
“I remember a time where Trolls were a fictitious monster from fairy tales, not arseholes on the internet looking for attention.”
― Robert O'Sullivan
"For about 25 years, I have written a weekly Mississippi-centered column published in about 25 newspapers in Mississippi newspapers and, more recently, on their websites," Charles D. Mitchell, Assistant Dean/Assistant Professor at The University of Mississippi 's Meek School of Journalism and New Media told this writer late last week.
Mitchell said he almost never reads the online comments but receives clicks, emailed responses and the occasional letter.
"They are important to me. Knowing the perspectives of an audience really helps address the audience. If I know where they are and what they're thinking, it makes me more effective."
"Bloody daggers and `you're going to hell' comments notwithstanding, I like the feedback. I am not bothered by the anonymity although I certainly agree people take more liberties if and when they feel their identity will not be known. A truism about journalists is that we are not licensed or certified and, significantly, nobody asked us. These same things can be said about any citizen - and that's not a bad thing," Dr. Mitchell said.
"The serial and corporate posters are what they are. As time passes, readers grow more and more accustomed to this and I trust their ability to weight the Trolls appropriately just as I must trust them to afford me some credibility," he said.
"Another writer and I once proposed a drinking game in which we would wager when any thread would depart from a substantive discussion of the facts and issues raised in copy to `you're a whore' or `you're an asshole.' Second post? Third?," Mitchell said.
"I guess I'm saying that a mature recognition should prevail: There are people who know nothing but ad hominem and who have nothing else to do, yet have the same right to be in a public conversation as anybody else," he added.
Meanwhile, Jeff Inman, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, said, "I think comment threads are good for three main reasons. The first being that they encourage engagement with their audience. New York Mag, for instance, gets thousands of comments sometimes on an article. Over time, some of New York Mag's commenters have become stars. And sometimes with this publication, the comment threads are stories, too. With New York Mag, comment threads sometimes overshadow the articles it publishes. And some readers stop by New York Mag to check up on their favorite commenter, not on a writer."
The second reason comment threads are good is that they help online publications' prominence on the Internet through the Google linkage system. It can be argued that in the days of electronic publishing, Google has become an online newspaper or magazine 'circulation manager'. And comment threads help to boost visibility and allow for wider reading audiences for online publications, Inman said.
"And the third reason is that comment threads give instant feedback to a publication on the articles it publishes. It's oftentimes instantaneous anonymous feedback from an instantaneous focus group," he said.
Inman said it's horrific seeing some of the nastiness Trolls exhibit, however. But a few publications are already on top of the game by mandating that all commenters must use their real names when posting comments. Inman laughed, "You can't be Angel of Death Force 57 anymore." But he added that when someone is hiding behind a fake `sock puppet' name, total anonymity can allow for total candor and transparency, even with what Inman called "unfiltered rage comments". Sock puppets are arguably First Amendment warriors. They normally post notes under stories that are free of pretension and phoniness, so maybe going right for the jugular vein of rhetoric and discourse has its worth.
Jeff Cohen, Director and an Associate Professor at Ithaca College's Department of Journalism, said, "I've followed this issue a bit, only because my columns have appeared almost exclusively online for 15 years and I pay attention sometimes to comments on my pieces. But I'm certainly not an expert who's done thorough research."
"I've found that HuffingtonPost has the least abusive, sometimes slightly more intelligent comments where commenters actually add new accurate information and sources," Cohen mentioned.
For a while, HuffingtonPost tried to get interns to monitor the comments section, but Cohen said in an email and telephone interview, "I'm not sure they do that now," adding that HuffingtonPost even had recruiters on Ithaca College's campus in New York (state) trying to recruit comment thread moderators as interns. He also said he didn't know if these were paid positions or simply volunteer gigs without pay.
"It will be interesting to see if HuffPost will keep up intelligent posts," Dr. Cohen said.
When asked about paid corporate Trolls, Cohen said, "My suspicion is that this is happening. It's not a ridiculous argument that these corporate Trolls exist. I’m not an expert on this."
"It might be that there are a lot of right-wingers, too, who in their spare time post comments. I know a progressive who in his free time goes on conservative sites and posts such comments taking the other side. It’s democracy and it's good for democracy. But when people are being paid to do this it is not democratic to surreptitiously post such comments maligning a writer and disparaging his or her work," Cohen said.
