Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, everyone, Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poullett. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and with me as always is the incomparable senior writer Jonathan Strickland. You're stupid, stupid. What we're gonna talk about mean people like that. I'm not actually mean in real life, not not that mean. Yeah. Actually, what Jonathan's referring to is a group of people who are lovingly known as trolls. Yes, or you know, maybe not lovingly, but at least known well. They I think they think it's they probably wear it as a bad embrace. Yeah, so trolls. Okay, So let's let's set the background here, as we usually do do. Doesn't involve any billy goats gruff no, no, And in fact, that's the wrong kind of troll. Um For the origin of the term, uh this the states back to old use net groups, which started actually in the late seventies UM and usenet is kind of uh it's it's been sort of merged into the Internet now, but it was sort of a precursor to the web as we know it today. Um. And it was sort of discussion boards that are all grouped around certain topics. And there were certain people who found it really amusing to go into these discussion groups and ask really stupid questions. And they were just trying to bait someone into trying to u to to engage them in conversation. And the goal was to continually ask more stupid questions and uh, just so it's a wind up, you know, you're winding the person up. And then at the end, the punchline is, hey, guess what, I already knew all that stuff. Um, I just made you jump through hoops through this frustrating conversation for nothing. And uh they The term for this became became known as trolling, and it was based off the fishing exercise of trolling, where you troll a fishing line through an area that's known to have a lot of fish in it with the hopes of catching a bite. Same sort of thing. So on usenet, what some trolls would do is they would post the same information through several groups on Usenet at the same time, trolling for a bite and if they got multiple bites, that was awesome, and you know it was it was more or less a kind of harmless prank, you know, just sort of an idea of you know, if you didn't engage the trolling conversation, then you were in on the joke and you could enjoy it as you saw someone else kind of get more and more involved. Right exactly, very good reeled in. Um yeah, so so yeah, if you're if you're not hooked, you're part of the you're part of the gag. You can actually enjoy it. But some trolls were kind of more mean spirited than others, and they would use things, um like insults or uh not necessarily insults towards the other users, but perhaps to their arguments, or they would use a spurious arguments on their own side to try and just to just to derail the conversation. Um, not to actually engage anyone in debate, but rather to cause a discussion to just fall to pieces. And that's where the whole flame bating term came from. It was to start a flame war, which is where you get people so mad they can't resist throwing insults. And then of course, if the troll had never insulted anyone. They can say, hey, why are you being so mean to me? You know, I was just here to make a have a conversation. I wasn't here to call anyone names or anything. You could play the helpless victim, um, and the people who are hurling the insults are the ones who look like the bad guys. Even though that was the trolls goal the whole time. Now it's not really hard to find trolls at all. You can you can visit virtually uh any website. You know. One of the things that's cool about the web two point oh overused name revolution another over used name, UM, is that there's interactivity on all these different websites. I mean you can go to to uh any of the news websites, especially in the political season we've just gone through. UH, you know, there was tons of this going on. UM. You could go to a for for example, you could go to a conservative website or a liberal website, you know, one with an obvious bias, and there's always gonna be somebody hunting around the message boards that says the other candidate is the one who is you know, going to be the one who solves everything, and your guys a liar, and you know that kind of thing is exactly that. Then that's the appropriate audience for a troll to go after somebody who absolutely you know, I know if I say this in this room, the whole room is going to explode. But it can be found anywhere. It can be found in shopping websites, on news websites, um, you know, virtually any place. Yeah, oh sure, certainly, even even the iTunes store you'll get comments and the reviews or Amazon. Um. So you really don't have to go that far to find people who are just trying to bait people into an argument. And of course, the more emotionally charged the subject, the easier it is to convince someone to get into that kind of throw down, which is why in the politics region it's so prevalent because politics, for many people's very personal and very passionate kind of subject. And so you you get that that emotionally charged subject, you add some tender and you throw on a match and of course you're going to get a blaze. And some trolls all they really want to do is just upset people because they think