Trolling, is also a way of demonstrating their numerical strength and thus constitutes an indirect threat that they will prevail by sheer numbers, if not by merit.

That is why the conventional wisdom of not feeding the trolls by simply ignoring them or not responding to them does little to them. Isolated trolls could be ignored, not thousands of them. Moreover, since many of them contain implicit or explicit threats of violence and sexual violence, some of them might need to be reported to the police also.

Personality traits

Many trolls are actually dangerously depraved people because their viciousness is agenda-driven. Whatever they write, they write deliberately, not on impulse, and this puts more purpose into it.

For them the online virtual world is just an extension of the real world where they do horrible things. Dr. Jennifer Golbeck of the University of Maryland writes that trolling is linked with the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of personality traits.


The ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits is characterised by psychopathy (continuous anti-social behaviour, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits and remorselessness), Machiavellianism (manipulation and exploitation of others, an absence of morality, unemotional callousness, and a higher level of self-interest) and Narcissism (by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy).

Adding sadism (cruel or demeaning behaviour to others, or intentionally inflicts physical, sexual, or psychological pain or suffering on others in order to assert power and dominance or for pleasure and enjoyment) makes up the ‘Dark Tetrad’.

In the early years of online forums, posting insults and profanity was called flaming and its more aggravated form was called “shitposting”. Then there was “hit-and-run posting” where someone posted something offensive and then disappeared.

We also had online shaming and cyberbullying in which targets were publicly humiliated or harassed. It would be a serious mistake to think that trolling of the kind we encounter in India is a virulent form of self-righteousness, as some people believe—they have obviously not seen the muck here.

trolls do not leave any doubt that they hate their targets so much that they would like to do horrible things to them and their ilk. Anonymity on the internet leads to the online toxic disinhibition effect, which makes the darker side of their personality burst forth easily because of pack mentality.

In his article ‘How the internet created an age of rage’, Tim Adams cites Tom Postmes, professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter and Groningen.

Postmes says, “Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure.”