The Troll Hunters

http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/533426/the-troll-hunters

by pmcpinto • 12 years ago

30 34 12 years ago

adamnemecek7• 12 years ago

Pro tip, if you equate trolls with neo-Nazis and trolling with hate speech, you are not qualified to speak about either.

praptak• 12 years ago

This is a pretty shallow nitpick. The article outlines pretty well what kind of people they mean. Yeah, it's different from the common meaning of "troll" but so what.

adamnemecek7• 12 years ago

This is a pretty shallow nitpick.

Yeah, I don't think it is.

thenmar• 12 years ago

I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...

protomyth2• 12 years ago

There is a rather huge difference in the psychology of the two. A committed racist is dangerous, while your average troll has some internal issues that have a low danger level. Trolls can escalate, but the type of people they talk about in the article are already there.

"If it looks like a duck..."

I would be interested where you fall on zero tolerance.

adamnemecek7• 12 years ago

Yes because trolling is not necessarily hateful. I would go as far as to say that for the most part it isn't.

andywood• 12 years ago

IMO there is an enormous difference. I've always defined hatred in terms like "motivated to kill, for real." Less serious is anger. Far less serious is mischief, which is where I feel most trolling sits.

Put another way, if a person is being irritating (in text, at that), and you find yourself feeling terrorized, there's a massive failure of communication occurring.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

Your right, the title really doesn't go with the article. Its like seeing a title "Flooding issue on the Japanese coast" and then reading about a tsunami.

cbd19847• 12 years ago

Depends.

Are these the kinds of trolls that hunt people down in the physical world, or send nasty letters to employers to get people fired, or send SWAT teams to people's houses?

All of those have happened. All of those are trolling.

adamnemecek7• 12 years ago

None of those are trolling. Those are harassment. Trolling can be used for harassment but is not the same as harassment.

thieving_magpie2• 12 years ago

Adrian Chen article? No thanks.

Wouldn't trust a word he writes.

tartuffe78• 12 years ago

Not familiar with him, what has he reported on before?

monksy3• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Chen

He's (/was) a Gawker network journalist who prided himself in doxxing violentacrerz (va) on reddit. VA was responsible for moding a few of the NSFW and unsavory subs, one of them being jailbait, on reddit. Agree or disagree with the sub, it's crappy to dox someone and go after their job/family/income etc. Then again bluelisting is the goal of SJWs these days.

He's also got a few other not so thrilling things that he's participated in as well... but I'll let you read the wikipedia article.

I don't think that article does it justice about the particular situation: Read more about VA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brutsch

thieving_magpie2• 12 years ago

There's plenty of scummy things he's done. The one that sticks out in my mind is when he faked cancer on reddit to try and make some stupid point about sexism, it never panned out. Just angered a lot of people who lent their sympathy.

He's just a trash journalist and I'm not going to give him any more clicks than he already baits people into.

gaius3• 12 years ago

These days, "troll" just means "anyone I disagree with".

stefantalpalaru• 12 years ago

Great! So now doxing and stalking are totally awesome as long as it's being done to people we dislike, right?

theorique2• 12 years ago

Who gets the authority to define "troll" versus "vigorous debater on opposing side"?

monksy3• 12 years ago

Usually it's the person who is the most offended. [Which means the observer]

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

“The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.”

I wonder if he actually believes that. The description reads like a simple 2 minutes hate for TV ratings. A diet brand of that hidden camera catch-the-internet-pedo show.

Even putting that aside for a second, what does it mean when people in the media talk about "starting a discussion?" Whenever I hear it, it's said by someone that appears to have a mind already made up, from a media platform that doesn't value and engage in audience participation. Even bloggers with websites allowing comments tend to have an adversarial attitude towards their audience because of the signal to noise ratio in their comments, an attitude that pushes the level of signal down even further. The "discussion" often looks like like-minded bloggers talking amongst themselves lobbing pot-shots to and fro with a circle of differently likeminded bloggers.