it's funny. You know, it's it's amusing, it's it's that whole gotch uh where you tell the really long joke that has the really bad punchline at the end, and really it's just for your own amusement, not for the audience. Not that I know anything about that. Um, I'm actually known in the office for telling a really long joke that has a really bad punchline, and not just the office, my reputation has spread far and wide, but at any room. So I do have some trollish tendencies. I have to come out and admit that is a kind of trollish thing to do, where you're really doing it for your own amusement, not for anyone else. Um, it's a very selfish kind of thing. And but some trolls have other motives besides just you know, trying to upset other people, like the ones on the political boards. Maybe there to actually so discontent among another group's followers. So you sit there and you just say, like, one trollish way of of doing this is to to come across as trying to be sympathetic. Like you said, you know, I really like so and so's policy on taxes, but do you really think he's gonna follow through that bay st upon such and such. And the whole idea here is that you're undermining the opponent while you seem to be on the side of the other people in the community. And um, that's still still very trollish thing to do. And it's also trollish to uh to gang up on the unsuspecting victims to Sometimes there'll be a plant um who who is deliberately being playing dumb. I guess you'd say, to allow the other person to um post a trollish post, and then the other person gets into it with him, and before long they have the whole room riled up. UM. So it's a you know, it's certainly a trollish thing to sort of sneak in the back door and get under people's skin and then let him have it. Um. Another another tactic is to disguise your identity as someone else, which is called uh. And you could even have a discussion with yourself. UM. That's called sock puppets, where you've got a suck puppet identity and UH and you you you could be logged in under one name, have a suck puppet logged in under another name, and you're having a conversation with the whole purpose to derail whatever conversation is going on in that community. Um, and you're the one controlling the whole thing. So in that case, you know, it's it's it's pretty easy to get people riled up because you can just keep escalating it yourself. You don't have to wait for someone else to do it. Now. Of course, if anyone has any way of actually looking to track back where those comments are coming from, there's a good chance they're going to figure out, hey, there's one person who's posting both of these these lines of dialogue. Um, and then you know the gig is up. But that's another that's another fairly common tactic on the troll community. That's true. And uh, you know a lot of people do this as a prank, but some people do not do this as a prank. They are doing this to actually cause harm. And I would I would say, uh, it's probably more than minority. Um. But there are some some pretty vicious trolls out there. There's some that that shows such a lack of empathy you start to wonder what motivates them to do this kind of thing. Um, there's a there are a couple of good examples. We we mentioned some in the article. I'll just go over one really quickly. Um. Jason Fortuny, who was the infamous troll who Um. He went on Craigslist and posted an ad posing as a woman looking for a specific kind of suitor. Um, and it was fairly uh risque. And he then posted all the responses he got on a blog, including personal information of the people who responded. So um, all these different pictures and and personal information of all these men who had responded to this ad go up and suddenly become public, and there's a big, you know, outcry of indignation and and and rage against his actions because it was constituted a severe breach of privacy. And his point was saying, hey, you know, I'm just kind of showing that you've got to be careful with your information online. You can't just trust it to anyone. So he was kind of taking a uh an approach of we should make sure that we're careful with what we say and what we share. Yeah, so he may have been operating by himself. But there are a couple of troll communities. Well actually there are a number of them, but a couple of them that you discussed in your article, and we didn't mention the articles how trolls work. Um, but a couple of those communities are anonymous and four chan, which are actually sort of one of them is an offshoot of the other, right, exactly, Anonymous is an offshoot of four chan. Yeah. Uh. The funny thing, um, for for those of you listening, was Jonathan was writing this article, and uh, he was doing research and he was going on the four chan site. Suddenly again, suddenly I get an instant message at my computer saying, I don't know if I can actually research this at work. I'm afraid somebody's going to see this stuff because there is a lot of viol I had to turn the images off on my web browser. Um. Four chan fur chans a message board and it's a graphic message board. So you can say, you can upload pictures to this message board and only that you can post completely anonymously. You don't have to have any sort of handle whatsoever, so you don't have to log