People have been writing about this creature called the internet troll for some time now, mostly unfavourably, likening them to terrible mutations that we hope will die out. Should they?
Every one of you has already encountered an internet troll. Even if you’ve not been the target of a troll attack, and don’t even know what a troll is, you’ve certainly seen someone on social media who had to deal with them. If you’ve ever read the comments of a popular video on YouTube, or if you’ve read comments on popular Facebook posts, you know that there are some people out there who deliberately like to stir things up and cause debates to get heated, and topic of discussions to get derailed.
Those of you who have lived a life before the internet will know that there always were some people who were like this. Some of us would have had friends (or classmates) who would fit this description of a “trouble-maker. However, is that really the definition of the word “troll”?
WHAT IS A TROLL?
There are several different definitions to be found on the popular site urbandictionary. com, and to be honest, we think all of them kind of fit.
Today, it seems like the word troll is used by people to describe someone on the internet (real or anonymous) who seems to be deliberately trying to irritate people (others or yourself), in order to:
a) Just piss them (or you) off
b) Derail an otherwise serious discussion
c) Spread lies and confusion for fun
WHY?
Ah. Now that’s the billion dollar question. There have been many explanations put forth on the internet for why trolls are the way they are, and apparently some of them have been by the trolls themselves…
Everything from small-penis-syndrome to mental disorders, and narcissism to sadism, almost everything that’s wrong with the world can be blamed on internet trolls. To be honest, if you’ve ever been targeted by trolls, you know for a fact that you have caught yourself wishing that the troll’s house would collapse in the middle of a family reunion, just so that the genetic lineage of the a$$hole is wiped clean. That’s just rage speaking, however, and you know that there are times trolls can be fun too. This is especially true when you read some of the comments on popular videos – it’s where the term “comment gold” comes from. There are times when trolls can be just plain hilarious.
We’ve all had those friends who, during diwali, put rockets into bottles and fire them sideways (parallel to the street), to make crowds of people jump and dive and do crazy things to get out of the firecracker’s trajectory. Do they know it’s dangerous? Sure. Do they care? Heck no! We think it’s safe to assume that you certainly did enjoy seeing rockets fizz about everywhere, even though you had to duck or jump out of the way of a few yourself. It certainly got your heart pounding faster, and seemed very exciting. Would you do that yourself? (Assuming, of course, that you weren’t the one who did such things). Probably not. There is, then, a case to be made for trolls certainly being exciting, or at least, entertaining.
TROLLING REDEFINED?
So do we have to stick with this assumption of being an internet “troll”? Was there no such thing as a troll in the pre-internet days? We have to concede that the usage of the word itself has only skyrocketed in internet times, and so, the now traditional usage of the word itself really does mean “internet troll”. Strictly speaking, a “troll”, in 2016 language, really is someone on the internet who does a wide range of things, which generally involve getting some people angry – the angrier the better, for the troll.
We will, however, overreach a bit, and try and broaden the definition of, let’s call it “troll-like behaviour” and try and look at it from an evolutionary perspective, to figure out whether this is really a recent flare-up of human behaviour, or whether there is more to it than meets the eye.
In a sense, this article essentially aims to trace troll-like behaviour backwards. We’re no biologists, and we are certainly not evolutionary biologists. Thus we apologise in advance for using the terms “evolution” or “natural selection” in as loose ways in which those terms can be used. We are merely seeking to find a pattern (one which very possibly may exist only in our minds) through all of complicated life, in order to better try and understand this organism called a troll. Let’s start with more recent and famous troll events and work our way backwards in time.
FAMOUS RECENT ACTS
Now here’s where it gets insane. There are just so many examples on the internet of people being trolled, we don’t even know where to begin.
Let’s start with the group Anonymous. Perhaps the most famous yet anonymous group of all time, the hacker combine recently “fooled” Donald Trump, the Secret Service and the FBI, by claiming to have “hacked” Donald Trump’s personal information, and then proceeded to post it publicly online. Now obviously this was considered a security threat and a security breach, as currently Trump is the leading Republican candidate in the run up to the US presidential elections. However, all anonymous had really done was to collect information already in the public domain and repost it as hacked information.
Actually, anonymous itself is set up to be a haven for trolls. This is because most trolls like to stay anonymous, and that’s why the internet is the ideal place to do so, because it’s really easy to keep your real identity hidden. So long as you don’t break any laws, tracers like the IP address you use cannot be demanded by authorities or others from the services you’re using online. This means that you can pretty much say anything you want online, and only risk getting banned, blocked or having your account terminated, which in today’s day and age of free accounts, is no big loss. Thus, when someone claims to belong to the group Anonymous, you really cannot tell if they are or aren’t, because by it’s own definition, it’s a decentralised group.
