Trolling Is Not Bullying

The Fires of History Newsletter, No. 10

In 2014, Time magazine published a cover story titled “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet.” The cover showed a close-up of a crying face reflected in a laptop screen. The article treated “trolling” as a catch-all for every species of online cruelty: death threats, doxxing, revenge pornography, racist abuse, coordinated pile-ons. All of it “trolling.” All of it performed by “trolls.”

The article was about real suffering. The threats it described were real threats. The harassment was real harassment. The victims were real victims.

The word was wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of politically incorrect. Wrong the way calling a tsunami a “wave” is wrong – technically defensible, functionally useless, and dangerous to anyone trying to understand what they are dealing with. Death threats are not trolling. Doxxing is not trolling. Revenge pornography is not trolling. These are harassment, stalking, and in many cases federal crimes. Calling them “trolling” does not illuminate the problem. It obscures it.

The distinction is not a matter of degree. It is a difference in kind. And the media’s refusal to learn it has made both problems – trolling and harassment – harder to address.

The Fishing Metaphor

The word “troll” entered internet culture in the late 1980s on Usenet, and it had nothing to do with monsters. Trolling was a fishing term. To troll is to drag a baited line behind a slow-moving boat, seeing what bites. The OED traces the fishing sense to at least 1377. The distinction between trolling and trawling matters: trawling drags a net and catches everything indiscriminately. Trolling is selective. You choose the bait. You read the water. You wait.

On Usenet, the practice was “trolling for newbies.” Post something subtly wrong in a newsgroup and see who takes the bait. The people who responded with outrage identified themselves as newcomers who had not yet learned to read the room. Experienced users recognized the troll and let it pass. Catch and release. The newbie learned something about the culture. The regulars confirmed the culture was still functioning.

“Don’t feed the trolls” was practical advice about catch-and-release fishing. Not a moral imperative about defeating monsters.

Sometime around the mid-2000s, the monster ate the metaphor. As trolling migrated from Usenet to mainstream awareness, the Norse troll – the creature under the bridge, the thing that eats children in the dark – replaced the fishing rod. Not accidentally. It is much easier to tell a story about monsters than about fishermen. The monster metaphor requires nothing from the audience: the troll is bad, the victim is good, the solution is to block and report. The fishing metaphor requires nuance. Nuance does not fit in a CNN chyron.

The Core Distinction

Here is the test: Does the trolling require more effort from the troll than from the target?

High-effort trolling is harder to create than it is to receive. Socrates spent decades developing his method. His interlocutors merely had to answer questions. Swift labored over every sentence of A Modest Proposal; his readers merely had to read it. The Yes Men spent months building a fake Dow Chemical website and preparing a BBC-ready spokesperson; Dow merely had to issue a denial. In 2004, the Yes Men went on BBC World News posing as Dow Chemical representatives and announced that the company would finally compensate victims of the Bhopal disaster. Dow’s stock dropped two billion dollars before the hoax was revealed. Months of preparation. Years of research. Personal legal risk. That is trolling.

Low-effort trolling – which is to say, not trolling at all, but the thing the media calls trolling – is the reverse. It takes three seconds to type a death threat. It takes weeks to recover from one. It requires no intelligence, no craft, no preparation, no risk, no courage. It is typing slurs into a chat box. It is sending anonymous threats. It is piling onto someone who is already being attacked because joining costs nothing.

The asymmetry is the moral core of the distinction. High-effort trolling targets upward – at power, at orthodoxy, at complacency. The target can fight back. Low-effort cruelty targets downward – at the vulnerable, the outnumbered, the person who cannot fight back. High-effort trolling creates value: an assumption exposed, a hypocrisy made visible, a conversation started. Low-effort cruelty destroys value: someone is hurt, nothing has changed, a space has been made worse.

These are not points on a spectrum. They are different activities that happen to occur on the same infrastructure.

The Academic Record

Judith Donath’s 1999 paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” is the earliest serious academic treatment of trolling. Donath did something that almost nobody writing about trolling after 2010 would do: she went to where trolling was actually happening and watched what the people doing it thought they were doing.

What she found was not harassment. It was a game about identity and community boundaries. Her definition: trolling is “a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players.” The troll posts a message designed to appear sincere, but the message is bait. Its purpose is to provoke a response that reveals something about the responder. The troll is not trying to hurt anyone. The troll is running a penetration test on the social infrastructure. Can this community detect deception? Can its members tell the difference between someone who belongs and someone who is pretending?