in, you don't have to have a password. You just go there, you post your message, and you leave, So there's no accountability, there's no responsibility. I mean, you can post pretty much whatever you want within only there are only a couple of exceptions. Um, the moderators look out for child pornography because they don't want to end up getting under fire for hosting it. So that's the one of the few things that is just an absolute no no on four Chan. And and really this stuff only happens on one specific channel within four Chan. It's the slash b slash channel um and uh it's also known as the random channel. So anything goes on this channel, and it's within a very specific section. Unfortune, it's in an explicit section, so it's not like it's uh, it's not like you're if you go there, you're not going to realize that you're gonna see some pretty vile stuff or vulgar stuff or pornographic stuff, or however you want to define it. But at any rate, stuff that's not appropriate for you to look at while you're sitting at your desk at work. So that's why I turned my images off. But yeah, it's um. The that channel has a lot of people who engage in extremely trollish behavior, but they're doing it to each other and most of the people they're all have the same kind of sense of humor, which is sort of like anything goes uh nothing anyone posts is is sacred. You can make fun of whatever topic you want. You can insult the intelligence of other users, um, any of that, and it's perfectly fine. And you do it with the understanding that the exact same thing is gonna be done to you. So that's a little different from trolls who go to other communities just to disrupt them. But out of this group sprung anonymous, and Anonymous is a very specific group of individuals who have the goal of not bringing down the Church of Scientology, but bringing to light certain alleged practices that the church follows. UM. The Anonymous alleges that the Church of Scientology has some very draconian practices that separate new members from their families and drain all of the resources out of their bank accounts, savings accounts, things like that. And so they've held protests, actual real life protests in various cities around the globe. UM. And they usually are masked and to hide their own identities because the Church of Scientology, uh, they say, will come after them um litigiously through the court system. So they say they wish your remain shall we say yes. They claim that there is no real leadership to the group. They all share the same goal, but there's no persons sitting behind a big desk, you know, in the big swivel chair, cackling madly. Um, it's it's hello, Anonymous, right exactly, it's it's Uh. People take it upon themselves to try and organize events, and then other people support it, and it kind of grows out of that from what I understand, Um, flash mobs. Yeah, kind of like flash mobs, although a little bit there's there's actually a purpose to it. There's there is a definite purpose. Yeah, so um that's but but definitely the Church of Scientology could has looked at this and has referred to them as terrorists. Now, some people either actually part of Anonymous or claiming to be part of Anonymous. This is the tricky part when you're when you're dealing with and when your entire community is made up of Anonymous contributors, how do you know who is and who isn't in that community? But some people claiming to have acted on behalf of Anonymous have have cause distributed denial of service attacks on Church of Scientology websites and things like that, and actual attacks. Whereas Anonymous claims that it does not condone these acts at all. Um, they're all about protesting and raising awareness, but not about causing direct financial harm to the church. And uh, and that's where it becomes tricky. Where do you how do you define which people are actually part of this group and which ones aren't. Are the people who are part of this group who are doing these things do they not realize that, you know, it's against the wishes of the rest of the group, or are Could this be someone who's actually trying to discredit anonymous and just by acting on their behalf do these things or are these things happening at all? Of it's crazy, it gets it gets pretty tough to to unravel it and figure out what's really going on. You spent some time thinking about this, Heaveny, I can neither confirm nor deny that. Well, of course you did anyway, since you had to exactly that was all the research that away poured into that so other other troll communities. I just want to mention one really quickly because I'm a big fan of a website called CHUD which is Cinematic Happenings under Development and it's a movie news and rumors site. Um, there were a group of people who they have a message board on that side, and there are a group of people on that message board who uh would derail entire threads about movies just to complain about certain movie reviewers or writers on that site. And eventually, you know, they were very permissive on this site for a really, really long time, but eventually it just got to the point where the harassment got to insane levels, to the point where some of these people were posting doctored photos of the young baby daughter of the owner of the website in UH and