Christopher M. Federico, Professor of Psychology and Political Science at the University of Minnesota, told this writer that there are two key things that comprise the typical Troll.
"First, online Trolls tend to have certain personality traits, as measured using standard psychological tests," Federico said. "In particular, they tend to be more Machiavellian (that is, they are impulsive and manipulative, but charming while going about it), more psychopathic (in other words, they are emotionally cold, fearless and antisocial), and sadistic (in that they seem to enjoy causing discomfort and pain). Interestingly, at the same time, online Trolls do NOT appear to be more interested in debating issues than other people. So, it's not merely an issue of these folks just being highly argumentative; they explicitly enjoy being obnoxious."
Federico continued: "Second, the environment in which online commenting occurs -- where the person you are `shouting' at is not physically present and not someone you know, and where you usually communicate from a position of anonymity -- tends to encourage what psychologists refer to as `deindividuation.' Basically, deindividuation is a loss of self-awareness where you lose concern about your own moral standards and about how you are going to be evaluated by others. If you are no longer paying attention to your own internalized values and what other people think of you, you're more likely to do things that are antisocial, aggressive, and contrary to generally accepted social norms. So, in sum, online environments may generally encourage people to engage in trollish behavior because of the way they weaken social controls on bad behavior."
In an article posted on Feb. 14, 2014, on the online publication BGR titled "Study finds online Trolls much more likely to be sadists, psychopaths", writer Brad Reed pens: Does Dexter Morgan spend his time submitting flamebait posts on 4Chan when he’s not murdering people? That’s the implication of a new study flagged by The Washington Post showing that people who frequently go online with sole purpose of antagonizing others just for the sake of starting conflicts are much more likely to exhibit sadistic and even psychopathic behavior in their offline lives.
The study, which was conducted by researchers at University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and University of British Columbia and was published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal, asked hundreds of Internet users to talk about how they behaved online and how they behaved in their everyday lives. What the researchers found was that trolls were much more likely to be more calculating and were more likely to lack remorse about manipulating people.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, of course, since the hallmark of trolling is that the troll is not making a good-faith argument and is instead only trying to stir up anger in online communities. Or as the researchers more bluntly put it, “it might be said that online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists.”

"Anyone who has ever spent remotely any time reading the comments section of pretty much anywhere on the internet has likely observed a Troll (why some of you reading may even have engaged in Troll-like behavior)," writes Kersey Sturdivant, on the blog Southern Fried Science, in a post titled "For Fun Science Friday - 'Trolls Just Wanna Have Fun'."
Sturdivant continues: "While these Trolls do not physically hide under bridges and/or steal sheep, their actions parallel many of the annoyances of their fairy tale counterparts. As defined by wikipedia, an Internet Troll “is a person who sows discord on the Internet… with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”
Sturdivant looks to the University of Manitoba study, as described in the reference from BGR above: Their study found, as I have always suspected, Internet Trolls are corrupted by the Dark Side. There were significant correlations between `Dark Tetrad' traits and trolling, though it is important to note that correlation does not mean causation: In their study only 5.6% of respondents identified themselves as Internet Trolls. By contrast, 41.3% of respondents were “non-commenters,” meaning they generally did not engage (i.e. comment) online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of the overall number of people on the Internet. While Buckels and her team do not present a solution of how to deal with Internet Trolls, they do identify the personality traits common in Trolls. My suggestion, if you see a Troll, do not engage them; Trolls feed off attention, the Southern Fried Science post says.
Are comment threads working out for America's daily papers and magazines? Well, while trying to build background and even research for this story, I sent out emails to a host of daily newspapers that have comment threads. I sent a canned query email, addressing each editor by name and only using one email address (these emails were not part of a chained letter sent out en masse) after experiencing voice-mail jail. After sending out more than 50 emails to large, medium-sized and small newspapers throughout the USA, I did not get one response. I also called and emailed two large progressive magazines (not Daily Kos), and asked the same sorts of questions.
