Interesting article about internet trolls and behavior

[Spider-Man]

There's a fascinating article on NYTimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=7&_r=1) about internet trolls, their behavior, and how they perceive the world. There's much more than that, but it touches upon some of the biggest internet events, good and bad, of the past few years and some of the people behind them.

Check it out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/myspace_com/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com (http://mydeathspace.com/), a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

[GWOtaku]

As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said.
“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”

Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”And that's pretty much the sum of it. They're sad people that feel pain or inadequacy and can only feel satisfied by trying to push it on others. The excuses and justifications of these people are a joke. I'm not sure whether what I feel most is pity or disgust.

[Juu-kuchi]

And that's pretty much the sum of it. They're sad people that feel pain or inadequacy and can only feel satisfied by trying to push it on others. The excuses and justifications of these people are a joke. I'm not sure whether what I feel most is pity or disgust. I personally lean towards disgust.

[SirLemming]

“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.
As soon as we're Vulcans, he means. Because as long as people have emotions, you can expect this to happen.

People will go to great lengths and invoke an endlessly wide range of philosophical and psychological principles to justify being inconsiderate to other people and doing whatever they feel like. It's bad enough when they just do this as an attempt to be funny -- playing a joke on you and then saying you're stupid because you don't know it's a joke, which to me defeats the whole spirit of the thing -- but the "cyberbullying" mentioned in this article absolutely deserves to be treated like a crime. Absolutely. It doesn't matter what crappy excuse you come up with or what your motivation is; hacking into web sites, stealing people's personal information, harrassing people over the phone, and vandalizing their property are all criminal behavior.

[Shawn Hopkins]

There's nothing really wrong with screwing around and being stupid on the Internet. It's pretty easy to ignore some guy who's just messing with you on a message board.

But I guess not everyone stops there. Calling a dead kid's family goes way too far. It's just more evidence that anonymity brings out the worst in human nature.

Edit: I finally got to read the whole article, and I think I understand the situation better. You know how a fork is a useful tool, and most people use it as intended: to eat? But then if you give it to certain types of people they're likely to act on their impulse to stick it in your eye?

That seems to about sum up the extreme troll mindset presented here. Except trolls are of course even worse because they are protected from all consequence by anonymity. And disregarding all the whiny excuses about how they're just giving people what they deserve or somehow making the world better that they use to deal with the cognitive dissonance their acting out their destructive impulses must cause them.

[Old Guy]

Took me 30 minutes, but I read it. lol. Yea, it was interesting stuff but nothing we didn't already know. Trolls are losers with nothing better to do. Or in some cases crooks who are trying to steal your money like that last kid they interviewed who was making $10 million a year.

[Toonfan2000]

But I guess not everyone stops there. Calling a dead kid's family goes way too far.

It's not only the dead kid's family; recently there was a case of a old lady in Texas who interpreted a humorous "Pool's Closed" sign as a racist attack against her children. TV news stories from San Antonio appeared on YouTube and she soon began getting calls from "Anonymous" people. What kind of losers flood peoples' phones with calls about stupid internet BS?

And I find it sad that the trolls they interviewed were above the age of 20; and also I perceive most trolls as high schoolers/college students with no life beyond school and the computer screen, and have no intention of taking up a legitimate hobby or leaving the house for anything beyond school (or in the college's case, leaving the campus).