will do exactly the job you need to do.

Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.

One night, Abby, who knows I understand life best through metaphors, said this: “Glennon, I want us to think of our love as an island. On our island is you, me, the kids—and real love. The kind of love novels are written about and people spend lifetimes trying to find. The holy grail. The most precious thing. The thing. We have it. It’s still young and new, so we’re going to protect it. Imagine that we’ve surrounded our island with a moat filled with alligators. We will not lower the drawbridge to let anyone’s fear onto our island. On our island is only us and love. Leave anything else on the other side of the moat. Over there, it can’t hurt us. We’re here, happy on our island. Let them scream fear or hate, whatever. We can’t even hear it. Too much music. Only love in, babe.” Every time an internet troll, journalist, or fundamentalist minister shared self-righteous judgment, I’d smile and imagine his tomato-red face screaming on the other side of the moat, while Abby, the kids, and I kept dancing on our island. None of it could touch us.

The internet accelerates everything. And what it is most accelerating is human stupidity. It is destroying attention spans. It is making it impossible for people to study and think. It is reducing everything to infantile videos, memes and soundbites. It promotes trolling on a global scale. It spreads the Dunning-Kruger effect everywhere, and it makes people believe that their crazy, ignorant, half-baked opinions – based on total prejudice and refusal to think about a new subject for anything more than a second – should be broadcast across the globe. The internet is intensifying and magnifying mediocrity and hatred of everything that is difficult and excellent.

A smartphone allows you to choose your own adventure. So be a hero, not a villain. Don’t be your own worst enemy. No wasting time… No training your brain not to remember things, losing the skills necessary to read a fucking map… No trolling. Don’t make snarky remarks on comment threads or internet forums or social media. Just do good. Help others. If you’re out in the world and bored, which you shouldn’t be anyway, but still, if you feel like you need to get on your phone, be useful. Answer questions, offer advice. Look only for question marks when you scroll through your Facebook news feed. Log on to Reddit and comment on something you have firsthand knowledge of and real insight about. Give far more than you take. Never text and walk. And stop googling things as you think of them. Instead, write it down and look it up later. If you can’t remember to do this, then you didn’t deserve to know the answer. This will keep your mind active, agile; clear to really think. It will keep you sharp. Using the internet for information or socialization should be an activity, something you sit down for—it should not be used while out and about. You should not refuse the beauty of what’s in front of you for mere pixels of red, green, blue on a 3.5-inch screen. Otherwise, you’ll lose yourself. An abyss of ones and zeros will swallow you whole. Don’t be a dumb motherfucker with a smartass phone.

Maybe you'll express an opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by that wrong person. Maybe you'll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you online—stuff that can never be erases. Maybe you're a member of a demographic that is constantly targeted—you're a woman, you're black, you're trans, or any combination of these or other marginalised groups—and someone who wants to get people like you off "their" internet decides to take it upon them to make your life hell. Online abuses target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.

You should buy a potted plant.” I laugh at that as I sit on the wooden picnic table at the park in the dark, listening to Jack ramble through the speakerphone beside me. “A plant.” “Seriously, hear me out—you get a plant. You nurture it, keep it alive, and wham-bam, that’s how you know you’re ready for this whole thing.” “That’s stupid.” “No, it’s not. It’s a real thing. I saw it in that movie 28 Days.” “The zombie one?” “Nah, man, the Sandra Bullock one. You’re thinking about 28 Days Later.” “You steal your advice from Sandra Bullock movies?” “Oh, don’t you fucking judge me. It’s a hell of a lot better than that shit you keep making. And besides, it’s good advice.” “Buy a plant.” “Yes.” “Did you buy one?” “What?” “A plant,” I say. “Did you buy yourself a plant to prove you’re ready for a relationship?” “No,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I don’t need a plant to tell me what I already know,” he says. “I’m wearing a pair of emoji boxers and eating hot Cheetos in my basement apartment. Pretty sure the signs are all there.” “Emoji boxers?” I laugh. “Talk about a stereotypical internet troll.” “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he says. “This isn’t about me, though. We’re talking about you.” “I’m tired of talking about me.” “Holy shit, seriously? Didn’t think that was possible!” “Funny.” “Remember that interview you did on The Late Show two years ago?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” “You were stoned out of your mind, kept referring to yourself in third person.” “Fuck off.” “Pretty sure that guy would never be tired of talking about himself.” “You’re an asshole.” He laughs. “True.” “You get on my nerves.” “You’re welcome.” Sighing, I shake my head. “Thank you.” “Now go buy yourself a plant,” he says. “I was in the middle of a game of Call of Duty when you called, so I’m going to get back to it.” “Yeah, okay.” “Oh, and Cunning? I’m glad you haven’t drowned yourself in a bottle of whiskey.” “Why? Would you miss me?” “More like your fangirls might murder me if I let you destroy yourself,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re crazy. Have you seen some of their fan art? It’s insane.” “Goodbye, Jack,” I say, pressing the button on my phone to end the call