To digress a bit, I began this quest by telephoning and asking to speak to an editor at these papers. But a reporter or an editorial room receptionist rang these editors' extensions and voice mail was always the end result. Anyhow, I took some time developing an email query and this canned letter asked how comment threads were working out for the marketing and overall exposure of the online edition. It also asked some questions concerning whether or not editors felt that comment threads were good or bad for business, if they added or took away from stories, and if comment thread Trolls were a problem, and if so, how are they creating trouble? I tried to compose a thorough, insightful, and articulate query, but to no avail. There wasn't one response. Such a loud non-response must mean something, but I don't really know what that something may be, quite honestly, and I'm at a loss to even venture a guess. . . .
An editor of a small daily in Appalachia who I got on the phone told me bluntly, "I'm not really interested in commenting. Send me an email questionnaire and I might reply." - I sent the email over a week ago and there wasn't a returned response. To be honest, I didn't have much better luck with colleges and universities throughout the USA and quickly discovered by perusing faculty pages that professors prefer to be contacted via email rather than with a telephone call; so I sent out about 50 emails within the past few weeks to psychology, communications, political science and journalism teachers and a handful were good enough to email me back or call me on the telephone. All who responded are in this article. None were filtered out.

Are comment threads and comment thread Trolls impacting the way the news is written and presented? Well, it can be argued that it's evident that in some "media organizations" posing as news outlets, that ad hominem attacks are becoming prevalent and are accepted by the viewing and reading public. Opinions galore are being thrown around every which way. They are often delivered with fiery rhetoric or by red-faced, screaming, talking heads. Is this news? Is it responsible journalism? And have Internet Trolls somehow infiltrated the news from the ground up? As strange as it sounds, a lot of what I read in print these days seems to be directed at the Internet Trolls, not a public that wants to be educated and informed. Are Internet Trolls and their sociopathic personalities taking over? Is the news these days preaching to them and not a more well-adjusted and kinder viewer or reader?
John T. Jost, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior and Professor of Psychology and Politics at New York University wrote in an email to this writer: "Thanks for your message. This is certainly an interesting and important topic; all of us have experienced the phenomenon you are describing. At the same time, I have not done any research -- nor do I know anyone else who has done such research (yet) -- on political Trolls in the U.S. (I do know a few people who are studying the Russian government's use of bots to retweet pro-government messages, etc.)"
"One thing that occurs to me, though, is that this topic is crying out for investigative journalism: Who are Bad Dog 333, Harley Charley, Bloody Bubba, Poisonous Rattlesnake, and what is driving them? Who, if anyone, is paying them? To me, this would be a very useful thing for a journalist to do, and it would help researchers of social media as well. I hope this helps, though I'm not at all sure that it does!" Dr. Jost wrote in his email.
Society is becoming more aggressive and intolerant. Nobody seems to want to find any Gregorian middle ground anymore. As I'm writing this, I just opened up my msn search engine and screaming on top of the page was the headline: 13 DEAD, 20 WOUNDED IN OREGON COLLEGE SHOOTING. With opinion writers scribbling on keyboards inflammatory prose, not looking for solutions, only problems and discord, is journalism becoming so reckless that all responsibility has vanished? It's hard to find anything fair and balanced anymore, where opinion is opinion and hard news is hard news. A succotash of both seems to be the media's cafeteria staple in these trying and troubled times. Comment thread Trolls might just be setting the standard for how news is delivered anymore - they may have become the end that justifies the means, sad to say. . . .
And although to conjecture that Internet Trolls had anything to do with this horrific mass murder in Oregon would be ridiculous, I can't help but wonder, are we heading in the right direction with all this hateful rhetoric, all the accusatory vitriol, all the name-called and even slander that's abounding, not only in comment threads, but in sound bites, so-called 'no-spin' reports, opinions and articles? Is it time to look at some of the ways the news is presented, delivered and digested and maybe, just maybe, try a saner and more pragmatic approach before the Internet trolling actually begins right after a story's headline, and the first Troll is named Atlas T. Smytherine, Staff Writer?
Internet trolling is the new way of Superpowers having a war. Instead of firing machine guns and rockets at each other, the major powers are using fusillades of twisted rhetoric. At least one side is, so far. . . .Russia is waging a war against the West using its trained Internet trolls by humiliating the U.S. and praising the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a Sept. 6 online article in ValueWalk.
