trollpolice.com

I am quoting the following from an article I think any forum board owner should read:

Don’t underestimate the power of a board administrator. He/she has access to more then most people think, and can obtain even more information without much effort.

While the article was written in 2006, it’s tactics still work. Plus, depending on the type of forum board you are running, there are many modules that you can install to help you with the same result.

Read: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/01/07/cyberstalkers-reporting.html

I have decided that I will be dedicating a lot more time to promoting awareness about online sex crimes against children. While in the past this site has provided information about “Internet Trolls” and the harm they can cause online communities; I feel dedicating more time to the prevention of sex crimes against children is more important. Obviously.

 Here’s just a look at the headlines:

Here are some links to some articles on the web about internet crimes against:

MINORS

–>In Danbury, Connecticut a  25 year old man is sentenced to thirty years in prison for strangling a sixth-grade girl he met in an internet chat room. This was not the only underage child he crossed state lines to have sex with.

Man get 30 years for raping and killing girl he met on internet

--> A girl chatted with a 31 year old man (who was a second lieutenant in the army) in an aol internet chat room, and scheduled a date to meet in person. The man picked her up and took her to his home, where they had sex. The man pleaded guilty and was sentenced  to one year in prison and 10 years probation.

Man gets year sentence for statutory rape of girl he met off internet

–> A 26-year-old Tennessee man met a 16-year-old girl in an Internet chat room and traveled to N.Y. to meet her. He had sex with her in his hotel room and has been sentenced to one to three years in prison for having sex with a teen-age girl he met over the Internet.

Man sentenced for having sex with teenager he met on internet

–>A man has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenager he met in an Internet chatroom. A 17-year-old told police she met a 56 year old man on the Internet and met him at a fast-food restaurant, and they went to a liquor store, and the man bought beer, tequila and vodka. At his home the girl drank alcohol, got drunk, vomited, and he began touching her. She told police she tried to get up but he held her down and then she passed out. When she woke up there were signs that she had been sexually assaulted, she said.

Man charged with sexual assault of girl he met on internet

–>The body of a 13 - year - old girl has been found, and the FBI has arrested a Brazilian national who allegedly met the girl on the Internet.  Sixth - grader Christina Long Connecticut girl who mysteriously vanished last week was found strangled in a Greenwich ravine yesterday after her aunt, Shelly Reilly, dropped her off at about 5:45 p.m. at the Danbury Fair Mall.

Cyber-suitor confesses to murder of teen

–>A thirty seven year old man is charged with a federal crime for allegedly taking a 14-year-old girl he met on the Internet in an aol chatroom to his home and having sex with her. Then, the two began an email correspondence and talked on the phone after her parents went to bed. After a while he reportedly flew to her state airport and then went to the girl’s home. He brought her a plane ticket to return to his home with him. There, FBI officials say, the two had sex. (HE was violating a federal law that prohibits an adult from taking a minor across state lines to have sex.)

Man confesses to sex with teen met in internet chatroom

–>Uk girl runs off with US man twice her age she met off the internet

–>A school bus driver  had sex with a 15-year-old girl after “meeting” her in an internet chat room. The 33 year old man contacted the girl on a website, and had sex with the girl at his home before returning her back home. The two spoke frequently on the internet and then made plans to meet. While the girl was with the man for the weekend, her parents reported her missing to police.

15 year old allegedly kidnapped by man she met on internet

–>A man was charged with the sexual molestation of a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet. The 21 year old male  was arrested after he made contact with the girl on a website and then met with her and had sexual contact with her.

Guilty man molested girl he met on internet

–>52 year old man indicted on charges of using the internet to solicit sex from an underage girl. He was arrested when he went to  meet with the girl, who in reality was an undercover law enforcement officer. He contacted the 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat room and his messages sent through the internet to her described in detail the sexual activities that he wanted to do with the girl .

man indicted on charges of using the internet to solicit sex from minor

–>A 43 year old man  used the Internet and telephone conversations to discuss having unlawful sex with a 14-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to one count of using the Internet to attempt to induce a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity and one count of possession of child pornography.
He wrote to a “MeganM” on the Internet and  during these online conversations, and during telephone conversations, he asked “MeganM” if she was interested in sex with older men, whether she was ready to lose her virginity, and why she would want to lose her virginity to an older man, and described in graphic detail the sexual activities he would engage in with “MeganM.” He arranged to meet with “MeganM” in person and when he arrived  he was arrested by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “MeganM” was an undercover officer posing as a teenage girl.  When executing a search of his home is when the child pornography was found.