photoshopped in horrible ways. Mean, it was really really stomach turning. So eventually the moderator banned these individuals and they went on another message board called Scorched Planet, which has a much more lacks kind of policy when it comes to people in there, and it just says like, you know, you can play here, you can say whatever you want, just keep in mind that other people are gonna say the same source stuff about you. I don't want to hear any complaining about it. Go for it. And so Scorched Planet and CHUD had this kind of long war where anyone who came over from Scorched Planet onto Chud was pretty quickly found out usually and before long was banned. And it was just it reached a level of of ludicrous proportions because it seemed like every other week there was another person who was coming in and kind of trying subverting the CHUD message board. So that's the thing, though, these guys would go over to this other board switched plan. They could plan out there their tactics about how they wanted to go about and try and do this. It wasn't just like one person causing some problems. It was it was a concerted effort. Yeah, speaking of concerted efforts, I'd also like to point out the fact that while he was doing research for this article, Jonathan got trolled completely unintentionally. He was looking up information and found this great article that talked about trolls and trollish behavior, and at the very end, all of a sudden, the language changed and it wasn't scholarly anymore, and it was very silly and uh sort of understating it. But there were some hints earlier I shared with you one in particular, I guess we won't go into detail, but there was there was one assertion made earlier in the paper that seemed a little outlandish, not a little, it seemed outlandish, but the rest of the language in this scholarly paper was very much, uh, it seemed legit. You know, I'm in a way it sounded like academ speak where you just try and mask what you're talking about using really big words and you hope they've used enough of them people won't question what you're really saying. That would be it. And uh, yeah, my news speak. You might say to go back to our George orwell thing, um, but yeah, it was. That was one of those things where I was reading, like I was looking to see if there were any actual good psychological studies done about the behavior of trolls, and there there really aren't a whole lot of them out there, and this was one that purported to be a graduate thesis on on trolls, trollish behavior the psychology behind it. So I read it and I thought it was pretty interesting, although there were some conclusions I thought were kind of, you know, a little strange until I got to the last paragraph and they were really the last section, and that's when I realized this whole thing was just a joke. I just spent and you know, thirty minutes reading a fake thesis. So they got me. They got now. I feel like we should point out that not everybody you see acting like a troll on a message board somewhere is necessarily a troll. Um. Sometimes people are just well, you know, abrasive. Try I say, uh and uh, you kind of have to, sadly, you kind of have to bear them out a little bit to see if they're actually trying to troll on the board, or if they're just very stubborn and very abrupt when they talk. Use a little critical thinking, try and see if they're using the same sort of behavior in multiple conversations. That that's a good indicator right there, they're using the same sort of tactics in totally different conversations, you may just be dealing with a troll. And uh. In addition to that, if you are actually running or moderating a message board, you know, it's it's you could you could say, well, I don't know if I want to even deal with this anymore. These people get on my board, what am I gonna do? They're gonna take over the place. Um, you know, if you if you moderate comments, that's a good way to to uh. You know, and some people call it censorship. But and the other point of view is if they're stating a rational point of view, it's one thing. But if they're trolling, well, really they're not really contributing much the discussion other than starting a flame war. So you know, there there are reasons to maybe look at stuff before it goes online. Um, you would probably want to tell people you're doing that. But on the other way, to suppress views that oppose your own, but definitely look to see if if they're legitimate or if they're just you know, if it's just a flame bait. Yeah, because honestly, that's not really contributing much to the conversation, you know, while in opposing viewpoint, you know, as long as it's rational, would help out with that. So and for other community members, really the best advice anyone can give you about trolls is don't feed the trolls as don't don't give in and and give them the attention. And because that's what they're after. They're after that attention. If if you don't fall for that, if you don't respond to them, there's no reason for them to stick around. They'll just eventually say, well, I'll go and find somewhere else where I can get the kind of attention that I'm I'm looking for. Um. Not granted that that really only applies to the trolls who are just out there to annoy other people. If they have