trolling Archives - The Prindle Institute for Ethics

Florida, deep red and with a large population, provides a valuable window into American conservative politics. What, then, should we make of a bevy of leaked, slur-filled, text messages? A group chat started by Abel Carvajal, the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party, for students at Florida International University, quickly became a swamp of violent language, n-word utterances, and Nazi jokes. This is hardly a lone finding. James Fishback’s campaign, currently running an uphill battle for the Republican nomination in the primary race for Florida governor, employs similarly incendiary language (especially among staffers). At the national level, polling by the free-market oriented Manhattan Institute found just over 30% of GOP members under 50 claimed they held racist views. Trump himself recently controversially posted, then withdrew, an image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Yet all these events share an ambiguity in interpretation. Are racism and other extreme views rampant, especially among younger Republicans … or are people simply “trolling”?

Trolling refers to a range of behaviors, from malicious bullying to harmless pranks. One of these is what media studies scholar Whitney Phillips calls subcultural trolling. The intent is to provoke a strong reaction by someone (gullible fool that they are) assuming the troll is sincere. Boldly asserting something widely condemned, like racism, is perfect for subcultural trolling.

Philosopher Ralph DiFranco argues such trolling is typically ethically suspect. It violates general norms of good conversation such as respect, honesty, and treating one’s interlocutor as an equal. The intent of trolling is often to shame, embarrass, and belittle, or at least waste time and attention. But this does not mean trolling can never be a force for good. DiFranco provides the example of trolling the trolls – countertrolling those who abandon good-faith conversation. Additionally, like satire, trolling can be used to deflate the haughty and the hypocritical.

From a certain perspective, proclaiming racism or using racist language could be a way to push back against a presumed overweening political correctness or cancel culture, rather than a sincere belief in racism. (To be clear, one can still consider the trolls’ language and behavior harmful and worthy of condemnation, even if the proclaimed belief is not sincere.) But trolling is not automatically satire. For someone to understand something as satire, they need to know the intended message, what it’s really saying. (Even if the victim is not necessarily in on the joke.) But trolls often hold their true beliefs close to their chests, making the underlying intent ambiguous. This may even be part of the emotional appeal of trolling. The slipperiness of belief involved in trolling leads to further ethical challenges.

One of those challenges involves the identification of bad actors. From the outside, a sincere racist and an insincere racist look the same. The sincere racist (the bad actor) can use the cover of irony or trolling to advocate for and desensitize people to sincerely held, deeply racist beliefs. But it is not merely onlookers who can get confused by trolling. The troll themself can use trolling to avoid fully committing to a moral stance. In this sense, it is perfect for social media, facilitating the escape into irony to avoid the pain of having one’s views the subject of constant scrutiny and judgment. One can engage in a behavior, say mock racism, and if they receive approval from surrounding individuals, they can stick with it. If they receive condemnation, they can turn the tables on their condemner — ”I can’t believe you fell for it. You idiot.”

This can harm moral self-development. While philosophers disagree about the details, it is generally accepted that virtuous behavior requires a process of cultivation. Putting one’s beliefs out there and receiving feedback can be a way to grow morally. But that growth requires sincerity. By holding beliefs in a perpetually half-joking way, the troll can avoid having to actually wrestle with their implications. What’s more, the troll never has to be honest with themselves. They can reassure themselves that they don’t really hold a belief, even while acting as if they do. In this way, harms associated with pernicious beliefs such as racism or antisemitism can occur, even without people being ideologically committed to the viewpoints.

Moral issues associated with trolling become especially complex as the trolling-style achieves political prominence. Like satire and mockery, trolling is a form of discursive offense. To the extent trolling can result in good, it is likely as pushback against a stuffy, self-serious status quo. But to what end? Policies cannot be enacted ironically. Worse yet, by being inherently ambiguous in its sincerity, trolling masks candidates’ real positions. From a campaign perspective, it performs the same function as politicians lying. Only post-election can one tell trolling from truth.

Still, we should not be too quick to blame the trolls alone. Trolling thrives in a media ecosystem in which “rage-baiting” drives clicks and sincerity is for suckers. It is worth asking how politics became such a good habitat for trolls.

There is a new Trump-helmed social media site being developed, and it’s been getting a lot of attention from the media. Called “Truth Social,” the site and associated app initially went up for only a few hours before it was taken offline due to trolling. Turns out, the site’s security was not exactly top-of-the-line: users were able to claim handles that you think would have been reserved for others – including “donaldjtrump” and “mikepence” – and then used their new accounts to post a variety of images that few people would want to be associated with their name.