Canadian man guilty in internet sex case

–>A 23 year old Man was convicted  of traveling to have sex with a fourteen year old girl he met on the internet. He met the  14-year- old girl in a chat room on the Internet, and, after meeting the girl and learning her age, he continued to talk with her via internet email and on the telephone. He described in graphic detail the sexual activities he wanted to do with the girl. 

Man traveled to California to have sex with 14 year old girl he met on the internet

–>A pedophile who used the internet to groom two girls for sex has had his sentence increased .The girls he met over the internet were 13 when he had sex with them.

Pedophile used internet to groom underage girls for sex

–>A 27 year old  man charged in an Internet sex scheme, in which he allegedly tried to persuade a  girl to have sex with him last week, has been charged with six drug charges stemming from a search of his apartment. He was taken into custody after he drove to an  ice cream parlor to meet a 13-year-old girl whom he “met” over the Internet. Saying he was 19 and allegedly asked the girl for sex. . An indecency charge also is pending and that charge stems from an incident involving a 15-year-old girl.

Oxford man charged with internet sex scheme involving 13 year old girl

–>Police have charged  a 24-year-old man with five counts of second-degree sexual assault of a minor. When the man  learned his Internet friend was a 14-year-old girl but that did not stop him from having sex with her. He met the 14-year-old while on the Internet, and had extended conversations with her in chatrooms on the internet and asked her to meet him in person. He and the 14 year old had sex where he lives.

Man charged with having sex with girl he met on internet

–>A 23-year-old man was  charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy he met on the Internet. He will be  standing trial on charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, statutory sexual assault, corruption of minors and interfering with the custody of a minor. If convicted, he could face more than five years in prison. (The two met in an AOL chat room .)

Deliberations continue in internet sex case involving 14 year old boy

–>A 52-year-old man was accused of soliciting sex from a police officer posing on the Internet as a 14-year-old girl, and was charged in Louisa with a felony count of soliciting sex from a minor. A meeting was set up during an Internet chat. That’s when undercover officers arrested him.

Louisa man arrested for soliciting sex over the internet with police officer posing as 14 year old girl

–>Internet security specialist arrested for attempting to solicit sex with a minor

–>

A 12-year old female reported to her mother that while communicating with people in an Internet Chat Room she was sent unsolicited sexually explicit images from someone in the chat room. One of the victim’s family members signed on the Internet and received similar pornographic images from the same person. An Officer pretended to be a 12-year old female and made contact with the person who sent the images on the internet. An established  intimate relationship developed and  the officer was sent similar pornographic images, indicating that he wanted to meet with the 12-year old for love and a sexual relationship. Following a nearly three month investigation, officers found it was a 43-year old male. An arrangement was made for the 43 year old to drive to meet the 12-year old persona and engage in various sexual acts. The 43 year old was arrested as he approached a pre-arranged location area to meet the 12-year old. Prior to the meeting, he had instructed the undercover officer to delete all references to him in the persona’s computer. At the time of his arrest, he had in his possession, a digital camera, marijuana, etc. that he promised he would give to the “child” when he met her.

Registered sex offender arresting after attempt to seduce minor on the internet

–>A 27 year old man used a home computer to have an Internet chat with a person he believed to be a 13-year-old girl, and said he wanted to have sex, and he was arrested when he arrived at the meeting place.

Honolulu man used the internet to lure a child for sex is sentenced

–>A 30 year old male had sex with a 14 year old for a live web cam show. He claims the 14 year old in question had a fake Id claiming she was 20 years old. But he also went on to say that he never actually saw the Id himself. He thought she looked at least 18 she claimed to be 20.

Webmaster sentenced to six months for sex with minor on internet

–>A man 28 was sentenced to one to three years in prison for having sex with a 12-year-old girl he had been corresponding with on the internet for several months. The man pleaded guilty to statutory rape.