The ValueWalk article goes on to say (all in italics): A unique insight at the ‘factory’ of Russian trolls was presented by a former employee of the so-called Internet Research Agency, Lyudmila Savchuk. Russian propaganda paid trolls are apparently a real deal, according to Savchuk, who went undercover to “unveil the trolls and make them show themselves.”
Throwing mud at the West and Russian opposition, the St. Petersburg-based factory of trolls praises the regime of Putin. The 34-year-old freelance journalist said she was employed by the troll factory as a blogger. Having her own campaign against Russia’s powerful propaganda machine, Savchuk decided to go to court and tell the public about how the Kremlin operates to disseminate its anti-American propaganda around the world through the Internet.
The Kremlin had denied any knowledge of existence of such a shadowy operation, and dismissed the notion that it was behind it. However, Russian court awarded the undercover blogger damages of one ruble (equivalent of $ 0.015) for the legal claims she put forward.
“We achieved that the existence of the troll factory was recognized, and ascertained that they are producing paid comments,” Savchuk said in an email interview with CNN.
The allegedly Kremlin-financed factory is comprised of mostly young educated people, who had difficulties in finding other jobs and were attracted by the good salary as for Russian standards.
According to Savchuk, Russian trolls were paid somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 rubles (about $750) per month, while the undercover blogger said she had donated her pay to charity.
Although the damages totaling the equivalent of $ 0.015 is ridiculous and laughable, payment damages still denote guilt. And reading between the lines and the numbers here, a lot of spite and humiliation had to be involved in levying these damages.
Meanwhile, Ithaca College's Jeff Cohen told this writer in a telephone interview last week that the website Common Dreams has been plagued with such a large number of anti-semitic comments that a concerned reader became so livid by all this hate-filled jargon that he took it upon himself to develop an elaborate and multilayered trolling scenario. Yes, the Trolls hit Common Dreams where it hurts the most - at the money belt. According to Common Dreams, a goodly number of the site's supporters and benefactors even gave up on the site. So a commenter took it upon himself to right this wrong. Using a number of fake "sock puppet" names, this commenter would post horrid posts as a Troll on Common Dreams and by using another name, `JewishProgressive', he would attack the very anti-semitic postings he'd written under other sock-puppet names to set the record straight. It turns out that this serial poster for Common Dreams was a Jewish Harvard graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website's discussion of issues involving Israel.
A Common Dreams investigation discovered that this poster's sophisticated, in-depth
campaign at one point even involved having one of his characters charge that the anti-Semitic comments and the criticism of the anti-Semitic comments must be written by "internet trolls who have been known to impersonate anti-Semites in order to then double-back and accuse others of supporting anti-Semitism"--exactly what he was doing. The impersonation, this character wrote, must be part of an "elaborate Hasbara setup," referring to an Israeli international public-relations campaign. When Common Dreams finally confronted the man behind the deceptive posting, he denied that he himself was involved with Hasbara.
His posting on Common Dreams illustrates the susceptibility of website comment threads to massive manipulation. As another illustration, he even audaciously tricked the white-supremacist Vanguard News Network, posing as "DeShawn S. Williams," a "Pro-White/Black, anti-jew.", the Common Dreams article reads.
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I don't know if anything has been cleared up in writing this diary for Daily Kos. Much remains unanswered and my inability to find a large number of knowledgeable experts to weigh in on the effectiveness of comment threads and the impact Internet Trolls have on comment threads has only been touched on here in a rudimentary, if not a superficial way. But I must say, the college and university professors who corresponded with me offered some fascinating and compelling insight.
It's been almost a month since I began the information-gathering phase of this article's writing. Sure, I could have sent out more emails to editors and professors in large number, but judging from the results so far, by extending this information building another week, or two weeks, maybe even three, how many more comments would result? Judging from the responses so far, not many. And since I've been bombarding editors and writing professors with these queries, I had to be expeditious in getting something posted rather quickly. First wins in the news game, after all. And I certainly didn't want to be beaten by my own querying.
In closing, it's all about words, isn't it? It's all a matter of rhetoric and the delivery of discourse and oratory. "Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble," said author Yehuda Berg.
How true, Yehuda Berg, how true. And so may I ask you, are we using words to build or destroy? Comment threads can surely add insight to a story. And they can bring to light salient opposing views that a writer may have missed. But oftentimes, the delivery of these words are as volatile as bullets fired from a gun.