What comes to your mind when you think of trolling?
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Someone that upsets one person for their own amusement? Lulz?

Or perhaps something more sinister. Propaganda?

Let’s start with poor taste. In 2012, Mountain Dew created a campaign called “Dub The Dew.” The company invited users to submit and vote on name ideas for a green apple flavor of Mountain Dew.

On August 13th of that year, an anonymous 4chan user encouraged other members to vote up two name ideas: “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” and “Gushing Granny.”

The same day, the 4chan post made its way to Reddit. It caught fire, the raid was on. Bronies joined in and tried to upvote Applejack. By the next day, Mountain Dew cancelled its campaign, tweeting out “Dub the Dew lost to The Internet.”

This is trolling at its most immature. This is the internet equivalent of school yard potty humor. An advertising campaign was hijacked for some laughs. For some it’s funny.

Using a common trolling refrain of “Hitler did nothing wrong” to evoke outrage? Definitely poor taste. Anti semetic? Yeah, that too.

At the end of the day, if you could track down each person that took part in the trolling, I don’t think you’d find many people with nefarious intentions. That’s just a guess.

But if you were to show an alien civilization the internet that day, I’d be a bit ashamed of our species. It’s like you traveled across the galaxy to find us and I farted in your face.

But what if the people involved in a trolling campaign had a playbook?

What if that playbook stated things like: make America the target of criticism, do not directly confront the idea of democracy, frame arguments in terms of what kind of system can truly implement democracy, choose examples in Western countries of violence and unreasonable circumstances to explain how democracy is not well-suited to capitalism, use America’s and other countries’ interference in international affairs to explain how Western democracy is actually an invasion of other countries and how the West is forcibly pushing Western values. Remember to use the bloody and tear-stained history of weak people to stir up Pro-party and patriotic emotions. Play down the existence of Taiwan.

And make sure to increase the exposure that positive developments inside China receives

That’s actually a real playbook for the 50 Cent Army. It was leaked.

The 50 Cent Army is a term for Internet commentators hired by Chinese authorities. The army attempts to manipulate public opinion to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. The name derives from the allegation that commentators were paid fifty cents for every post. A 2016 Harvard study found that 80% of posts involve pro-China cheerleading with inspirational slogans.

13% involve general praise and suggestions on governmental policies. If you grew up in the West, the playbook for the 50 Cent Army has an obvious bias. It promotes the agenda of China.

What would a playbook for the US government look like? Or a far right terrorist organization? What about a playbook for eco-terrorists? Or for that matter, anyone with an agenda.

How do you know when you’re consuming something on the internet that has a hidden agenda?

This is the trouble with having conversations with strangers on the internet. You could find yourself being the victim of a childish prank on 4chan or an unwilling enabler of a sovereign nation’s propaganda campaign.

Very different in their aims, but very similar in the way that they operate. They’re both examples of trolling. What kills me is that sometimes these trolling circles amplify each other. QAnon definitely started as a joke on 4chan.

It was quickly co-opted by people seeking power and control. By the time the memes were spreading on social media, it found an audience of true believers and opportunists.

And when the most powerful leader in the world, a malignant narcissist, repeats the lies in a pathetic and selfish attempt to retain power at all costs? People died. And a huge swath of the United States still believes these outlandish lies due to cognitive dissonance and the cowardice of a group of lawmakers to stand up to a bully.

Seriously, what the fuck. So let’s talk about trolling. And maybe the next time someone is trying to manipulate you online, you won’t fall for it.

There are 5 general types of trolling: Playtime, Tactical, Strategic, Domination, and Sponsored.

Playtime Trolling is usually acceptable. It’s a quick, short game.That Twitter user that jumps into a discussion and derails it.

Probably just for shits and giggles. Ignoring it is the best way to stop it.

Then there’s tactical trolling. Some people might consider it acceptable, but that has to do with the troll’s intent. It’s when a troll creates a credible persona and gains the confidence of other people in a group. The people in that group are not in on the joke.

And once that troll has some credibility in the group, they start to provoke discord in subtle ways. It can take awhile, and it’s much more serious than a playtime troll. If you’re in a group being tactically trolled and you recognize what’s happening, you should do your best to let others in that group know before shit hits the fan.

And you should hope that it’s not strategic trolling. With strategic trolling, a high level strategy is produced. These can take months or years to develop and it can involve a number of people acting together. There are two types of strategic trolling: domination and sponsored.