We've been having a ground-up discussion about flaming and trolling on the internet for decades. Now that internet harassment has become a hot topic, the media has rolled in and is having a top-down discussion amongst self-appointed "very serious people" that seem rather incongruous with what my many years of experience on the internet.

ll123• 12 years ago

A lot of people nowadays support things like getting people fired for having unpopular opinions and say in response, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." Unless they automatically only believe in what's popular, it's in their best interest to protect expression of unpopular and offensive opinions, because when the tide of popular opinion turns against them, when the internet hate mob starts attacking them, then they'll realize why there shouldn't be harsh personal and professional consequences for expressing unpopular opinions.

People defend these sorts of vigilante actions by saying, those people aren't just expressing their opinions, they're saying hate speech. But almost all political opinions can be turned into moral faults though. If you support abortion you support murdering babies, you are a monster. If you support Palestine you support anti-semitism and terrorism, you are a monster. If you support (any right wing opinion), you are a monster.

gaius3• 12 years ago

Recently a left wing, female politician in the UK had her career destroyed by an ill-advised tweet (as in, revealing her true thoughts about the working class voters who elected her). You would this that would have educated these people that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, but there's no sign it has.

Dewie• 12 years ago

Other than being Internet harassers, trolls have their origin as a name for several different (depending on region, time) humanoid creatures, inspired by and originating in Norse mythology. Troll may have originated as a negative synonym for jötunn, a mythological race that were often in opposition or competition with the Norse gods (the Æsir).

Their physical appearance is varied; while in Norway they might be more associated with giants, specifically as depicted in the art of Theodor Kittelsen[1]; in Sweden, the work of John Bauer[2] seems to have influenced the general perception of trolls in a similar way; in Middle Sweden, trolls apparently look very much like humans, to the point that it is hard to distinguish them from humans; outside of Scandinavia, troll dolls[3] may the most known depiction.

To troll (Norwegian: å trolle) was apparently related to the verb å trylle: to do/practice magic. Trolldom is a word which in contemporary Norwegian simply means magic (with IMO a more supernatural connotation than the word magi), while it was a legal term to denote witchcraft at the time of the witch-hunts. Maybe to troll can be related to the more modern meaning of being a deceitful trickster in anonymous forums? There is also a saying, å gå troll i ord, which can convey the same sentiment as "be careful what you wish for". More generally, it is a superstition of not daring to speak of some evil by its rightful name, for fear evoking/summoning it (like... Voldemort in Harry Potter). A Swedish dictionary from 1678 has this to say about that matter: «när man talar om trollet, så är det inte långt borta» ('the troll is not far away when one speaks of it').

Trolls seem have an aversion to human settlements, preferring to live in remote and "uninhabited" places, like forests, mountains and caves. In Southern Sweden folklore, trolls seem to be believed to have either died out or driven away with the rise of Christianity[4]. One still had reason to fear the trolls, though, since they could kidnap you and drive you mad (bergtagning), which was used as an explanation of mental illness. They could also swap your child for their own (changeling). Thankfully, trolls could be driven away by the sound of church bells, in the same way that they had an aversion to Thor and his hammer. A somewhat famous phrase from Norwegian folklore is a troll exclaiming that "he can smell Christian man's blood!", which I think was supposed to mean that he was fond of eating Christian men (humans?).

Trolls were also known for hurling rocks, for example at rocks. I think this has to do with seemingly random large rocks that can be found in the North Northern Hemisphere where they "couldn't have ended up naturally", while in reality they were carried there by glaciers thousands of years ago. Some trolls are also part of the Scandinavian nature itself, due to their particular weakness of turning to stone at the sight of sunlight.

###

A work totally unrelated to "The Troll Hunters" is "The Troll Hunter", a Norwegian mockumentary about a man who hunts actual, mythological trolls.

[1] See (google) the painting Trollet som grunner på hvor gammelt det er

[2] http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll#mediaviewer/File:John_Bau...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_doll

[4] This is something they have in common with some "elvish" creatures in Norse mythology; they were also seen as evil when Christianity took a foothold. But unlike trolls, these elvish beings were previously thought of as good beings.

The Troll Hunters

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