“The YouTube comment section is known as a special circle of hell—and that might be because the people leaving provocative comments are literally sadists and psychopaths, a new study titled “Trolls just want to have fun” has discovered.
Canadian psychologists Erin Buckels, Paul Trapnell, and Delroy Paulhus set up a survey of personality inventories matched with “Internet commenting styles”—in other words, they attempted to psychoanalyze commenters, which should be cause for a Nobel prize (and hazard pay) in itself. What came from the study will likely surprise no one: people who like to troll are also likely to show signs of “sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.”
Those three character flaws make up the ominous “Dark Tetrad of personality.””* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
*Read more here from Kyle Chayka / Time:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/13/internet-trolls-are-actually-sadists-study-finds/
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Comments
Re: Trolls are sadistic psychopaths
I think maybe Cenk doesn’t necessarily see the same kind of misogynistic trolling that Ms. Kasparian sees on a daily basis. It would be an interesting experiment to have Ms. Kasparian forward all her troll e-mails and comments and such to Cenk’s inbox and ask him how he feels after reading them, and likewise Ana could read Cenk’s inbox of troll e-mails, and they can compare the different reactions to trolling in that light.
I can’t help but ‘feed the trolls’, because in one sense, yes I am angry if someone says something trollish like that, such as racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or trans*phobia, cissexism, ableism, ageism, etc. But I also think there are people out there who genuinely believe as the troll claims to believe, so I feel a need to refute and repudiate on general principles. And even if it maybe doesn’t change the minds of the most intransigent, it can help sway the undecided, I think.
Also, in the very best sense of the term, someone like Sasha Baron-Cohen is a professional troll: it’s what he does, and he does it as a kind of social commentary to expose our hidden prejudices, which I find fascinating. It’s an example of a good use and social utility to the troll.
But I do think with trolling comes power, that it goes to people’s heads. I used to get wound up when some troll would attack me, but now, I just feel sorry for them that they crave human attention so badly that they’d turn to a total stranger for it, and only know how to earn that attention negatively. But some of them are creepily obsessive, so you have to be careful.
Anyway, I do think women get it so much worse on the internet in terms of trolling, so I think if I were a woman, I would feel much more threatened by online trolls, because the worst of them are virulently misogynistic. Any time a woman is outspoken publicly and politically, there are creeps out there who will threaten them in the only way they know how, and they do it in order to silence the voices of women, and it’s criminal behaviour, and wrong.