Domination trolling is when a troll or group of trolls create or manage a community. The troll might manipulate group members into fighting with each other, and this fighting would then give them more power within the group and use it as a means for control.

I think of these trolls in the same way as a domestic abuser. It’s an ugly human desire for power and control and the abuser will do anything to have it. But I don’t think that’s the worst kind of trolling, because those trolls are acting emotionally. They’re still susceptible to outside influences.

No, the worst kind of trolling is sponsored trolling. That’s trolling that’s funded by governments and organizations to manipulate public opinion. China’s 50 Cent Army that was mentioned at the beginning of this podcast is an example of this. The IRA, or Internet Research Agency, is another example of this.They work on behalf of the Russian Government.

In 2014, the IRA began a campaign to shift public opinion in the West that would be useful for a military intervention in Ukraine. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the United States also participates in sponsored trolling.

We might have the equivalent of a 50 Cent Army, but American citizens wouldn’t be a target. The sponsored trolling that is targeting American citizens requires hyper-partisan news outlets.

When it comes to Donald Trump, he’s basically a domination troll. However, he’s been enabled by the Republican Party and conservative news outlets into what is really sponsored trolling.

On the campaign trail and as President of the United States, Donald Trump and his staff would reveal a target. The hyper partisan news outlets would then pick it up and spread the message. For example, during a town hall on Fox News, in the midst of the 2016 presidential election, one of Jeb Bush’s aides, Lauren Batchelder, questioned Trump’s friendship with women.

Considering there is an audio recording of Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals without consent, that’s a legitimate question. But a troll seeks to redirect the conversation. So Dan Scavino Jr, then the social media manager for the Trump Campaign, instigated the attack on Ms. Batchelder.

He tweeted out “I thought there was a plant today. #TrumpTrain confirms it was” Included in the tweet were screenshots of her social media accounts. Then Trump also tweeted that she was a nasty woman.

For more than a year after the event, Ms. Batchelder received death and rape threats.

Once assuming the presidency, Trump and his staff continued to work with hyper-partisan news outlets, targeting perceived threats, and coordinating trolling attacks. With the loss of the election, Trump began making a hit list and ultimately incited a mob to siege the Capitol Building.

This wasn’t surprising to people watching Trump and his associates' usage of social media. To me, it felt inevitable that something horrible would happen. It was just a matter of when the majority of Americans would say “ok, now that’s unacceptable.”

And now we know.

So anyways, where do these trolls hang out? 4chan is a good place to start. The site was started in the bedroom of Christopher Poole, who was 15 years old at the time. The first boards were used primarily for posting pictures and discussing manga and anime.

Today the site is linked to internet subcultures, activism, and the alt-right. It’s birthed many memes and gained a lot of media attention. Me? I have a love hate relationship with 4chan.

One of the first trolling campaigns that came from 4chan was Project Chanology. It was also the first time the hacking collective Anonymous launched a coordinated attack. Project Chanology was launched in the form of a video posted to YouTube, entitled "Message to Scientology", on January 21, 2008. The video states that Anonymous views Scientology's actions as Internet censorship, and asserts the group's intent to "expel the church from the Internet". For me, attacking a cult (and yes, Scientology is a cult) was righteous.

The protest shifted to non violent protests and an attempt to get the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Church of Scientology's tax exempt status in the United States. This campaign felt like the internet and it’s band of trolls was being used for a common good. But in the current climate, I don’t feel so good about 4chan.

Perhaps The New York Observer was correct in describing posters as “immature pranksters whose bad behavior is encouraged by the site’s total anonymity and absence of an archive.” The turn for me came with #GamerGate.

If you know about #GamerGate, you probably follow one of two narratives. The first narrative is that #GamerGate was a campaign against ethics in video game journalism. That video games, a thoroughly enjoyed hobby of a lot of people, predominantly white men, for a long time, was being taken over by social justice warriors and academics.

The second narrative is that #GamerGate is a harassment campaign A reaction to a growing industry that’s becoming more inclusive.When you look at the campaign as a whole, It’s this second narrative that is the truth.

Zoe Quinn is an independent game designer. She made a game called Depression Quest. It’s a text based choose your own adventure designed to convey the experience of depression Through a series of fictional scenarios and based on Quinn’s own experiences.