1. True trolls are internet users who set out to ruin someone else’s day. Everyone else is merely someone who disagrees with you, which is allowed. It is hard to differentiate between someone who is ‘generally disagreeable to the entire world’ and ‘currently disagreeing with me’. So we move to… 2. They can’t speak proper, innit. Their punctuation, spelling or grammar is so far round the spout it’s actually random. Of course, this could also indicate someone with a learning difficulty, so to be kind we need to check off some more identifying factors such as… 3. They say extremely unreasonable things. Not just ‘Yeah well, so what, copper?’ but posting on the Facebook memorial pages of murdered children that they deserved it, searching out women to call them whores, or sending rape and death threats. This isn’t normal debate. 4. They are not friends with logic. If you question them, ask them why or suggest substantiating this or that, they will scream, kick a table or call you a Nazi. 5. The sheer volume of their posts –either in word count or frequency –indicates a serious personality disorder. 6. If you saw them on the bus, you would sit elsewhere.

I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.

It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three

But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong. This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls6 claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves. The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone. But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.7 Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.

Just as Barlow declares independence from the tyrannies of corporate and governmental encroachment, trolls regard the Internet as their personal playground and birthright; as such, no one, not lawmakers, not the media, and certainly not other Internet users, should be able to dictate their behavior.

Previously framed by the media as the Internet Hate Machine, post–Wikileaks Anonymous has become synonymous with so-called hactivism and is frequently lauded as a progressive force for good. Or if not a force for “good,” then a force for something—that is, some political position or ideal.

Banning anonymous expression would therefore have little impact on groups already steeped in violence and abuse, and would risk stifling much more than online aggression—a high price to pay, especially when one considers the overwhelming political and social benefits of a free and open Internet.

To these early adopters—the vast majority of whom were white males—the Internet was a land of endless opportunity, something to harness and explore, something to claim.

The logic of privilege that undergirds trolls’ relationship to technology is itself undergirded by the ideals Americans are taught to hold most dear: namely, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, and furthermore, that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. American trolls in particular embrace these ideals, and when pressed on the ethics of their behavior, often cite what they presume to be their constitutionally protected right to irritate strangers on the Internet. For these trolls, the iconic line from the Declaration of Independence might be revised thusly: “All trolls are endowed by their Internet with certain unalienable Rights, among them Anonymity, Impunity, and the Pursuit of Lulz.

Everybody who is on the Internet is subject to insult, trolling, hating and cruelty. Most of these online assaults are dominance plays. They are attempts by the insulter to assert his or her own superior status through displays of gratuitous cruelty toward a target.

Q is like a stupid Internet Troll; he makes some strawman accusation against Picard, Picard refutes his argument with logic and reason, and Q just changes the terms of the argument, all the while enjoying the attention he’s getting. But does anyone create alt.q.die.die.die? No, of course not. Life is so fucking unfair.

The Internet has spawned an abusive malevolent platform that cyber stalkers and trolls can use to harm people in the real world and ruin their victims lives forever with their permanent posts. Cyberspace can also be used to hunt those that prey on innocent people, so that those who live by the malicious words may also feel the repugnant feeling of being stalked and hunted even in their own false sense of anonymity.

Sadly, society has always been burdened with those unable to deal with the knowledge that not everyone says, does and believes as they do. A few join the Time Police. Those rejected – even by the Time Police – as being too far gone to mix with people on a daily level usually went on to become internet trolls. Or politicians.

You need to get back to it.” “It doesn’t exactly pay the bills.” “Maybe. But you need to figure out how to love the life that you have, while you work on the life that you want. So you’ll find a job that pays the bills and sculpt at night. And on weekends.” She smiled. “That’ll keep you from trolling the internet and submitting fake real estate applications.

