So, December rolls around, and it’s the festive season again. Time for sparkling lights, presents, warm fires, celebrations with friends and family… and an epic time for social media trolls. More time to spend steaming over a hot phone, PC or iPad and more pile-ons to join when someone carelessly shares a holiday season thought that can be mined to create the online equivalent of a group of school children banding together to bully a hapless victim.
Trolling on social media
I’ve written many articles about the psychology of social media over the years, the most recent about its propensity to fan the flames of conspiracy theories. In the worst of cases this involves spreading false accusations and creating problems for police trying to identify and investigate crime. And sometimes famous individuals are harried online to the point that they feel they have to hide themselves away.
But mostly, what makes the online world so anxiety-provoking are those who use social media simply to wind others up. The blanket term for such individuals is trolls, a term taken from traditional fairy stories about trolls who live under bridges and pop up to frighten those who walk across. It has nothing to do with the wild-haired 1970s toys of the same name!
A surprising number of words, which mean something quite different in the real world, have been used to differentiate between types of social media trolling.
Astroturfers
Firstly, there’s astroturfers. This is an orchestrated movement from a marketing or political campaign that makes a product or politician appear more popular or effective than they are. Sometimes astroturfers will use fake accounts, such as a ‘bot’ account, that like, follow and post positive opinions to boost the campaign. Astroturfers are hard to spot. I will admit to being caught out recently by a ‘natural shampoo’ company! The best remedy is to search further online for product reviews, and never buy a product on the basis of a social media campaign. I’ve learnt my lesson now.
Sealions
Then there’s sealions. Sealions are generally real people, who cannot bear the idea that someone ‘out there’ has a different opinion to them. They will frequently try to boost their own ego to press their own opinions on another online poster. An early ploy is to ask the original poster what qualifications/ experience they have in the relevant area. Many particularly like to take on academics in the relevant subject to try and ‘catch them out.’
Female academics are particularly vulnerable to sealion-style trolling from men. The sealion comes back constantly to the thread to pick at the responses, ‘but you said… and now you are saying…’. Some responses are then reinterpreted in replies, to make it appear to others reading the thread that the original poster is misinformed, and may thence join in to agree with the sealion: a pile-on.
The majority of sealions engage in ‘sealioning’ with the hope that they might incite a pile-on – see Incitement Trolling below.
Sealions are, above all, time thieves, so the best solution is to simply stop answering them, remembering that they are just passing strangers. It’s also useful to remind persistent sealions that the type of interaction they are trying to trigger would fit the criteria of bullying and harassment in a real-life interaction.
Concern trolling
This can be applied to non-famous strangers on social media, but concern trolling is frequently used to comment on the appearance and behaviour of famous people, to raise the social media profile of the poster as others join the thread to agree/ disagree/ speculate. The primary female actresses in the Wicked films have attracted a lot of such attention recently, with respect to their appearance. Arianna Grande responded:
“I’ve been kind of doing this in front of the public and a specimen in a petri dish really since I was 16 or 17… I have heard it all. I’ve heard every version of it, of what’s wrong with me. And then you fix it, and then it’s wrong for different reasons… It’s hard to protect yourself from that noise.”
In other words, a long line of social media posts (or ‘pile-on’) speculating on someone’s health and discussing it at length between themselves is not helpful, and raises anxiety in general, whether the focus of the attention is fine or not fine.
Taylor Swift preferred to respond in song:
“Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off.”
Good advice!
Incitement trolling
This is equally likely to happen to famous and non-famous people on social media. A poster makes a highly inflammatory point about a situation and/or a person and invites others to share and comment. This mimics the tabloid ‘clickbait’ headline, and again, is undertaken to raise the social media profile of the poster, drawing in as many responses as possible.
Some social media posters might argue that where a politically elected individual or publicly-funded official has behaved appallingly, that this type of posting is justified… but too often, inciters don’t check to find out if a particular accusation is true. Such threads are then prone to head into conspiracy theory (see above).
Mashed potatoes
I saw a stunning example of incitement trolling last week, following the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. A young woman (who looked to be in her early 20s from her profile picture) had posted that she had been asked to contribute the mashed potatoes to the collaboratively prepared family Thanksgiving meal, and that a catering pack of pre-prepared chilled mashed potatoes for the family had cost over $100.
If my own daughter had done that, I’d have said something like ‘10lb of spuds would cost a lot less, you know’ and left it at that. The thread underneath started from there. But the extent to which it grew was mind-boggling, examples included the accusation that she was so spoilt she probably didn’t know how to mash potatoes, that she must be ‘stupid’ to pay for pre-prepared food; that she was exhibiting ‘Gen-Z laziness;’ that she was disrespecting the occasion because Thanksgiving was about having a home cooked meal (?!) and that the conditions in which people make pre-prepared chilled food are disgusting, but she probably wouldn’t care anyway. I gave up after about 50 posts into the rabbit hole.
So, be warned folks, don’t post reflections on your Christmas dinner unless you want to be shamed about it!
Please don’t feed the trolls
From the perspective of my Bermondsey origins, my first response to this type of online grifting would be a simple one – ‘leave it out’. My home-counties-raised granny would have phrased it more formally, ‘if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say it at all’.
The internet has come up with another potential remedy – ‘counter trolling’. But beware, sarcasm frequently pours petrol onto an already smouldering thread.
Linguist and social media researcher Claire Hardaker advises that the best way to deal with trolls is not to respond at all: “The average troll seems to find silence absolutely infuriating.” Which makes logical sense, given that the vast majority of trolls are, above all, seeking attention from other social media users.
They are certainly not going to get any attention from me over this festive season anyway, because I’ve got one book to finish writing and another to start, so I won’t be on social media very much until late January. So, I’m signing off for 2025 here, with very best wishes to all our readers for a peaceful solstice, a merry Christmas and a happy new year, and a piece of advice while you are sitting around phone-surfing in the after Christmas stupor: ‘Please don’t feed the trolls’.
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