the ulterior motive of bringing down a community or of undermining someone's position, they probably would stick around until a administrator steps in or bands them or whatever. But for the most part, the best idea is just ignore them, especially if there is an ignored feature on the community. I cannot recommend that highly enough. I have used the ignore feature on several communities to great personal joy. It's definitely made my my time on those communities much more pleasant. I'm sorry, did you say something nice? Uh? You so? Well? Do you have anything else virtual? Should we wrap this up? Yeah? I think I think we're getting close. Okay, Well, you know what. That's a that's definitely a good conversation. And there's more in the article so you can read it on how stuff works. So, Chris, can you think of anything off the top of your head that's more frightening or frustrating than Internet roll Uh? Children? That? Wow, you hit a soft spot on me. That's not what I was thinking. Of that definitely counts, you know, having my own and just saying anyway, well, I was actually thinking of something that that recently has been a cause of great frustration for many people. I'm talking about our article on how stocks and the Stock Market Works. Yeah, let's talk about frustrating and frightening. Okay, you beat me. Yeah. That's written by Marshall Brain. Oh yeah, her site. Oh yeah, so I thought i'd give it a little shout out to Mr. Brain. You can read How Stocks and the Stock Market Works right now over at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you against soon. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. 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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, everyone, Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poullett. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and with me as always is the incomparable senior writer Jonathan Strickland. You're stupid, stupid. What we're gonna talk about mean people like that. I'm not actually mean in real life, not not that mean. Yeah. Actually, what Jonathan's referring to is a group of people who are lovingly known as trolls. Yes, or you know, maybe not lovingly, but at least known well. They I think they think it's they probably wear it as a bad embrace. Yeah, so trolls. Okay, So let's let's set the background here, as we usually do do. Doesn't involve any billy goats gruff no, no, And in fact, that's the wrong kind of troll. Um For the origin of the term, uh this the states back to old use net groups, which started actually in the late seventies UM and usenet is kind of uh it's it's been sort of merged into the Internet now, but it was sort of a precursor to the web as we know it today. Um. And it was sort of discussion boards that are all grouped around certain topics. And there were certain people who found it really amusing to go into these discussion groups and ask really stupid questions. And they were just trying to bait someone into trying to u to to engage them in conversation. And the goal was to continually ask more stupid questions and uh, just so it's a wind up, you know, you're winding the person up. And then at the end, the punchline is, hey, guess what, I already knew all that stuff. Um, I just made you jump through hoops through this frustrating conversation for nothing. And uh they The term for this became became known as trolling, and it was based off the fishing exercise of trolling, where you troll a fishing line through an area that's known to have a lot of fish in it with the hopes of catching a bite. Same sort of thing. So on usenet, what some trolls would do is they would post the same information through several groups on Usenet at the same time, trolling for a bite and if they got multiple bites, that was awesome, and you know it was it was more or less a kind of harmless prank, you know, just sort of an idea of you know, if you didn't engage the trolling conversation, then you were in on the joke and you could enjoy it as you saw someone else kind of get more and more involved. Right exactly, very good reeled in. Um yeah, so so yeah, if you're if you're not hooked, you're part of the you're part of the gag. You can actually enjoy it. But some trolls were kind of more mean spirited than others, and they would use things, um like insults or uh not necessarily insults towards the other users, but perhaps to their arguments, or they would use a spurious arguments on their own side to try and just to just to derail the conversation. Um, not to actually engage anyone in debate, but rather to cause a discussion to just fall to pieces. And that's where the whole flame bating term came from. It was to start a flame war, which is where you get people so mad they can't resist throwing insults. And then of course, if the troll had never insulted anyone. They can say, hey, why are you being so mean to me? You know, I was just here to make a have a conversation. I wasn't here to call anyone names or anything. You could play the helpless victim, um, and the people who are hurling the insults are the ones who look like the bad guys. Even though that was the trolls goal the whole time. Now it's not really hard to find trolls at all. You can you can visit virtually uh any website. You know. One of