On the one hand, Meepsheep tells me worss on the Internet never hurr anyone. On the other hand, hecsays, 'At around age sixteen, I did do a lot of stuff that I now regret that I know had real-life impacts in people.

he was fifteen, released at eighteen. A bid for possessing child pornography a year later, and then our well-oiled system sent him back to the streets. That’s when he got smart and started trolling online with the other cyber creeps. The Internet is the biggest double-edged sword in our technological history, but it’s not going anywhere. The sickos get sicker and more numerous. The Internet gives them a hidden playground, and privacy laws actually protect them. Behind the group of beautiful women and waiting to be seated were a

Today, the job of being a politician feels like a fallback option for someone who can't make it as an internet troll.

Internet Trolls say snide things to aggravate others; as they think there is no comeback... Yet intelligent answers win the audience, and people question the morality together.

Every time we encounter a troll, we say, 'Another village is missing its idiot.' If the world is a Global Village, there must be plenty of Global Village idiots on the loose. They’re all trolling on social media.

Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.

I don't care if he posts about what he had for lunch sometimes; I want to know why that somehow gives him a free pass to post death threats on your service.

How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care?

So do you go to the police or not? Well, if you don't, people will claim that the abuse wasn't real because theres no police report about it. If you do enter the system, you have to accept that all of what I've detailed in this chapter is what you're facing; be willing to sign up for the years-long process in the event that case actually goes to trial; know you have little chance of seeing justice because legislation and law enforcement have not yet caught up with the pace of online crime; and, even if you re successful, accept that a court order may not do much to stop an obsessive abuser.

In some situations, the attempts to "do something about this" can directly stress the person being targeted or make their situation worse. One example from my own experience is that people frequently screenshot and send me something horrible someone has said about me to give me a "heads-up" when I have purposefully reorganized my life to keep that stuff as far away from me as possible.

Even if you stick mainly to mainstream sites, you've probably seen glimpses of the internet's underbelly in the comment section at the bottom of news articles. The article could be about local man saving a box of kittens from a burning building, but no matter: the comments will accuse him of hating dogs, setting the building on fire in the first place, and secretly being Barack Obama's Kenyan uncle.

cada día, millones de personas escribían en foros de Internet en España, y un gran porcentaje de ellas (entre las que se encontraban las dos víctimas) respondían al perfil de meros trolls que se escondían tras un teclado para descargar su frustración con el mundo. Podía ser una práctica más o menos reprochable, pero no era motivo para matar a nadie.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it's profoundly dehumanizing to listen to a virulent the angry stranger shout about how horrible you are to people who are primed to hate you.

Internet Inquisitors harness this fandom to make money. Multiple websites have been set up since the beginning of GamerGate to pander to this audience, gaining ad revenue and a following. YouTube, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo, Patreon, and other money-making platforms are leveraged by the more opportunistic among them.

A cancel culture is people who have failed in life. People who failed to accomplished anything good .People who have failed to be themselves and to accept themselves. There is no successful person, Who can try to take away someone's plate or who can try to destroy what someone has built, because they know what does it take to accomplish and to achieve something.

In internet slang, a “troll” is an attention seeker who traffics in inflammatory rhetoric to antagonize and sow chaos and discord.

Here was a loose collection of secularists, rationalists, libertarians, and weirdos—freethinkers whom YouTube elevated to the same stage as learned scholars. Their videos tackled heavy stuff, like free will and human nature, mixing academic discourse (or the pretense of it) with delightful internet trolling.

Social media people would rather support your beef than support your hustle. They rather share your memes rather than share your business posts.

On social media, you will be fighting someone who is nobody. Who is trying so hard to be somebody by fighting you? Most people are not sane or normal and some are lost, broken, angry, hungry, bitter, and jealous. Never experienced any love or attention. They have nothing they have worked for and nothing to lose. You should not entertain anyone and everything on Social Media.

People feel like they can say whatever they want to say on social media, because of whatever is happening, or they comment on. It Is far away from them. Until they learn that their words had a negative impact on the situation or on someone. Is then they preach to be kind to others trying to cleanse their soul and consciousness. What keyboard worriers don’t know. Most of their suffering, bad luck, misfortune, and a curse. It Is because of the things they said with their banner, catfish, and anonymous accounts. It is karma for their action.

Trolls do not build.' - Aragorn (as Strider)