COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 12/09/2019
Mathew Ingram
Most people are probably familiar by now with the idea that there are “trolls” on the Internet. That is thanks in part to scandals like GamerGate and the rise of Donald Trump, the Troll-in-Chief. Many trolls have an agenda of some kind—as the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency, accused of seeking to sway the 2016 American election, did—while others seem to just get a kick out of creating chaos. As the butler Alfred said to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “some men just like to watch the world burn.” Despite their differing motivations, there are some similarities in how trolls work, and in how they are able to capture the attention of both regular Internet users and professional journalists in order to spread their disinformation. A new report published by the digital think tank Data & Society, written by Joan Donovan, Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and senior researcher Brian Friedberg, aims to create a taxonomy of trolling tactics.