Trollmegeddon: Are We Entering a New Era for Digital Hate?

Earlier this month an American influencer posted the names of several of her most prolific trolls on Instagram. Will this deter hardcore haters and why do they do it anyway?

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Over the course of this week, I tied up a chapter I’m ghostwriting for one of my authors focused on bullying. It’s a common theme whenever you explore the story of someone living in the public eye. Often, they will have experienced victimisation at school. Talent, beauty, nascent fame or precocity can all put a target on a tall poppy’s back. Alternatively, astounding success can be propelled by ‘proving the bullies wrong’ and I’ve recorded several stories where decades later, insecurities created in the crucible of the teen years continue to motivate mature professional careers. Even as well-known and respected people achieve goal after goal, the words that cut them to the bone as children continue to reverberate between their ears. In this day and digital age, there is also the obvious nearly new dimension of cyberbullying and trolling.

When you work in social media, you’re often advised to steer clear of mentioning trolling, or any of the sad sites where people go to anonymously slag you off. We’re all supposed to pretend we don’t know they exist and avoid giving the whole space oxygen. For many of you reading, it might sound like a niche topic, but I’m sure some of you have stumbled upon a thread of doom while seeking advice on weaning or something equally innocuous. If you’re like me, you’ll have recoiled from the negativity and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. But some of these sites have reached the tipping point to defy turning a blind eye. Aside from facilitating flagrantly illegal behaviour starting from slander and ending at stalking, these digital spaces have normalised what would, until pretty recently, be seen as shocking examples of bullying. Shit talk is one thing. Having been raised in a home where you constantly rinse each other for your ridiculousness, there’s not much I haven’t heard already from people with whom I share DNA. Piss-taking is my love language. But this is something different and it’s hard not to feel the fabric of what we accept as acceptable in our society has changed its stripes. However, the fightback may have just begun.

Earlier this month, American influencer Brianna Madia uploaded a long and detailed history of her battle with a tribe of particularly dedicated trolls. Madia admits upfront a dodgy error of judgement involving public fundraising to treat her dog’s injuries—the spark that ignited the wildfire—but what unfolds after is the stuff of Black Mirror nightmares. From doxxing to libellous accusations sent to employers resulting in loss of earnings, to pulling her ex-husband and in-laws into the pile on, to harassing anyone even tangentially associated with her, the cyberbullying bled venomously beyond the screens. Friends spoke of being terrified to leave their homes; Madia speaks emotionally of her suicidal intentions. Her experience is a horrendous cautionary tale for any young person who might view a social media career as an aspirational way to make easy money. It also will send shivers down the spines of anyone who has ever used Instagram’s ‘paid partnership’ tool. The cultivation of an atmosphere of fear and intimidation are, of course, the hallmarks of any bully.

In this case, there is a voluble punchline. Instead of being cowed, Madia decided to enlist the help of a digital investigator/fan to uncover the identities of 200 of her trolls. With the information, she contacted their employers and made the identities of the most prolific public. One was a therapist. Another worked for a church. A firefighter, a nurse, a shelter worker. Some were people she had personal relationships with—including both family and people she thought were friends. Wherever you stand on the morality of her actions and where the culpability falls, the episode is a watershed. There are so many moral quandaries: is it the same to comment here and there on these threads when you’re aware they’re causing someone both emotional and material damage as it is to consistently instigate and intensify the hate both online and beyond? Can simply lurking make you an accessory to, for example, second degree manslaughter should suicide result? Is posting the details of someone who has posted your details morally equitable? Or is it simply vigilante justice? Either way, the saga sets a precedent and for both sides of the dynamic—the public figure and the hater. Any snark who has crossed the line may be reevaluating their digital trail, while people with profiles around the globe consider consulting legal teams. Since Madia’s post, much of the original exhaustively vitriolic content has been deleted, while new strands have simultaneously exploded to follow the drama. It seems that without the cloak of anonymity, at least some haters actually aren’t gonna hate; for others, the bear has been truly poked.

