“What is turning so many young men into internet trolls?”

I’m grateful to Renee Contreras De Loach for bringing this item to my attention:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/03/how-to-stop-trolls-social-media

I couldn’t help but think, while reading it, of some of the genuinely unpleasant and very belligerent people I’ve encountered on message boards (when I still did message boards much), in really nasty (and almost always anonymous) emails (two episodes so threatening that I contacted the police), on Facebook, and occasionally in over-the-top comments to this blog.  (I haven’t banned very many people here, or deleted many posts, but I’ve deleted and banned a few.  And, believe me, they had earned it.)

Typically, these are people who disagree with my religious views and disapprove of my defense and advocacy of those views.

I get that.  And disagreement is fine.

What I genuinely don’t understand is the depth of the angry hostility, the need to be personally adversarial, the apparent desire for “total war,” the utter dehumanizing of their target (in this case, me), the denial of any redeeming traits in their chosen victim, and, for more than a few of them, the weirdly obsessive character of it all.  (For some, it’s been going on for well over a decade.)

I’ve been repeatedly accused, over the years, of racism, a malicious delight in ruining the careers of others, voyeurism, barely-repressed violence, anti-Semitism, sadism, poor taste in literature, religious fanaticism, utter academic incompetence, sociopathic tendencies, secret atheism, the cheerful destruction of families, bland movie preferences, gross and continual dishonesty, cynicism, poor discrimination in music, an inability to control my always-raging temper, fascism, religious bigotry, pathological egotism, callous indifference to human suffering, and a host of other major character defects.

My appearance has been continually ridiculed.  Phony stories of my bad character and misbehavior have been posted by people falsely claiming to be my acquaintances.  Bogus data has been posted about my personal income and finances.  People have written to scholars in my (very broad) academic field, hoping to find materials with which to discredit me professionally.  Others have searched for biographical details about me from before my marriage that might make me look bad.  And some have scoured IRS records, looking for data that might be useful for demonstrating that I’m a mercenary-minded fraud.  When I was serving as an expert witness for the federal government in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case a few years back, one or two people even proposed to try to write to the judge in an attempt to destroy my credibility.  They were obviously so eager to damage me personally that they were willing to interfere with the prosecution of an aggravated rapist and kidnapper.

I’ve been astonished at such things.  Even after many years, I still find them amazing.  Even oddly fascinating.

And all or virtually all of this has come from people posting under pseudonyms.

I assume — not without a fair number of supportive clues — that the vast majority of these people are both male and relatively young, just as most of the folks are who’re discussed in the linked article.  I also assume that they’re more or less functional in their daily lives, that they’re probably fairly civil in their ordinary face-to-face interactions with others, and that they reserve their unbridled aggression and nastiness for the anonymity of the Internet.  Again, just as the people mentioned in the article do.

It’s a perfect topic for social psychologists to examine.  And it’s also really regrettable.