Twitter: Troll reversal

Twitter has given voice to a world of lunatics, who get off on causing strangers pain. By Tom Eaton

The message to me and my colleagues was very clear: the young man with the jihad-themed username knew how to make a bomb, knew our work address, and was planning to turn us into pink mist. Our crime? We had suggested in an online article that Pakistan's cricket team was weaker than India's.

It was 2001, and bearded bombers haunted the nightmares of the West. I don't consider myself Islamophobic, but I am somewhat bomb-phobic and I was relieved when the British owners of the website took the threat seriously and traced his IP address. The culprit was revealed: our jihadi was a teenager living in his mum's flat in the north of England. The only things he knew how to detonate were the pimples on his forehead.

It was my first taste of the degraded subspecies of humanity that is the online troll, and I was shocked. No longer. The trolls have crawled out of the internet's sewers and installed themselves as our cyber-neighbours.

Trolls are everywhere, but perhaps nowhere is the hate more explicit than on Twitter. Of course, not all would consider themselves trolls. Many confidently tweet using their own names, positioning themselves as bastions of conservative common-sense in a world gone mad with liberalism, feminism, or any other of the inclusive ideologies that offend them.

Some collect small coteries of admirers - let's call them trollets - and preach to this choir of malcontents in the language of snide loathing. Certain laboured neologisms seem particularly popular: "libtard" is used to describe anyone who thinks apartheid wasn't awesome, while "feminazi" is apparently anyone who thinks that women are people.

So what, you might ask? Sticks and stones can break our bones, but surely words can never harm us? The trouble is that trolls have realised that this isn't true. Words can and do do terrible harm if they come in relentless wave of vileness. Sticks and stones can break our bones, but ugly words, obsessively flung at us like rocks, can frighten us, disrupt our lives and, sometimes, break our spirits: the suicide in February of Charlotte Dawson, an Australian media figure and anti-bullying activist, was linked to brutal online persecution by trolls.

Sometimes they prey on pain, like flies clustering around a wound. When George Lineker, son of footballing great Gary, was diagnosed with leukaemia, a Twitter troll messaged him with, "heard ya Leukamia (sic), pity ya didn't die".

But overwhelmingly the target of Twitter trolls seems to be women who have committed the cardinal sin of being women. Should any woman with even the smallest public profile call out misogyny or sexist stereotyping, or even just make a statement about gender violence, she can now expect to receive at least one Tweet threatening her with rape or calling for her to be murdered. I would refer you to some of the trolls attacking @EverydaySexism if it wouldn't entirely snuff out your last hope for our species.

Ignorant rage is one thing, but where does the relentlessness come from? A recent study by researchers at the University of Manitoba found that the average troll spends a full hour every day doing nothing but abusing strangers. If they loathe their victims so much, why not just insult them and walk away?

One answer seems to be their psychology. According to the study, people who admitted to enjoying sending abusive messages online shared a startling tendency to be narcissistic, sadistic, Machiavellian and psychopathic: a full menagerie of demons whooping between their ears.

Trolls, it seems, do it for the rush of being a villain.

It is an explanation that clashes with our world of moral relativism and tearful confessions to Oprah. Monsters, we are told, only live in fairytales and superhero films. But Twitter has revealed glimpses of a universe of pus inhabited by people who get genuine pleasure from causing pain.

I suspect some of those dark complexes identified by the researchers have found themselves both heightened and tormented by Twitter, a tool which gives them the power to be heard by a billion people but which shows them, cruelly, that only their few hundred trollets are listening.

Twitter simultaneously stokes narcissistic hubris and crushes it, and that conflict must be unbearable for the kind of person who feels overlooked. The more time they spend on the internet, seeing the vastness of the world and their smallness in it, the angrier they get. Their anger goes unacknowledged and festers to become rage, and, ultimately, slow-burning hate.

So how should we respond to these creatures? Nobody seems sure. For years the advice has been: "Don't feed the trolls." It seems sensible. Trolls eat indignation. To respond is to give them not only validation but also sustenance. Then again, some say this approach places the responsibility on the victims and leaves the perpetrators free to keep doing their thing. The good citizens of cyberspace, they insist, must drive out the trolls, whether through collective outrage or aggressive litigation, and reclaim the internet.

Until that happens, perhaps the only thing one can do is try to disengage, to leave them to their darkness. Remember you are dealing with people who do not live in any world you would recognise; people who are slaves to compulsions and thoughts you are incredibly lucky to be free of. Perhaps, for now, log off, stand up, and go outside. LS

• Follow Tom Eaton on Twitter at @TomEatonSA