the things that's cool about the web two point oh overused name revolution another over used name, UM, is that there's interactivity on all these different websites. I mean you can go to to uh any of the news websites, especially in the political season we've just gone through. UH, you know, there was tons of this going on. UM. You could go to a for for example, you could go to a conservative website or a liberal website, you know, one with an obvious bias, and there's always gonna be somebody hunting around the message boards that says the other candidate is the one who is you know, going to be the one who solves everything, and your guys a liar, and you know that kind of thing is exactly that. Then that's the appropriate audience for a troll to go after somebody who absolutely you know, I know if I say this in this room, the whole room is going to explode. But it can be found anywhere. It can be found in shopping websites, on news websites, um, you know, virtually any place. Yeah, oh sure, certainly, even even the iTunes store you'll get comments and the reviews or Amazon. Um. So you really don't have to go that far to find people who are just trying to bait people into an argument. And of course, the more emotionally charged the subject, the easier it is to convince someone to get into that kind of throw down, which is why in the politics region it's so prevalent because politics, for many people's very personal and very passionate kind of subject. And so you you get that that emotionally charged subject, you add some tender and you throw on a match and of course you're going to get a blaze. And some trolls all they really want to do is just upset people because they think it's funny. You know, it's it's amusing, it's it's that whole gotch uh where you tell the really long joke that has the really bad punchline at the end, and really it's just for your own amusement, not for the audience. Not that I know anything about that. Um, I'm actually known in the office for telling a really long joke that has a really bad punchline, and not just the office, my reputation has spread far and wide, but at any room. So I do have some trollish tendencies. I have to come out and admit that is a kind of trollish thing to do, where you're really doing it for your own amusement, not for anyone else. Um, it's a very selfish kind of thing. And but some trolls have other motives besides just you know, trying to upset other people, like the ones on the political boards. Maybe there to actually so discontent among another group's followers. So you sit there and you just say, like, one trollish way of of doing this is to to come across as trying to be sympathetic. Like you said, you know, I really like so and so's policy on taxes, but do you really think he's gonna follow through that bay st upon such and such. And the whole idea here is that you're undermining the opponent while you seem to be on the side of the other people in the community. And um, that's still still very trollish thing to do. And it's also trollish to uh to gang up on the unsuspecting victims to Sometimes there'll be a plant um who who is deliberately being playing dumb. I guess you'd say, to allow the other person to um post a trollish post, and then the other person gets into it with him, and before long they have the whole room riled up. UM. So it's a you know, it's certainly a trollish thing to sort of sneak in the back door and get under people's skin and then let him have it. Um. Another another tactic is to disguise your identity as someone else, which is called uh. And you could even have a discussion with yourself. UM. That's called sock puppets, where you've got a suck puppet identity and UH and you you you could be logged in under one name, have a suck puppet logged in under another name, and you're having a conversation with the whole purpose to derail whatever conversation is going on in that community. Um, and you're the one controlling the whole thing. So in that case, you know, it's it's it's pretty easy to get people riled up because you can just keep escalating it yourself. You don't have to wait for someone else to do it. Now. Of course, if anyone has any way of actually looking to track back where those comments are coming from, there's a good chance they're going to figure out, hey, there's one person who's posting both of these these lines of dialogue. Um, and then you know the gig is up. But that's another that's another fairly common tactic on the troll community. That's true. And uh, you know a lot of people do this as a prank, but some people do not do this as a prank. They are doing this to actually cause harm. And I would I would say, uh, it's probably more than minority. Um. But there are some some pretty vicious trolls out there. There's some that that shows such a lack of empathy you start to wonder what motivates them to do this kind of thing. Um, there's a there are a couple of good examples. We we mentioned some in the article. I'll just go over one really quickly. Um. Jason Fortuny, who was the infamous troll who Um. He went on Craigslist and posted an ad posing as a woman looking for a specific kind of suitor. Um, and it was fairly uh risque. And he then posted all the responses he got on a blog, including personal information of the people who