Man sentenced for having sex with 12 year old girl he met on the internet

–>Several stories about internet crimes involving minors

–>Lawyer turns self in on minor charge

–>An armed immigration officer who allegedly used the internet to solicit a sexual encounter with a teenage girl was arrested on his way to meet her. The 27-year-old has been charged with corruption of a minor and indecent assault, among other offences. He met the girl in an online chat room and told her he was 17, but after he sent a picture of himself, the girl became suspicious and told her father, who went to police.

Immigration officer allegedly used the internet to solicit sex with minor

–>A 53 year old teacher has been arrested after turning up at a restaurant expecting to see a 15-year-old boy he met on the internet. He had fixed up a meeting during three weeks of explicit chats in a gay chatroom. (The person he thought was a teenage boy was in fact an undercover police officer.) He is where the meeting was supposed to take place, and is expected to be charged with child enticement for immoral purposes and attempted sexual assault.

Teacher gets arrested after expecting to meet 15 year old at restaurant

–>A schoolgirl who disappeared with a man she met through an internet chatroom has returned home after almost three months. The 16-year-old was believed to be with a 20-year-old whom she met online last October.

Missing internet chat girl returns home after 3 months

–>A 26 year old man who lived in his 15-year-old girlfriend’s bedroom closet for weeks, pleaded guilty to sex with an underage girl and to photographing her in the nude. He was sentenced court to seven years in jail. (He had met the girl on the internet.) The man, a soldier, had deserted his Army unit Knox and was discovered when the girl’s mother found dishes, a pillow and other items in the closet.

Man lived in teenage girls closet that he met on the internet

–>Police say computer programmer traveled to Chicago believing he would have sex with a 14-year-old he met on the internet. He was charged with a felony and  if convicted, he could get 15 years in prison. After  he checked into a hotel, he was arrested when an undercover officer posing as a young girl arrived by cab to meet him. He had  sent sexually explicit messages and images to the officer and made arrangements to meet into have sex.

Computer tech goes to Chicago to meet with 14 year old he met on the internet for sex

–>A 61 year old man posed as a teenager in an internet chatroom and met a 16-year-old girl in person and assaulted her. The 61 year old first made contact with his alleged victim after posing as an 18-year-old in an internet chatroom and then telephoned the girl  claiming he was the 18 year olds  father and said his son had been in a serious car accident. He contacted the girl several times to give her news of his son’s “condition” before they agreed to meet When he met the girl he was alleged to have invited her to stay in a hotel before allegedly enticed her into his car where the alleged assault took place. It’s claimed the girl then escaped and contacted police.

Man poses as teenager to lure 16 year old

–>A teen is back at home safe and sound and an American teen who she met on the Internet has been charged with several counts including abducting a person under 16 years after the two were caught near a Greyhound bus. The 19 year old male located the 15-year-old girl with whom he’d been chatting on the Internet for several weeks and before long the two were in an allegedly stolen vehicle. The teens had been using the cell phones to do their on-line ‘chatting’ all summer.

Teen abducted by man on the internet

–>A 34-year old executive pleaded guilty today to a federal charge of traveling from Washington to California with the intent of engaging in a sex act with a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet. and was arrested near the Santa Monica Pier on September 16 when he arrived to meet the 13-year-old child, who in fact was an undercover law enforcement officer, and admitted that he met the 13 year old in an Internet chat room and that he described the sexual acts that he wanted to engage in with the child. Over the next six months, he engaged in a series of conversations with the “girl,” whom he believed to be 13 years old.

Executive pleads guilty to having sex with minor he met on internet

–>University sophomore has been accused of having sex with a 14-year-old girl he met on the Internet. The 19, was arrested and has been charged with two counts of first-degree sexual assault of a child. He met the girl online,  and he picked her up from her home and brought her back to his dorm where they had sex.

Student charged with sexual assault of girl he met on the internet

–>Teen killed by man she met on Internet. A Connecticut man has been charged with manslaughter after he admitted to strangling a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet.

  Teen killed by man she met on the internet

–>A 35-year-old man was arrested after deputies said he had sex with a 17-year-old boy whom he met on the Internet, and faces a charge of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. The deputies asked him what he was doing, and he said he had just visited a man he met on the Internet As deputies continued investigating, they discovered that he had performed sex acts on a 17-year-old boy

Man accused of sex with 17 year old boy he met off the internet

–>A 27-year-old man is charged with having sex with a 14-year-old girl he met over the Internet that follows 2 earlier cases of harassment of teenagers. He has been charged with second-degree rape, second-degree sodomy and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child after he allegedly brought the girl to his home to have sex with her. The two struck up a relationship in an Internet chat room and they then decided to meet in public. The man then  drove her to his home and allegedly had sex. The 27 year old has been convicted twice before for harassment in incidents involving teens he met over the Internet : for groping a 17-year-old girl  he met over the Internet, and  was also convicted of second-degree harassment over a telephone incident involving a teenage girl he had previously met on the Internet.