Not all trolls are malicious, or trying to cause trouble even. Another way of trolling someone is to feign ignorance, or purposely act stupid so as to get a laugh, and to cause some people to get frustrated. This kind of troll is perfectly fine with being laughed at, in fact, he/she counts on it. An example here is Kenneth McCarthy, a writer for Comedy Central. Kenneth (Ken M) actually started off on the internet like all of us. In an interview to Upvoted, he recounted how he used to leave sincere comments on news articles, but never received any rational replies. Without even knowing what trolling was, he started playing dumb, in his own way of pushing the boundaries of how stupid he could be in the comments and still get people to reply to him, and take him seriously. Soon, he was an internet sensation and had a fan following.
Even this writer was fooled once while writing a dmystify about nuclear weapons, where someone had inserted false information into a Wikipedia page, which was then picked up by a few smaller sites as a story of interest, and then those very sites were provided as the citations for the information. Basically there was a scientist called Edward Teller, who is sometimes called “father of the hydrogen bomb” because of the designs he helped create for nuclear weapons. It just so happened that he was the right age to possibly be related to a magician called Teller (from Penn and Teller), and the Wikipedia page claimed Edward Teller was the father of the magician Teller. This was an edit made by a known vandal, and was later on changed, but it was information that was stuck in this writer’s brain for a long time. Sadly, by the time the error was discovered, we’d already printed the book, and had to print a correction the next month. However, it was a prime example why Wikipedia cannot be trusted, and certainly, a lot of fact checking is needed for information posted online.
There are many more examples, but this is the one topic where you might have read a lot of articles before, and you can always Google to know more. What’s not as common is perhaps looking at older examples of troll-like behaviour, which may or may not have been planned.
FAMOUS ANCIENT ACTS OF TROLLING
We are going to stretch the definition of troll-like behaviour for this, because, well, this is perhaps from where the inspiration for a lot of modern day trolls stems from. Let’s look at that in the form of an example. Take the bronze age story of Troy, and even though it (supposedly) happened over 3,000 years ago, so many of us know all about the Trojan war. Heck, we even name certain types of malware “trojans” because they pretend to be something they’re not (or contain malicious code in an otherwise harmless looking package). For over 3,000 years the story of the Trojan Horse has been told, about how a deception was able to win a war for the Greeks – and by inference is something to be celebrated. Although we can’t say the Greeks trolled the Trojans, you do understand the point we’re making here about how if you broaden the definition of trolling, you can see the same mental processes of deception being used, even in much more practical times.
A much more recent example of a deception was the telling of a story adapted from H.G. Wells’ novel, War of the Worlds on the radio by Orson Welles in 1938. The story of Martians attacking Earth, and the detail in which it was narrated, was said to have caused a mass panic. However, it wasn’t the radio station, or even Orson Welles who was trolling, because it’s now believed that actually there was no panic, and in fact the station which broadcast the episode had very few listeners to begin with. In an attempt to “troll”, it was newspapers who hyped the event and made it seem like a million people were terrified and trembling at this radio prank. This is because radio was still new, and was stealing big bucks in advertising money away from the newspapers, and thus some newspapers thought it would be a good idea to hype the whole thing in order to discredit radio as a source for serious information. We leave judgements about whether the newspapers failed or succeeded to others, however, it was, as far as we can tell, a deliberate preinternet era example of trolling.
Not all examples of such deviant behaviour are for fun. Some are devious and clearly for profit, though many would argue that profit alone cannot explain the deep desire of a person to try and fool people. It’s also extremely pleasurable to be able to “pull one over” otherwise intelligent people, and to be able to fool experts is just got to be an incredible feeling for a troll.
A famous British art forger, Shaun Greenhalgh, who was most active from 1990 to 2005, is a prime example of someone being able to fool experts, in their own field of study. The most famous forgery was called the Armana Princess, which is a headless sculpture that Shaun whipped up in his shed in under three weeks, but his father was able to sell it by fooling multiple experts from the Bolton Museum, the British Museum and also famous auction house Christie’s. The sculpture was bought by the Bolton Museum for a whopping 440,000 pounds (in 2003). When the family was caught, finally, these experts were left with egg on their faces.
Pierre de Fermat, the French lawyer and mathematician, once wrote a theorem in the margin of a copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica, which was later known as “Fermat’s last theorem”. The theorem states, quite simply, that it is impossible to have an + bn = cn for any value of n larger than 2. Thus, we know that 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared (which is basically the relation of the sides (measuring 3 and 4 units) of a right-angled triangle with its hypotenuse (measuring 5 units). In the margin he wrote the theorem, and added that he could prove it, but there wasn’t enough space in the margin to do so. This, we believe, is the troll in Fermat rearing its ugly head, and tempting him to torture mathematicians for over 300 years! Although possible, because people from the 17th century seem to be pretty brilliant (Newton certainly was), we feel that Fermat was lying, deliberately. Perhaps the answer had frustrated him, and he decided to play a little mischief by leaving it as a mystery for thousands after him to try and solve. Over 350 years later, in 1995, British mathematician Andrew John Wiles (now knighted), finally cracked the problem using complex modern mathematical techniques that only a handful of people on Earth can really understand, in a proof that takes up about 150 pages of a book, and took Wiles seven years to come up with! Fermat wasn’t lying about one thing: 150 pages of modern math would certainly not fit in the margin of an old French text book!