responded. So um, all these different pictures and and personal information of all these men who had responded to this ad go up and suddenly become public, and there's a big, you know, outcry of indignation and and and rage against his actions because it was constituted a severe breach of privacy. And his point was saying, hey, you know, I'm just kind of showing that you've got to be careful with your information online. You can't just trust it to anyone. So he was kind of taking a uh an approach of we should make sure that we're careful with what we say and what we share. Yeah, so he may have been operating by himself. But there are a couple of troll communities. Well actually there are a number of them, but a couple of them that you discussed in your article, and we didn't mention the articles how trolls work. Um, but a couple of those communities are anonymous and four chan, which are actually sort of one of them is an offshoot of the other, right, exactly, Anonymous is an offshoot of four chan. Yeah. Uh. The funny thing, um, for for those of you listening, was Jonathan was writing this article, and uh, he was doing research and he was going on the four chan site. Suddenly again, suddenly I get an instant message at my computer saying, I don't know if I can actually research this at work. I'm afraid somebody's going to see this stuff because there is a lot of viol I had to turn the images off on my web browser. Um. Four chan fur chans a message board and it's a graphic message board. So you can say, you can upload pictures to this message board and only that you can post completely anonymously. You don't have to have any sort of handle whatsoever, so you don't have to log in, you don't have to have a password. You just go there, you post your message, and you leave, So there's no accountability, there's no responsibility. I mean, you can post pretty much whatever you want within only there are only a couple of exceptions. Um, the moderators look out for child pornography because they don't want to end up getting under fire for hosting it. So that's the one of the few things that is just an absolute no no on four Chan. And and really this stuff only happens on one specific channel within four Chan. It's the slash b slash channel um and uh it's also known as the random channel. So anything goes on this channel, and it's within a very specific section. Unfortune, it's in an explicit section, so it's not like it's uh, it's not like you're if you go there, you're not going to realize that you're gonna see some pretty vile stuff or vulgar stuff or pornographic stuff, or however you want to define it. But at any rate, stuff that's not appropriate for you to look at while you're sitting at your desk at work. So that's why I turned my images off. But yeah, it's um. The that channel has a lot of people who engage in extremely trollish behavior, but they're doing it to each other and most of the people they're all have the same kind of sense of humor, which is sort of like anything goes uh nothing anyone posts is is sacred. You can make fun of whatever topic you want. You can insult the intelligence of other users, um, any of that, and it's perfectly fine. And you do it with the understanding that the exact same thing is gonna be done to you. So that's a little different from trolls who go to other communities just to disrupt them. But out of this group sprung anonymous, and Anonymous is a very specific group of individuals who have the goal of not bringing down the Church of Scientology, but bringing to light certain alleged practices that the church follows. UM. The Anonymous alleges that the Church of Scientology has some very draconian practices that separate new members from their families and drain all of the resources out of their bank accounts, savings accounts, things like that. And so they've held protests, actual real life protests in various cities around the globe. UM. And they usually are masked and to hide their own identities because the Church of Scientology, uh, they say, will come after them um litigiously through the court system. So they say they wish your remain shall we say yes. They claim that there is no real leadership to the group. They all share the same goal, but there's no persons sitting behind a big desk, you know, in the big swivel chair, cackling madly. Um, it's it's hello, Anonymous, right exactly, it's it's Uh. People take it upon themselves to try and organize events, and then other people support it, and it kind of grows out of that from what I understand, Um, flash mobs. Yeah, kind of like flash mobs, although a little bit there's there's actually a purpose to it. There's there is a definite purpose. Yeah, so um that's but but definitely the Church of Scientology could has looked at this and has referred to them as terrorists. Now, some people either actually part of Anonymous or claiming to be part of Anonymous. This is the tricky part when you're when you're dealing with and when your entire community is made up of Anonymous contributors, how do you know who is and who isn't in that community? But some people claiming to have acted on behalf of Anonymous have have cause distributed denial of service attacks on Church of Scientology websites and things like that, and actual attacks. Whereas Anonymous