Community catches the troll: the community passes. Community misses the troll: the troll has identified a vulnerability. The troll is the community’s immune system.

Whitney Phillips, in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (MIT Press, 2015), extended the framework through years of ethnographic research with self-identified trolls. She later published “The Oxygen of Amplification” (Data & Society, 2018), which identified the precise mechanism by which media coverage of trolling feeds the behavior it claims to oppose: the amplification-condemnation loop. Cover the troll. Condemn the troll. Drive engagement with the condemnation. Attract more trolls who want the same attention. The coverage is the oxygen.

Neither Donath nor Phillips – the two scholars who have done the most rigorous empirical work on the phenomenon – define trolling as harassment. They define it as a specific mode of interaction with specific social functions. The fact that the word was later grafted onto every form of online cruelty is not a natural evolution of language. It is a category error that serves institutional convenience.

The Three-Part Damage

When you call everything “trolling,” you produce three specific harms.

First: real harassment becomes harder to identify and address. If a Ken M comment on Yahoo Answers and a death threat in someone’s inbox are both “trolling,” then the word communicates nothing about severity, intent, or appropriate response. Law enforcement, platform moderation teams, and the targets themselves are left without vocabulary to distinguish between a fishing line and a federal crime.

Second: productive provocation is erased from public discourse. Socrates was a troll. Fermat was a troll. The Rosicrucian manifestos were a troll. The tradition of deliberate, high-effort provocation designed to expose contradictions and force the audience to think – a tradition running unbroken from ancient Athens to Usenet – disappears when “troll” becomes a synonym for “monster.” You cannot defend a practice that has no name. When the word “trolling” becomes the word “harassment,” the entire mode of discourse it used to describe becomes invisible.

Third: institutions get cover to dismiss uncomfortable speech. This is the most dangerous consequence and the least discussed. When “troll” means “bad person who says bad things online,” any institution facing uncomfortable questions can dismiss the questioner as a troll. Do not engage the argument. Attack the character of the person making it. The corruption of the word gave every institution, every public figure, every corporation facing legitimate criticism a single-word dismissal. “They’re just trolls.” Conversation over. No engagement required.

The mechanism is the same one Athens used on Socrates: do not address the argument, silence the person making it. The word became a shield, and the people it was shielding were not the ones being trolled.

The Satire Test

Imagine losing the word “satire.” Not banning it – just letting it drift until it meant any form of meanness that used humor. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? Satire. A comedian mocking a politician? Satire. A schoolyard bully making fun of a kid’s clothes? Also satire. Once you cannot distinguish Swift from the bully, you cannot defend Swift without appearing to defend the bully. So you stop defending Swift. Then you stop reading Swift. Then the entire tradition of using humor to expose power – from Aristophanes to Voltaire to Mark Twain – becomes culturally indefensible, because the word that distinguished it from cruelty no longer functions.

That is what happened to “trolling.” A word that once described a specific, identifiable, culturally productive practice was expanded until it described everything and therefore nothing. The expansion was not organic. It was driven by media organizations that needed a single villain for a complicated story, and “troll” – with its built-in monster imagery – was too convenient to fact-check.

Mikhail Bakhtin spent a career formalizing what trolls have always known. His study of medieval carnival described a licensed period of inversion in which normal hierarchies were temporarily suspended. The peasant could mock the king. The layperson could parody the priest. The grotesque was celebrated. The sacred was profaned. Carnival was not chaos. It was a pressure valve that made the social order survivable.

The internet forum was the modern carnival space – pseudonymous, hierarchically flat, a place where a tenured professor and a fourteen-year-old could argue on equal terms. The transition from pseudonymous internet to real-name internet was, in Bakhtinian terms, the abolition of carnival. When your real identity is attached to your speech, the peasant can no longer mock the king. The pressure valve closes.

Every culture that has endured has had its carnival. Trolling is the carnival that refuses to end. You can ban it from a platform. You cannot ban it from the species.

But you can strip it of its name. You can call it the same thing you call harassment, abuse, and cruelty. And once you have taken the name away, the practice becomes indefensible – not because it has changed, but because nobody can refer to it without invoking the monster that ate the metaphor.

The fishing metaphor is recoverable. The word is recoverable. But only if someone explains what it meant before the media got hold of it.

Consider this that explanation.

This essay draws from The Fires of History and Lurk More, coming fall 2026.

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