We don’t need to stick to classic history, we can also look at ancient mythology. Whether you believe mythology to be true events or man-made stories doesn’t really matter to the context being provided here, because either way you will have to accept that the stories from mythology really do affect the humans of ancient times. Thus we have young Krishna, the naughty prankster, who is much loved by everyone, despite his naughtiness, because he does make people laugh. Norse mythology also contains a deity in the form of Loki, who is a shape-shifter and often fools even the gods in mythology with his powers of deception. History later made him mischievous, but he started out just deceptive.
We can assume, however, that there has always been a desire to be naughty, and fool people. As we mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter what you believe, because
even if you believe that naughty deities exist, it still shows that “trolling” really has been around for a long, long time.
But is it a purely human trait?
IS THERE A TROLL GENE?
As we said at the start of this story, there is no way for us to ever have even a smidegeon of real genetics and evolutionary biology knowledge to allow us to comment on the subject, so please treat this as a wild thought experiment based only on conjecture, and not actual scientific fact.
In our thought experiment, given that genetics and epigenetics shows us new aspects of life that genes can control, and seemingly a lot of mental structure certainly seems genetic (or epigenetic), we feel it’s plausible that even things such as comedy and trolling might be genetic in nature. There are just people we all know who are inherently funny, and have a comic timing and way of thinking that most of us can never even hope to emulate. Even with months or years of preparation, we’d never be able to make people laugh the way these individuals can using only their wit. Thus, there’s fundamentally something different in the way some people think. Perhaps we can go as far as to say that there are ways in which their brain just develops very differently.
There are many genetic markers that scientists are associating with differences or deficiencies in the brains of various people. It’s why some people have autism, and as a result bad social skills, but can also have wild talents for some area that normal people just cannot fathom. Many claim that Einstein and Newton were probably autistic. What this means is that genes and gene expressions can affect the way our brains develop and function, and perhaps, just perhaps, could even control personality traits such as the ones trolls exhibit. If this is true, a troll might have no control over the desire to troll, and thus could be considered as helpless as you are about your skin colour – which, unless you’re Michael Jackson, is something you will have to learn to accept.
DO ANIMALS TROLL?
There’s another way to test for this thought experiment, and we should specify that it’s not a truly scientific method as no actual genes are being sampled. If comedy, mischief and trolling really has a genetic origin, then it stands to reason that humans shouldn’t be the only ones exhibiting this behaviour.
There are many examples in nature, and the most obvious one is the Cuckoo, who lays eggs in another species nest, so that all the headache of chick rearing and feeding is done by someone else. The human equivalent is having babies, being capable of caring for them, but leaving them on the doorsteps of good samaritans, so that you never have to take the trouble. Some species of cuckoo only breed in this way, while others are known to lay eggs in nests of others of their own species. What this amounts to, in essence, is a spreading of one’s genetic offspring into many different nests, and thus increasing the chances of genetic survival. The fact that it’s genetic is exhibited by the young bird when it hatches, as it hatches faster than the foster parent’s own eggs, and then proceeds to throw out the eggs (or smaller chicks if they hatch) in order to minimise the competition for food. This is done purely by instinct as the chick is too young to learn this behaviour. Thus, the cuckoo could possibly be an example of troll-like behaviour (in a broad definition) actually being an obvious evolutionary advantage!
Another mischievous creature we want to highlight here is the Scorpionfly. This weird insect does a lot of strange things in order to mate. The custom for the Scorpionfly mating ritual is for the male to bring the female a gift of food in order to make her more likely to mate with it. However, males don’t always want to work hard to get the meal, and have been known to steal already dead insects from spider-webs, and also steal from other males. However, some of these little male insects take to trolling their counterparts, by pretending to be female, and waiting for some unsuspecting male to bring it food as an offering, which it accepts, and then goes off to find a female to offer the food to. We can only assume there have been a few times when a bunch of males exhibiting this transvestite behaviour just keep regifting food to one another because everyone’s pretending to be female. Most internet forums can draw a parallel here… trust us, there are no women on there, just some men pretending to be women in order to get attention and troll.
If we want to get closer to mankind genetically, there’s always monkeys to look at. Anyone who’s been to a tourist spot that has monkeys in India will testify to them being really mischievous – and not just with humans, but with other monkeys and other species as well. We’ve all seen monkeys harass cats, dogs, birds and humans, and they don’t always do it for food. Sometimes a bored monkey will steal something inedible purely for fun – ask the many tourists who didn’t secure their cameras with straps, or didn’t hold on to their hats!
