Seven Trolls
A few years back the South End String Band wrote a little ditty about the Barefoot Bandit and submitted it to the Ron and Don show on KIRO radio, at the time the slot with the largest listening audience in the entire Pacific Northwest. We got something like 25,000 hits and the Band, unaccustomed to prime time notoriety, had heads swelled to the size of Goodyear Blimps. Well, the size of pumpkins anyway. Okay, we were mildly amused.
As we followed our number of hits daily, we noticed at the bottom the COMMENT section so naturally we checked to see what our admiring public had to say about our soon-to-be-classic Side A. To say it was an eye-opener is an understatement. It was a stick in the eye, is what it was, a few dozen trolls unloading on us for everything from celebrating a criminal to undermining the Judeo-Christian faith, stuff so far off the wall it was hard to get our mind around what they were driving at. Except that they seemed angry and angrier, dumping toxic waste and their disgust with the world into their commentary.
I didn’t understand then, and probably don’t now, this trolling stuff. I mean, are people really this creepy? The poisonous venom spewed in those comments was troubling and still is. Occasionally I peek at the comments to some news feed, just to see what the peanut gallery has to say, and invariably find myself blown back by the sheer unadulterated nastiness. Maybe, I sometimes think, it’s just seven maladjusted teenage guys venting their rage at a childhood with no toys and bad parents. After I get the taste of their venom out of my mouth I desist peeking at these commentaries for a few more months. Who needs to spoil their day reading noxious stuff from people you (hopefully) will never meet? It’s worse even than the punk who flips you off in his car for some unknown slight. You want to follow him to the gas station and see what’s bothering him?
Seven guys. Not likely. I have been trying to wrap my head around this country voting for a mean spirited, misogynistic, racist bully who shoots from the lip via tweet at every imagined slight. All I can come up with is there are a lot more trolls than those seven dwarfs. And they not only vent on the comment section, they vote.
Hits: 44
A lot of people sure are angry, and being able to give comments in a relatively anonymous forum only encourages the worst instincts. Some journalistic outlets will only let you comment now under your full real name. Others, like The Capital Times, have simply ended online commentary.
These yahoos are like the call-in folks for late night radio, regulars who sleep fitfully by day and roam the airwaves by night, AM/FM vampires in search of victims, their rotting brains receiving garbled messages from God and the Martians. The Cap Times might have the antidote, but aren’t they now relegated to an insert in the daily newspaper once a week? And this in a town that’s decidedly liberal?
I’m always surprised the worst of the trolls can write. In the future I suppose, AI bots could be programmed to identify potential future anonymous abusive writing personalities, and slow track them out of English class. No more insanely argumentative comments. Problem solved. For a few years. After that we’ll be talking to our computers, and we’ll get spell corrected, unedited monologues from the grammer-less subconscious of the
I accidentally clicked “Submit,” with my comment’s totalitarian solution dangling in an unintended better quit-while-I’m-ahead conclusion that on reflection is best left, in The Twilight Zone.
Did someone install Consciousness Check on my computer?
I really wished most of the trolls were just venting swollen spleens, then maybe hit SEND or SUBMIT accidentally, but I suppose that’s