Man had sex with 14 year old he met in chatroom

–>Two men have been arrested in China on suspicion of raping and murdering at least six girls after arranging dates with them over the internet. The pair were arrested after police posing as potential dates arranged over the internet to meet them. The bodies of six victims were exhumed from under a building materials shop, and a  home the two used for their “meetings”. The victims ages are believed to range between the ages of 12 and 17.

China arrests 2 men over internet rapes and murders

–>A 15-year-old girl was raped after she met a man she contacted through internet messages. The teen  had begun a internet relationship with the man after a friend met him on an internet chat, and he is supposedly about 24 years of age. When they walked to a nearby park he subjected her to a horrendous attack. After raping her in broad daylight, he followed her as she walked to get a bus home before disappearing, a police spokeswoman said.

Man rapes girl he met after internet chat

–>A 13-year old girl was murdered by a 25 year old man she met through an online chat room. Christina Long,  was found strangled days after she disappeared. and Police allege she had gone to meet the man for the first time after they had sent “graphic” online messages to each other. Police say she used almost a dozen provocative screen names on the America Online account she had.  The married man confessed to the killing and led police and FBI agents to the body. .The killing brought more warnings to parents about the dangers on the internet for their children.

13  year old girl murdered by man from internet chatroom

–>The new offence of “sexual grooming” would make it illegal for adults to meet or arrange to meet someone under 16 to engage in sexual activity. It is designed to stop pedophiles contacting children on the internet but would also cover adults who may be in contact with children for legitimate reasons, such as piano teachers or Scout leaders, who at some point decide to move the contact on to a sexual level. The announcement follows a series of high profile cases. Three judges in the Court of Appeal last month warned men who use internet chatrooms to groom young girls for sex of lengthy jail terms, as they added 18 months to a three-year sentence for a Cambridge pedophile who sexually abused two 13-year-old girls. A 46 year old man  who is believed to be the most prolific internet groomer ever, last month received a five-year prison sentence for a series of offences. The former postal worker was found with a hand-written sexual profile of 54 youngsters from the UK and 19 from abroad. He bombarded some of the girls, aged as young as 13, with up to 100 phone calls after befriending them on the Internet. At the time of his conviction, the Home Office said the new legislation could have meant a doubling of his jail term.

Child “grooming” sentence to be increased

–>A 48 year old  man is being held on three counts of child rape in a case involving a girl he met on the Internet. He met the 13-year-old girl through an instant messaging service on the internet , and flew Central to New York and had sex with her. He  allegedly sent pictures of himself, including some nude photos, and picked her up from her high school. He is accused of taking to girl to a local hotel, where they had sex.

Hollister Man charged in rape case involving minor he met on the internet

April 27, 2007 (Computerworld) — Anyone who has participated in the blogosphere in the past two months knows the troubling story of Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger who was the victim of online threats that included violent sexual acts and murder (“Death threats force woman to suspend blog, cancel talk at O’Reilly conference”). When the harassment spread beyond her own blog to two others that were affiliated with other prominent bloggers, Sierra became so terrified that she canceled an upcoming speaking engagement and took a hiatus from blogging.

But Sierra isn’t the only one to endure online harassment. In fact, some would argue that she’s just the most visible — if not the most historically egregious — tip of an iceberg that has been around since Internet discussions began in the early 1980s. “Between now and the early days of Usenet, the level of abusive behavior has been distressingly constant,” says Tim Bray, a veteran blogger and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

The difference is, with 70 million blogs in existence today and 1.4 new blogs created every second, according to blog search engine Technorati Inc., there are just more people participating in online discussions, and “the more crazy people you’ve got reading them, the wilder the whole blogosphere can become,” says Richard Silverstein, who advocates for a peaceful approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his blog.

