The first step to mounting a defense is understanding who is harassing you. That starts with the troll archetypes, and there are three.
The Thinker
These are few and far between, but they are absolutely critical to the mechanism of organized online abuse. They choose the targets, twist the facts, and fabricate the stories. They also provide, for those who require it, the justification (however questionable) that what they are doing is not only justified, but righteous.
The Zombie Army
They aren’t the best and brightest, but they have wifi, plenty of free time, and a desire to hate and hurt someone. They will go where they are pointed and repeat what they are told by the Thinkers. If you find yourself astonished that so many people believe the same outrageous lie about you, you have these trolls to thank.
The Zealot
This person crosses the line from trolling to obsession. They might create an entire website devoted to hating you, show up at your events, Facebook message your mom, or even send a false performance complaint to your boss. Online abuse via an employer is so prevalent that
— an advocacy group for victims of online abuse - has a
to help them understand.
Why do they do it?
The subject of how functioning humans devolve into internet trolls is complicated — especially because you can’t trust them to tell you the truth. Some of them sound like teenage boys, because they
are. Others are adults whose bodies made it out of junior high, but whose maturity was tragically left behind. Some justify their behavior with rhetoric that would be at home at a neo-nazi rally.
Yes, a few are pathological.
that “when high on trait psychopathy, trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognising the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions.”
But it should be clear that people dealing with mental illness are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators. Putting trolls under the umbrella of mental illness is both ableist and enabling. And
found that trolls can be made, not born, noting that “trolling stems from both innate and situational factors … both mood and discussion context affect trolling behavior.” Ultimately, trolls must be held responsible for their behavior.
Troll tactics
Once we have a sense of who the players are, it’s time to look at the tactics they employ.
Refusing to back down on known fallacies
In my experience, the most common tactic is a sort of “lying about lying”. The Zombie Army trolls will generally believe other trolls no matter how outlandish the claim, and so when one troll tells a lie (either directly or through the use of hyperbole, omission, or twisting facts), many will repeat it—even if it can be easily disproved.
This is a common tactic of trolls who are trying to harm you professionally. They will simply continue to state the falsehoods with an air of authority, regardless of the facts. As York College professor and researcher Erec S. Smith
, “intelligent trolls know they are wrong but continue to push their fallacious arguments to tally a victory — even if the victory is empty and wrought with falsities. A troll’s goal is not virtuous in a traditional sense. A troll’s goal is the acquisition of power and the dismissal of truth and ethics. Add this attitude to the universality and anonymity of the internet and you get the rise of alternative facts and the demonization of empirically based facts.”
Troll telephone
This works like the childhood game where you stand in a line and the first person whispers a phrase to the second person, who whispers it to the next, and on down the line until it’s hilariously distorted by the time it reaches the last person in line.
In this case a troll in one forum says something flip, and another troll takes it as truth and repeats in another forum. Then it becomes a lie that gets told over and over again.
In my case, someone glibly posting “I’ll bet she did her whole marathon on a scooter” eventually became an email to a school where I was booked to speak, insisting that “she calls herself a marathoner but she did the whole thing on a scooter! What else is she lying about?”
If a nonsensical lie about you starts making the rounds, it’s probably the result of Troll Telephone.
Aggressively poor reading comprehension
You write or say something, your trolls claim that you wrote or said something else, and then they use it against you. For example, you might say that you worked at Google. Your employer receives an email saying that “she was never an executive at Google, what else is she lying about?” But — you never said that you were an executive at Google.
This is similar to Troll Telephone, but they’re using your own words as a starting point for the distortion.
These first three tactics—refusing to back down on known fallacies, troll telephone, and poor reading comprehension—can be used by trolls in combination to try to discredit you. The goal is to use the sheer volume of assertions to convince people who fail to apply their own critical thinking or research.
Threats and doxxing
It’s not an accident that so many people who were polled lived in fear. Trolls often combine sending threats with with “doxxing,” the practice of posting people’s personal information online.
When #GamerGate victim Brianna Wu retweeted a meme someone had made of her tweets poking fun at her trolls, the trolls responded by posting her address online and sending her graphic, violent threats until she was forced to flee her home. Predictably, the trolls then claimed that she made the whole thing up. Which bring us to…
It wasn’t me
The final troll tactic we’ll talk about here is a form of gaslighting. It typically happens when you go public about the trolling you are experiencing. Suddenly the trolls are shocked — shocked I tell you! — that their actions are interpreted as harassment. They’ll claim that you just can’t take a joke, or that you are scared of an “open debate.”
If it is remotely possible, they’ll deny it happened at all — they’ll claim you faked the picture, doctored the email, sent the death threat to yourself, etc. They may engage in blame-the-victim tactics, claiming that they wouldn’t have kept going if you had responded. Or, that they wouldn’t have kept going if you
hadn’t responded. Or that it’s your own fault because if you would just think, speak, and act exactly like they want you to, they would leave you alone.