True bullying is always about power. For the most part, bullies aren’t like us. With a cognitive make up which includes hostile bias—a kind of paranoia—their brains function in a different way. The adage that bullies are made and not born continues to be borne out in the literature, with consistent boundaries around aggression before the age of two fundamental to the development of ‘pro-social’ behaviour. Bullies often read social cues and process social information inaccurately. They will attribute hostile intentions to others and perceive provocation when it just doesn’t exist. Using that imagined provocation as justification, they reconcile their aggression as both righteous and proportionate. Revenge is reasonable in their eyes, even while the supposed insult remains nominal or even imaginary. These lines of thought lead bullies to derive pleasure from injuring others, enable them to disassociate from any kind of empathy, deny other’s ability to suffer and believe that aggression is the best solution to all conflict.

Some of the motivations for trolling include attention seeking, narcissism, simple sociopathy and the feeling of belonging that becoming a member of these groups of animosity breeds. There is no shame in loneliness, it can happen to anyone (hi!). But isolation can also lead to the coagulation of communities around resentment, especially online. The faceless factor cannot be overstated. When humans believe they are anonymous, they will become markedly more aggressive.  A classic 1969 study offered female students the chance to administer electric shocks to their peers. Some were hooded, while others faced their potential victim and looked them in the eye with clearly visible name tags. The results show that masked participants were twice as likely to comply and also chose to send the strongest shockwaves. American psychologist Philip Zimbardo concluded that individuals become desensitised to suffering through facelessness and that anonymity leads to what he described as deindividuation. He hypothised that people behave in a more aggressive or violent way when they believe they will not be held accountable for their actions. Without consequences, more people than you’d like to believe would be zapping that leccy with the voltage whacked up to max.

Working online has changed my perception of human nature, shifting my philosophy from Locke (humans are inherently good, altruistic and selfless) to Hobbs (human nature is characterised by a war of all against all; we are simply vainglorious and driven by a desire to dominate each other). It has peeled back the veneer of decency which I once had the blissful ignorance of believing to be humanity’s norm. There may be those amongst you who think that coping with a bit of bitching is a fair price to pay for free mascara—especially if it has to be sought out. Hopefully we can all agree that no amount of Reels money deserves a visit from social services due to baseless child abuse tip offs (depressingly this has happened to influencers I know personally). But both really stem from the same seed—a total and complete lack of consequence for aggression and bullying. Everyone feels powerless against the flood. Just as in the past we accepted and rationalised child on child cruelty as ‘boys being boys’, we’ve socially internalised online bullying as ‘girls being girls’ (and yes this is vastly gendered, but research supports the conclusion).

But perhaps the tide is turning. Perhaps we are cornering in on the nadir. Wishful thinking maybe, but I have read a few public, ‘enough is enough’ posts to know that the atmosphere is shifting. Just as the unhooded students backed away from the shock buttons in the ‘60s, for those thousands of women posting exponentially malevolent content online, understanding how easily they can be named and shamed could lead to a new era of circumspection. Entire law practices are springing up to serve the new deluge of libel, slander and defamation claims spanning loss of earnings to mental health damage caused by online abuse. Digital forensics is now a $5 billion market and is predicted to be worth $12.6 billion by 2028. While the majority of this is focused on theft and espionage, the tools required to track internet use are becoming more mundane. No-one is truly anonymous online anymore. You can hide off grid, but the minute you click that spacebar, you’re in the matrix and your computer, your phone, your footprint can be traced legally. Yes, it can be a convoluted process which takes time and money. But lots of public facing roles are lucrative. Now the Wild West 2.0 is entering maturity, breaking the law online is becoming the same as breaking the law off it. And that counts for the laws of how we behave socially too. As Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate explained to the BBC, the costs of trolling have mounted. “People have been excluded from school or university, lost their jobs, their friends and even been jailed for sending abuse online. Not only is it a horrible thing to do, you are risking your own future by engaging in trolling.’ These stories recall the truth that while a bully may seek to hurt others, the person they hurt the most is themselves.

If Madia’s story counts for anything it shows that those in the public eye at least have a new option. For anyone tempted to join a tear down community, it may be worth keeping in mind that the hood you’re wearing is becoming increasingly transparent. As Stephen Marche wrote in the New York Times, “trolls breed under the shadows of the bridges we build.” Seems like some of those bridges at least are falling down.