Trolling
The cultural movement that gets money and laughs from your outrage
By Ryan Stone
The world is full of trolls. Not the sticky, green, lives-under-a-bridge kind, but the kind that lives to make people angry. And, while some, like Anne Coulter, are fame and money-driven personalities, the term “trolling” actually comes straight from the internet where it doesn’t really make any money and is simply done for the lulz. For a country that claims to pride itself on amazing scientific achievements and endless academic endeavors in search for the truth, one has to admit that a lot of our 21st century culture is dominated by people that lie and exaggerate simply to make people angry.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, then today’s major network news outlets are the crystal meth. If it’s not about violence and sex, fire from above, or utter annihilation at the hands of a marginalized demographic like Republicans, gays, or immigrants, then people don’t want to hear it. And Clorox and Verizon won’t plug anything that millions won’t watch, so network executives care a lot more about numbers and less about where those numbers come from. So, while many a guilt-gilded Christian may spend their Sundays feeling bad about themselves, FOX, MSNBC, and CNN are making sure that those same people and quite a few others spend their Mondays shocked and angry.
Media trolling is a subspecies, not a recent evolution, but certainly one that has come into its own. In order to keep an audience, twenty-four hour news networks like CNN make it necessary to push the envelope when it comes to viewer bait. Enter personalities like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, two of the more lucrative trolls. They are counterbalanced by people like Rachel Maddow and Olbermann on NBC, but there is no reason to think that Maddow or Olbermann’s place is to set the record straight, but rather to make some more money by exploiting your outrage. Keep the ball of anger bouncing. Keep the people watching. Keep you following along like an idiot.
Here is how you are played every time you watch the news. Someone like Glenn Beck will say something patently outrageous. Someone like Keith Olbermann will make a segment ranting about the outrageous statement that Beck, O’Reilly, or Chris Matthews makes. Then the Daily Show will make fun of all of them. And Stephen Colbert, in truest, bluest troll form, will pretend to be the craziest of the bunch. The most entertaining people in the United States are the people that don’t realize that the Colbert Report is a joke. Those people are prime targets for trolls.
While media trolling makes money, internet trolling is the non-profit stepfather. On the internet, it is not about the money. There are no executives or pundits. There are just lulz, the currency of laughter. That’s why, when the Church of Scientology pushed YouTube to remove Tom Cruise’s recent revealing psycho rant from its website, a group of people from 4chan worked together to crash the Church’s website. That’s also why, when the Scientologists started to fight back, the anonymous trolls took their activism to the streets and started real life protests, including one that involved a man slathered in pubic hair and grease running into a Church and rubbing himself on everything he could touch.
The fuel for trolling comes from everyone’s need to be right. To quote the XKCD character who won’t come to bed, “I can’t. This is important… Someone is WRONG on the internet!” So, like any two-dimensional pundit, all you have to do is speak or print a blatant lie. Stand behind it, and you will attract a mob of outrage. That mob is then yours to advertise to or manipulate as you will. But, some will know better, and they will post a little warning sign that I wish would pop up during every network news broadcast:
Don’t feed the trolls.