This isn’t the first time a far-right social media site has been targeted by internet pranksters. Upon its release, GETTR, a Twitter clone founded by one of Trump’s former spokespersons, was flooded with hentai and other forms of cartoon pornography. While a defining feature of far-right social media thus far has been a fervor for “free speech” and a rejection of “cancel culture,” it is clear that such sites do not want this particular kind of content clogging up their feeds.

Those familiar with the internet will recognize posting irrelevant, gross, and generally not-suitable-for-work images on sites in this manner as acts of trolling. So, here’s a question: is it morally permissible to troll?

The question quickly becomes complicated when we realize that “trolling” is not a well-defined act, and encompasses potentially many different forms of behavior. There has been some philosophical work on the topic: for example, in the excellently titled “I Wrote this Paper for the Lulz: The Ethics of Internet Trolling,” philosopher Ralph DiFranco distinguishes 5 different forms of trolling.

There’s malicious trolling, which is intended to specifically harm a target, often through the use of offensive images or slurs. There’s also jocular trolling, actions that are not done out of any intention to harm, but rather to poke fun at someone in a typically lighthearted manner. While malicious trolling seems to be generally morally problematic, jocular trolling can certainly also risk crossing a moral line (e.g., when “it’s just a prank, bro!” videos go wrong).

There’s also state-sponsored trolling, which was a familiar point of discussion during the 2016 U.S. elections, wherein companies in Russia were accused of creating fake profiles and posts in order to support Trump’s campaign; concern trolling, wherein someone feigns sympathy in an attempt to elicit a genuine response, which they are then ridiculed for; and subcultural trolling, wherein someone again pretends to be authentically engaged, this time in a discussion or issue in order elicit genuine engagement by the target. Again, it’s easy to see how many of these kinds of acts can be morally troubling: intentional interference with elections, and feigning sincerity to provoke someone else generally seem like the kind of behaviors that one ought not perform.

What about the kinds of acts we’re seeing being performed on Truth Social, and that we’ve seen on other far-right social media apps like GETTR? They seem to be a form of trolling, but do they fall into any of the above categories? And what should we think about their moral status?

As we saw above, trolling captures a wide variety of phenomena, and not all of them have been fully articulated. I think that the kind of trolling I’m focusing on here – i.e., that which is involved in snatching up high-profile usernames and clogging up feeds with irrelevant images – doesn’t neatly fit into any of the above categories. Instead, let’s call it something else: protest trolling.

Protest trolling has a lot of the hallmarks of other forms of trolling – it often involves acts that are meant to distract a particular target or targets, and involves what the troll finds funny (e.g., inappropriate pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog). Unlike other forms of trolling, however, it is not necessarily done in “good fun,” nor is it necessarily meant to be malicious. Instead, it’s meant to express one’s principled disagreement with a target, be it an individual, group, or platform.

Compare, for example, a protest of a new university policy that involves a student sit-in. A group of students will coordinate their efforts to disrupt the activities of those in charge, an act that expresses their disagreement with the institution, governance, and/or authority figure. The act itself is intentionally disruptive, but is not itself motivated by malice: they are not acting in this way because they want others to be harmed, even though some harm may come about as a result.

While the analogy to the case of online trolling is imperfect, there are, I think, some important similarities between a student sit-in and the flooding of right-wing social media with irrelevant content. Both are primarily meant to disrupt, without specifically intending harm, and both are directed towards a perceived threat to one’s core values. For instance, we have seen how right-wing media has perpetrated violence, both in terms of violent acts and towards members of marginalized groups. One might thereby be concerned that a whole social network dedicated to the expression of such views could result in similar harms, and is thus worth protesting.

Of course, in the case of online trolling there may be other intentions at play: for example, the choice of material that’s been used to disrupt these services is clearly meant to shock, gross-out, and potentially even offend its core users. Furthermore, not every such action will have principled intentions: some will simply want to jump on the bandwagon because it seems fun, as opposed to actually expressing a principled disagreement.

There are, then, many tangled issues surrounding the intentions and execution of different forms of protest trolling. However, just as many cases of real-life protesting are disruptive without being unethical, so, too, may cases of protest trolling be potentially morally unproblematic.