A game for everyone? Probably not. But’s an artist expressing herself.

So I don’t know why exactly Eron Gjoni, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, did what he did. At some point post breakup, he decided to launch a website called The Zoe Post. It was a lengthy account of Eron and Zoe’s relationship. It included personal chat logs, emails, and text messages. As a jilted lover, Eron accused Zoe of cheating on him with a game journalist. As a fellow game developer, let me just chime in here for a second for a bit of perspective.

The indie game scene definitely has cliques. But that’s like any scene. While you could say Depression Quest was critically acclaimed, it was acclaimed by people and organizations that are trying to push the boundaries of games. None of these awards had any monetary value. The sales of Depression Quest definitely didn’t make Zoe Quinn rich. When #GamerGate happened, she was like most independent game developers. Most likely poor.

So Zoe’s ex Eron accused her of sleeping with a games journalist to get positive coverage. There was a backlash from gamers who disliked the departure from typical game formats that emphasized violence and skill. They opposed political intrusions into their culture. Their culture.

Who is “they?” Mainly white men.

Specifically, adult white men that grew up playing video games.

To put this in perspective, It’d be like a novelist facing backlash for trying a new genre. There are still a ton of video games that emphasize violence and skill. The industry hasn’t stopped making those games either.

So, the Zoe Post goes live. Actor Adam Baldwin helps spread the hashtag GamerGate to his followers. Less than four months after Gamegate began, Quinn’s record of threats received had grown 1000 fold. She was doxed. Her tumblr was hacked. Her Dropbox and Skype accounts were hacked. She received death and rape threats.

Harassers would call her dad, and tell them she was a whore. The only thing I can say to this kind of behavior is, What the hell is wrong with you?

Once the mob started, The list of targets grew. Anita Sarkeesian, popular for her YouTube series Tropes vs. Women that analyzes sexist tropes in video games, received renewed attacks. She was doxed. She received death and rape threats.

Brianna Wu, another game developer who came to Zoe’s defense also became the target of rape and death threats. Ars Technica, a popular tech site, quoted early members of #GamerGate said that they had no interest in video games but were primarily interested in attacking Quinn.

But Sexism and misogyny have existed on the internet for a long time. In LambdaMoo,an early pioneer in real time chat rooms,Its members had an encounter with a user named Mr. Bungle. Mr. Bungle came into the chat room and proceeded to virtually rape people in the room by use of chat actions. Several users of LambdaMoo posted about the emotional trauma Mr. Bungle caused.

The encounter was written about in an article called “A Rape in Cyberspace.” It’s one of the earliest examples of New Games Journalism where the review of computer games are meshed with social observation and consideration of surrounding issues, including legal ramifications. That was 1993.

We’ve known about trolls for a long time. Today it seems worse, but that might just be because more people are online. But if people in tech have known about trolls for decades, why haven’t they designed their products to reduce their presence? Or perhaps tech companies amplified the presence of trolls through their creation of filter bubbles.

Filter Bubble, a term coined by internet entrepreneur and activist Eli Parser, is when algorithms selectively guess what information a user would like to see based on all the information they have about you. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.

One user searches Google for “BP” and gets investment news on British Petroleum. Another user searches and gets information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Then, the filter bubble gets amplified by bots. A bot, by definition, is just a software application that runs an automated task over the internet. Siri, Alex, Cortana, Google Assistant. Those are bots too, but they aren’t the bots that amplify the filter bubble.I’m talking about bots on social networks. Bots that autonomously tweet, re-tweet, like, follow, unfollow and directly message other accounts.

And with bots that post clickbait? Yikes.

Political groups control bots. Researchers estimated that pro-Trump bots generated four tweets for every pro-Clinton automated account. Pro Trump bots out-tweeted pro-Clinton bots 7:1 on relevant hashtags during the final debate.

Bots have fooled political candidates and campaign staffers into retweeting misappropriated quotes and accounts affiliated with incendiary ideals. And all of this leads us to post truth politics.

The term post truth was first used in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian American playwright Steve Tesich. Debate is framed by appeals to emotion and disconnected from the details of policy. There’s a repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored.

You couldn’t describe the playbook of Donald Trump any better. So we have to ask ourselves, how important is the truth?

And if the truth is important, how are we going to make technology amplify truth over disinformation and emotional appeals?