And he should know. Like Sierra, Silverstein is the victim of online harassment, in the form of hostile comments on his own blog, in external discussion groups and on blogs created solely for the purpose of maligning him. Given the topic that he blogs about, Silverstein is no stranger to abusive commentary. “It’s part of the territory — if you want to write a blog like this, you’re going to deal with unpalatable people,” he says.

But when the external blogs — whose creators were anonymous — grew increasingly threatening, including what he saw as pornographic photographs, he began to feel personally harassed. “I’ve felt insecure and under threat,” he says. “No one has said, ‘I’m going to come and kill you,’ but there were some comments that got me concerned. You hate to think of these things, but it’s very possible that some wacko will escalate from a threatening comment to actually doing something.”

Silverstein has been able to uncover the identities of the bloggers, but he’s been unable to force the blogs’ removal, despite repeated correspondence with Blogger.com, which cites Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act that shields providers of content creation tools from liability for the content users create. In an e-mail sent to Silverstein, Blogger.com said that the site “does not remove allegedly defamatory, libelous or slanderous material from Blogger.com or BlogSpot.com,” pursuant to Section 230, although it did remove the photographs because they were copyrighted images.

While both Silverstein and Sierra are higher-profile bloggers than many of us, it’s clear that anyone who enters the blogosphere needs to be aware of the types of people who get satisfaction out of online harassment. According to Derek Wood, vice president of clinical operations at PsychTracker Inc., a journaling site for people with mental illness, the harassment comes in two general forms: trolls and cyberstalkers. It’s important for blog participants to understand the psychological makeup of both types so that if they encounter any type of online abuse, they’ll have some idea of what they’re facing and how to respond to it.

Author and Source: http://www.drewspeak.com/

“The troll comes to the door of a new forum and sets down his bag of tricks. If he has a grudge against the people inside discussing and debating their passions with a certain degree of amicability, peacability and decorum, he does not show them. He has the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself. He loves chaos; his bag is full of golden apples he can lob to set the masses squabbling. He has also many masks, smoke bombs, straw men, cloaks, puppets, matches, ethanol, knives, dust, sand, and magicks of the most arcane sort. He knows what he is about - causing trouble. Why? This is the troll’s darkest mystery - if any one knew his secret, he would die. For all trolls, their motive power is this: without contraries, they cannot progress.”

I composed this in my notebook a while back; it seemed an exciting way to portray the rapidly-shifting identities and nuisance/amusement factors of these all-too familiar faces in all my old Usenet haunts. I do not deny that a certain nostalgia colours this imagery: the truth is, I was once an Internet troll, “back in the day” when I was an angry, atheist teenager on an AOL account. You know the type, I’m sure. Let me tell you: I trolled pretty hard. That’s all behind me, of course, and I don’t regret having outgrown the adrenaline rush of just rolling out and pissing off some Christian group, a WebTV board or a wrestling forum. It had its thrill at the time, but I eventually just figured out I would probably piss more people off writing my own blog than I would trolling anyone else’s. I offer no apologies for this. I imagine a sizable percentage of regular Internet posters have some small, guilty history of trolling - it’s been a common phase among a lot of the posters I’ve come in contact with over the years.

I do not necessarily wish to excessively extol the virtues and powers of the Internet troll; these persons are typically not quite so epic as they are a nuisance. They are readily the bane of many close-knit Internet communities, descending like a swarm of ethereal locusts from cursed heaven - a fantasy plague of boors eradicating established social orders with malice and confusion.

An article printed in the Washington Post entitled ominously “Female bloggers harassed, menaced” depicts the unfortunate story of Kathy Sierra, a blogger and software developer who had a horrifying ordeal with anonymous trolls: someone apparently posted images of her with a noose around her neck, someone made numerous threats and crafted images involving her being suffocated, her throat being slit, her being ejaculated on, etc., all presumably laden with a psychotically-creepy-murderous inflection. The woman eventually canceled a speaking arrangement at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference and went “underground” and blogged under a pseudonym, after announcing on her website: ““I have canceled all speaking engagements, I am afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.” Horrifying, sociopath behavior like this constitutes one of the potentialities of the troll: the individual who is truly vicious, twisted, obsessed and angry, an ugly, anonymous, dark-minded person with a hellbound will to do you pain. I imagine this image might stir some atavistic archetype: is this not the type of creature nightmares are made of? This, certainly, should be seen as an aspect of the devil.