WHY DO TROLLS STILL EXIST?
If we accept as a hypothesis that trolling (or purposefully mischievous behaviour) is something that’s genetic, we then have to wonder why this has survived? What could the evolutionary advantage be for such behaviour to continue?
We think the first and foremost reason for this behaviour existing, especially in younger beings (children, teens, infants), is that it’s not really trolling at all. In fact, the best word to describe it is “play”. How many of you have watched kids be “mean” to one another when playing? Of course the definition of mean is applied by adult (or more mature) standards here, so if you were to trip someone who is walking by you in a park, then proceed to jump on him/her playfully, pull their hair, throw sand in their face, then run away screaming in laughter, anyone witnessing this would certainly think you were quite an a$$hole! When toddlers do it, it’s just “playing”. This holds true for all species that we usually observe in domestic situations – kittens, puppies, chicks, foals, cubs…
In biologist terminology, play is something that animals do for fun when they’re not stressed, not being hunted or in any other life and death scenario. Many animals can play alone too, because it seems to be a fun state of mind rather than necessitating an interaction with another. However, most popular play methods do involve siblings or other young ones, or even adults. Species can even inter-play, as kittens are often seen playing with puppies, for example. This is not only limited to youngsters, because young adults also exhibit this behaviour, and in fact in many species, this is an all through life method of having some fun.
So can we say that trolling is basically just another method of playing? Perhaps, but we certainly cannot prove it, merely point in that general direction. Perhaps some scientists will make it a study and get a grant to do so and answer that question someday (if some obscure study hasn’t already done so).
COMEDY, SATIRE, ETC.
When it comes to playing, trolling or basically having fun (often at another’s expense), there are many more methods of getting a laugh. Although no concrete data that we could find, there are many suggestions that humour in general is an indicator of good genes.
Thus, think of it in terms of natural selection, and you might find a study or two that suggest that humour is a desirable trait for females when they are ovulating. We think this is because wit and humour signify a mating ritual that’s usually played out in the animal kingdom. Although there are exceptions to every rule, in general, the animal kingdom consists of males vying for the favours of females. In mammals, because females have to carry the pregnancy, this courtship is especially pronounced. Thus, males use more than looks (they also use humour and wit) to show that they have good genes. Studies have shown that although men and women can be as funny as one another, and one of the most common desired traits on dating sites is “Sense of humour”, it applies very differently to the sexes. What women generally mean when they list that desire is that they want a man who can make them laugh, while men usually mean that they want a woman who will laugh at their jokes or silliness. According to the data collected, it’s suggested that men don’t necessarily want a woman who’s funny, or wittier than them.
Whatever the case, geneticists and psychologists seem to believe that there is a clear evolutionary advantage to having the humour gene express itself prominently in your DNA. The same applies to satire, slapstick comedy, and even trolling.
FEED THE TROLLS, THEY HAVE A PURPOSE
Since almost all trolls derive pleasure from trolling, we can conclude that they’re essentially indulging in the animal behaviour of playing. The reason they persist is because we, the non-trolls, find it funny (at least in some instances), which encourages them to continue.
However, there certainly is another much more important case to be made for trolling. Yes perhaps such behaviour is in-built into many of us, and yes, perhaps there is a troll-gene that’s actually beneficial for evolution… however, we think there are a few important aspects in which trolls (some, not all) play a vital role in society.
To start with, the trolls are usually always pushing on our limits of tolerance. It takes a person to blow up a few times and be affected by trolls before he or she starts developing thicker skin. One of the side effects of developing thicker skin is the willingness to listen to more contrarian views without losing your cool. Thus, the journey that a troll starts you on with regards to some random discussion on the internet, could actually culminate in you being a more tolerant person – not just online either.
The anonymity of a lot of trolls are also the reason they’re able to speak their mind openly, and often rudely. Now, of course, sometimes the troll attempts to sidetrack the conversation, or starts inserting fallacies, however, there are a few times when a troll will make a valid point, and speak out and say what many others may be thinking but be too polite to say out loud (type out loud?). This is obviously because their real identity is not at risk of being exposed.
Trolls are especially useful for pushing boundaries in any discussion regarding religion, or some other similar topic that usually offends people very quickly – nationalism is one hot example in these days.
Even if you believe in none of the above reasons, you will have to admit that (when you’re not the target) trolling can be a heck of a lot of fun. Why? Because no matter how civilised we think we are, we love it when two of our own species decide it’s time to have a good roll in the mud, hurting themselves. There’s a reason why the Romans were able to entertain both men and women with the gladiator games – we humans are sick, and deep down, we really, really want to feed the trolls!