It all starts off in quite an innocent and civilized manner. Someone posts an idea or opinion on the social media of their choice. Perhaps it is some vignette doubting the government involvement with the ill effects of chem trails. Maybe someone purports that stringent enforcement of building codes and zoning bylaws are causing the housing shortage and the plight of the homeless. It might even be a topic as innocuous as whether a ham and pineapple topping should disqualify a circular deep-dish Italian cuisine favourite from being called a pizza.
It doesn’t take long before an opposing point is posted and the debate is on. A lively discussion continues with more opinions weighing in on the merits of each side of the intellectual stances.
And then, enter the trolls. No, I’m not referring here to scary Scandinavian creatures who populate Norse mythology in fairy tales such as Three Billy Goats Gruff and who hide under bridges while waiting to ambush and terrorize all unsuspecting passers by. The trolls I refer to here inhabit the internet universe and are undoubtedly infinitely more distasteful and ornery than the Norse variety.
These internet trolls crawl out at night from behind the woodwork to station themselves alongside their keyboards and microphones in order to use almost every social media platform for the purpose of intentionally provoking some, if not all, of the other participants with inflammatory and insincere messages that are designed to evoke bruised feelings and upset emotions. Consequently, an internet conversation that started off sincerely and intelligently soon gravitates into something resembling a feeding frenzy deep in the heart of the African Serengeti.
It doesn’t even matter what the subject of contention happens to be, because the trolls will come creeping out from wherever it is they hide in order to plant their little internet gardens of indignation, anger, ire, wrath, and fury. After the first few fairly benign comments, the trolls will steer the conversation until it degenerates into personal, ad hominem attacks or downright character assassinations.
Let’s examine a typical social media forum that becomes infiltrated and eventually destroyed by online digital fighting and rage texting initiated by trolls who, by using angry texts and heated messages, get their ya-yas by sending impulsive and aggressive messages to those they choose to punish. One such forum that pops up on the internet fairly frequently involves the discussion/debate over the Roswell incident.
Just in case you somehow have missed out on this decades-long controversy, Roswell is a small city in New Mexico where, purportedly, an alien spaceship crashed to Earth nearby in 1947. Many are convinced that there has been a cover-up conspiracy by the American government and military to conceal the incident.
Much of the controversy is surrounded by the claim that the body of an alien “spaceman” was recovered from the crash site, and has been kept under wraps somewhere near Roswell for all these years for reasons no one has ever been able to understand or explain. In this particular example, the discussion develops as both proponents argue their points of view while citing evidence they believe to be factual to support their opposing convictions. Before too long, the forum widens to include other posted comments. Just then, the inevitable happens. Trolls who have been lurking in the proverbial bushes (or shall we call it “under the proverbial bridge”), enter the fray with digital threats aimed to derail any kind of thoughtful discourse.
What follows is a volley of name-calling and personal insults stemming from trolls hiding behind fabricated profiles, bogus avatars and phony aliases. Some creepy troll with the handle of Cyclops420 may weigh in to the thread with an “I am your father, Luke” comment, while another may follow that up with “and I am your mother but you were created in vitro using Klingon genetics.” Before you know it, the whole dialogue gets weaponized and then blown to bits. Any attempt to draw the discourse back on track is met by a caustic “Say it to my face” or an even more sardonic “After I sit on it.” As you can plainly see, these internet trolls leave much to be desired on the spectrum of honour.
Perhaps what internet trolls need is a crash course in formal debating skills. If they were familiar with identifying red herring fallacies, in which a debater introduces and then tears apart an argument that was entirely unrelated to the subject being debated, they might not have to reach so far into their bag of idiotic tricks. Similarly, the slippery slope fallacy contends that once an event starts off on a certain direction, it necessarily must continue onwards without change until it reaches the very end. Not so, but most trolls would not recognize the faulty reasoning. A third debating fallacy comes in the form of the circular argument. If you argue that we need animal testing for new drugs because in order to test new drugs we need to use animals, then you are indulging in a circular argument and might as well join your local troll chapter.
Nobody asked me, but maybe the only way to keep the internet trolls from crawling out from under them bridges is to burn the bridges. Because it’s never a good strategy to burn your bridges behind you, let’s take a lesson from the Three Billy Goats Gruff fairy tale. They were able to destroy the fearsome and voracious troll by outsmarting him at his own game. In the end, he was defeated by his own excessive arrogance and overconfidence. Without bridges left to hide under, trolls will become exposed as the pathetic pretenders whose asinine texts and messages you would rather not engage.
There, I’ve said it to their face.