Dear reader, I understand I’m relying heavily on phantasmal and fantastic imagery to examine this phenomenon: I believe it is crucial, then, when attempting to diagram the complex sociology of the Internet community, one recognize the mythical, virtual qualities of the medium. I hope that we can forgive this elevated language, or perhaps even accept it and play around with it, to see what ideas can emerge when viewing these “obvious” trends in Internet sociology through the painfully anachronistic context of old pagan gremlins.

The landscape which surrounds the Internet troll shimmers with the potentiality of violence, the unspoken simmering of anger and resentment towards the harasser as things get furiously heated. The shooter at the Case Western rampage, a 65-year old with confirmed “severe personality disorder” named Biswanath Halder was apparently motivated by this post from an anonymous troll to his website’s guestbook (http://web.archive.org/web/20031215053508/http://halder.ws/) : “Bizzy Halder is a moron. This guy makes a living out of creeping people out. From his fake hair, to his fake teeth, his whitey tighty shorts and pants, to his shit stained sweaters this guy is a LOON. He’s been kicked out of every lab on campus and everyone makes fun of him. So let’s not even talk about credibility. Don’t listen to a word this guy says.” Shortly afterwards, he opened fire on Case Western with an automatic weapon, apparently attempting to target the troll, a co-worker he suspected of having hacked his website in the past. Neither the man he killed nor the others wounded were the troll. The delusional Indian man had been, quite literally, swinging at spirits, or in this case, shooting at spirits.

Internet trolls can have real power. They can alter your emotional landscape, insert their presence very tangibly into your life. Being trolled can be a harrowing experience. Because of the implicit anonymity built into Internet dialogue, the user often has no clear idea who is harassing him/her - they are confronted only by an adversary who might be represented only by an alphanumeric “name” and a barrage of abuse. There is often little recourse against the offending party. Back in the day when I trolled Usenet, many persons tried to report me as violating my ISP’s Terms of Service to no avail. I received not one single piece of mail from my Internet provider asking me to stop being such a pain in the ass, despite the fact that I was very obviously flooding newsgroups with flames and nonsense, enough to render legitimate conversation impossible. In the instances where physical threats and the like are leveled, there is a venue for law enforcement to get involved, and rightfully so, but rarely are trolls ever quite that vicious. Most of the time, flames will fall within the bounds of protected, free speech: one can no more muzzle a blatant troll than he can any other dissenting view.

A classic rule of thumb has ever been: do not feed the trolls, and many a new user has been regaled with this adage in the face of an inflammatory poster; the problem is, few persons are willing to heed this familiar warning. One might note similarities in this attitude to that of Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon; when confronted with the premise of ideological terrorism, it is the typical human response to fight fire with fire, trade blow for blow. In mediums of the ideological, textual, and memetic, however, fighting back against malicious phantasms is unproductive. When one is literally “swinging at spirits”, these spirits gain power and substance they hitherto do not possess. It is through opposition and response that they gain validity, become “real” enough to cause the stir and scenes they aim to make.

Moderation features are often nearly useless against these guys: erasing a post makes a troll only more determined to write the same sort of message again, and banning a troll practically guarantees he will darken your doorstep again with a vengeance. I read an account of a Slashdot troll once who claimed to have scripts constantly fishing for proxy servers and free e-mail accounts so that he could consistently hold hundreds of accounts simultaneously in order to vote himself to whatever position he pleased via the meta-moderation system; while I cannot guarantee the veracity of this man’s account, it nonetheless demonstrates the level of effort a troll is willing to exert into making his point. And while I would imagine that each individual troll has his own agenda, this all begs the question - what, exactly, is the point of trolling?

Chaos, discord, controversy, argument; the troll often serves as the Erisian element, capable of galvanizing and polarizing unsuspecting groups with his tricks. What’s the point? Maybe it’s fun to push the limits, to agitate people, to vent one’s hostile emotions at unsuspecting, real persons under the mask of anonymity. Maybe it’s an outlet for real cruelty and vehemence, maybe it’s a hobby, anything could be driving the motivated troll. There are troublemakers in all sorts of settings, in all sorts of mythologies - a troll can be equated to Loki or Anansi just as easily as they could a vitriolic bigot. Who knows? All I understand is that the Internet troll exists by the grace of those who give him a voice; without that, he is nothing.