I probably shouldn’t be, but I’ve been debating climate change, Al Gore, and the Cap and Trade System over at this blog here: http://www.xanga.com/ProvokingThought/694755383/obama-plans-to-destroy-the-economy-to-appease-the-enviro-wackos/

I’m only bringing it up in case someone else wants to get involved in the discussion.

I through out an entry on trolling but in reviewing it I realized I forgot a few things.

First I feel I need to clarify the concept of a “Benevolent Troll”. Some might argue that they do not exist, and that all trolls are bad or evil or dangerous. Others will argue that the act of trolling, whatever the justification is just rude and improper. We should be “civil” to one another no matter what, and challenging too harshly or battering someone over his or her closely held beliefs is a kind of rudeness that should not be tolerated.

I agree that civility is worthwhile but there’s a fundamental difference between promoting civility and promoting a silencing of debate or discussion.  Sometimes anti-trolling rhetoric comes dangerously close to the latter.

Civility, however, has little to do with trolling. Trolling is about *provoking* people. It’s entirely possible to provoke someone using the kindest and most polite language possible with a smile on your face. Sometimes you can provoke someone by PRAISING them. It also depends a lot on the person provoked. Some people are provoked by anyone who challenges their beliefs or argues against what they are saying. Other people can’t be provoked even when people are shouting insults at them.

Perhaps that’s one of the best ways to discern the difference between benevolent and selfish trolling. A benevolent troll would find the people who are provoked by any challenges to their beliefs more interesting. They’d go ahead and challenge those beliefs in part in order to get the reaction and in part because they feel all people should have their beliefs challenged, their positions fought against. In contrast, true trolls will either have no preference, or will find the people who aren’t easily provoked to be the most interesting targets. The reason is simple. They represent the greater challenge for the true troll! To rattle someone who seems always calm and composed is fun for them, as is throwing a normally peaceful and well constrained community into chaos.

Another way to look at Benevolent Trolling is to think of that annoying Professor or teacher you had in school. You know the one. The utterly socially inept one who had this way of challenging every single thing you said in class. The one who played devil’s advocate with everyone pushing your buttons, forcing you to question your fundamental beliefs. The one that never showed any sign of disrespecting your beliefs but always seemed to say just the right thing that made you feel like an idiot. The one who in the end you have to grudgingly admit probably taught you far more about critical thinking than any other teacher you’ve ever had.  That person is a Benevolent Troll.

A selfish troll however is that annoying student in your class who strolls in twenty minutes late, thinks he knows everything anyway, decides in two seconds that you must be an idiot and then proceeds to try and “prove” how much smarter than you he is to the Professor and the rest of the class. The one who tries for all he’s worth to make you explode in anger and rage in the classroom, to lose control and say things that you didn’t mean to say or formulate your arguments improperly. And then after class you walk by and overhear him hanging out with his friends laughing at your reaction and mocking you behind your back. The selfish troll in other words takes pleasure in feeling superior to you. He gets his kicks out of making you look stupid.

There I think that’s as clear as I can possibly make the distinction.

Now I want to cover one other matter with regards to trolling before I cast aside this topic, hopefully never to return to it again. (there are obviously more important matters in this world than internet trolling)  You see I forgot one kind of trolling in my previous posts litany of the trolling categories.  It’s just another troll subset like Vendetta Trolls but it’s an important one because it contradicts part of my analysis in the last post. 

This final troll type I discovered only recently. This year in fact and only because a clever friend pointed it out to me that I was being trolled. It’s what can be called Defensive Trolling.

Defensive Trolls can in turn be split into two categories. Self-defensive, and protective.  A self-defensive troll acts to defend his or her own site from challenges to their position or authority. They do this, in particular by being purposefully offensive and contradictory to the visitor and doing so in such a way as to purposefully engender a negative reaction from that person. The idea being to EITHER annoy that person so much that they are disgusted and go away so your site can return to its regular scheduled peaceful agreeable commentary,  or to make the person do or say something offensive enough so that the site owner can feel justified in banning the person.

The second category, the protective kind is pretty much the same except they aren’t acting on behalf of their own site. Usually this is a close friend of the owner of the site or a companion a family member, or worse, a *fan*. They take it upon themselves to drive out the intruder to the site on principle or an exaggerated sense of protectiveness. Sometimes a protective troll will troll away all members of a forum or bulletin board whom they feel is ruining their experience there or ruining the experience for others. They see their role as coming to the defense of others who are too averse to conflict to be willing to defend their own site. They rarely see their own behavior as contributing to the disruption on the site or even being a greater cause of it.  This can be a particularly sticky situation for the owner of the site, especially if they are close to the protective troller but don’t necessarily approve of the protective troller’s actions.

Defensive Trolling is tricky business altogether actually, most notably because the defensive troll doesn’t often realize or acknowledge that he or she is trolling. In fact they often see themselves as justifiably *defending* themselves from the real troll, the intruder who dares stir up controversy on their blog.  Their argument that they aren’t a troll certainly seems reasonable, given that this kind of trolling so radically differs from all the other forms of trolling. Here the troll, *isn’t* going out to somebody else’s site, *isn’t* disrupting another social group, *isn’t* getting his or her kicks out of making other people look stupid in public.  The Defensive troll is acting entirely with regards to their own site or that of a close friend, relative, or other connection.

And not all defensive commentary constitutes Defensive Trolling. Certainly if I’m on a friend’s site and someone says something particularly crass, stupid, or wrong, I feel more inclined than usual to say something to contradict it. And it’s not unusual for people to feel personal about the things they write and feel the need to defend or explain themselves.

No, it goes over the line when the defender becomes the aggressor. When their comments are less about defending their positions or clarifying their positions and MORE about an attempt to get rid of the person who they see as having commented improperly. You often see in these situations the troller will bring up tangential points that have nothing to do with the subject at hand, but are nevertheless likely to annoy or enrage the intruder. Often the trollers positions may even change as necessary in order to get beneath the skin of the intruder. The Defensive Troller is unlikely to apologize or acknowledge anything the intruder says and feel that he or she is in the right the entire time. They may or may not be taking direct pleasure in running the intruder out of town so to speak, but in a sense they are gaining satisfaction out of it by protecting their isolated and controlled social environment. It’s again a kind of selfish trolling done for the troller’s own interests.

Ordinarily I see defensive trolling happens the most the more insulated the community is and the less open it is to alternative perspectives. Highly partisan political communities and religious communities are most apt to have these kinds of entities. Try if you’d like to go to a religious or political community contrary to your views and calmly state your opinions. Sometimes you get the reasonable ones that react well to you. But often  enough you will experience Defensive trolling to run you out of town.

I feel that defensive trolling is probably one of the most dangerous and most common forms of trolling because it is the most stealthy and the most rarely criticized. Defensive trolls frequently arise because people don’t recognize that their behavior is wrong or inappropriate and they think they are just coming to someone’s rescue or properly defending their site. Since the Defensive troll is ensconced in his or her own social group, the person is never called to task for their trolling behavior and often is even supported in it. 

Of course when most people talk about trolls they focus on trolls who appear on somebody else’s website, or the troll that terrorized their particular site. They rarely talk about trolls who defended their own site through trolling.

But if civility is to be obtained in the land of the internet I should think it is equally important to restrain ourselves from selfish trolling when we are on the defensive as it is to call attention to trollish intruders on our sites.  Just as it is equally as important to ensure that we do not cast about the word “troll” when it is unjustified, disparaging some disagreer’s reputation unjustly.

This is the only way the internet can remain a place open to free ideas and civil communication of alternative perspectives.