![]() A “racist troll” sounds like someone who wears blackface on Halloween for the negative attention, not a white supremacist murderer who also likes memes. I grew up online, so I immediately recognized their strategy as trolling, but the best term I could muster-“racist troll”-felt insufficient. A then-shadowy white nationalist group calling themselves the alt-right started flooding Twitter with Pepe the Frog memes designed to not just hurt but also trigger outraged “normies” into spreading their hate for them. I had to think hard about the word “troll” in 2016, two years after Gamergate, while covering the presidential election for WIRED. As Ginger Gorman, an Australian journalist and author of the new book Troll Hunting, puts it: “Understanding lags far behind the actual practices of trolling.” For many people-those who have never been trolled, who tend to be men and are most often white-this notion of trolling persists unchallenged to the present day, creating the crisis of language in which we find ourselves. They did shape other’s online behavior, giving us internet adages like “Don’t feed the trolls,” but mostly they were pests. Others specialized in needling forums into no-winner arguments. During the internet’s infancy, users workshopped bothersome practical jokes like “ scrolling”-the Rickroll of its day. (It seems safe to assume the context is the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked organization sometimes referred to as a “Russian troll farm.”) His definition takes an admirable stab at corralling a feral idea-in a hopelessly outdated way. So I found it interesting, and a little alarming, when Robert Mueller offered up his own definition last week: Trolls are “internet users-in this context, paid operatives-who post inflammatory or otherwise disruptive content on social media or other websites.” It’s a footnote on an otherwise totally redacted page of his report on Russian influence in the 2016 election. ![]() Inside my brain (and in WIRED’s newsroom), when and where and why to use the word “troll” has become a point of agita, visited and revisited with each turn of the news cycle. ![]()
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