claims that it does not condone these acts at all. Um, they're all about protesting and raising awareness, but not about causing direct financial harm to the church. And uh, and that's where it becomes tricky. Where do you how do you define which people are actually part of this group and which ones aren't. Are the people who are part of this group who are doing these things do they not realize that, you know, it's against the wishes of the rest of the group, or are Could this be someone who's actually trying to discredit anonymous and just by acting on their behalf do these things or are these things happening at all? Of it's crazy, it gets it gets pretty tough to to unravel it and figure out what's really going on. You spent some time thinking about this, Heaveny, I can neither confirm nor deny that. Well, of course you did anyway, since you had to exactly that was all the research that away poured into that so other other troll communities. I just want to mention one really quickly because I'm a big fan of a website called CHUD which is Cinematic Happenings under Development and it's a movie news and rumors site. Um, there were a group of people who they have a message board on that side, and there are a group of people on that message board who uh would derail entire threads about movies just to complain about certain movie reviewers or writers on that site. And eventually, you know, they were very permissive on this site for a really, really long time, but eventually it just got to the point where the harassment got to insane levels, to the point where some of these people were posting doctored photos of the young baby daughter of the owner of the website in UH and photoshopped in horrible ways. Mean, it was really really stomach turning. So eventually the moderator banned these individuals and they went on another message board called Scorched Planet, which has a much more lacks kind of policy when it comes to people in there, and it just says like, you know, you can play here, you can say whatever you want, just keep in mind that other people are gonna say the same source stuff about you. I don't want to hear any complaining about it. Go for it. And so Scorched Planet and CHUD had this kind of long war where anyone who came over from Scorched Planet onto Chud was pretty quickly found out usually and before long was banned. And it was just it reached a level of of ludicrous proportions because it seemed like every other week there was another person who was coming in and kind of trying subverting the CHUD message board. So that's the thing, though, these guys would go over to this other board switched plan. They could plan out there their tactics about how they wanted to go about and try and do this. It wasn't just like one person causing some problems. It was it was a concerted effort. Yeah, speaking of concerted efforts, I'd also like to point out the fact that while he was doing research for this article, Jonathan got trolled completely unintentionally. He was looking up information and found this great article that talked about trolls and trollish behavior, and at the very end, all of a sudden, the language changed and it wasn't scholarly anymore, and it was very silly and uh sort of understating it. But there were some hints earlier I shared with you one in particular, I guess we won't go into detail, but there was there was one assertion made earlier in the paper that seemed a little outlandish, not a little, it seemed outlandish, but the rest of the language in this scholarly paper was very much, uh, it seemed legit. You know, I'm in a way it sounded like academ speak where you just try and mask what you're talking about using really big words and you hope they've used enough of them people won't question what you're really saying. That would be it. And uh, yeah, my news speak. You might say to go back to our George orwell thing, um, but yeah, it was. That was one of those things where I was reading, like I was looking to see if there were any actual good psychological studies done about the behavior of trolls, and there there really aren't a whole lot of them out there, and this was one that purported to be a graduate thesis on on trolls, trollish behavior the psychology behind it. So I read it and I thought it was pretty interesting, although there were some conclusions I thought were kind of, you know, a little strange until I got to the last paragraph and they were really the last section, and that's when I realized this whole thing was just a joke. I just spent and you know, thirty minutes reading a fake thesis. So they got me. They got now. I feel like we should point out that not everybody you see acting like a troll on a message board somewhere is necessarily a troll. Um. Sometimes people are just well, you know, abrasive. Try I say, uh and uh, you kind of have to, sadly, you kind of have to bear them out a little bit to see if they're actually trying to troll on the board, or if they're just very stubborn and very abrupt when they talk. Use a little critical thinking, try and see if they're using the same sort of behavior in multiple conversations. That that's a good indicator right there, they're using the same sort of tactics in totally different conversations, you may just be dealing with a troll. And uh. In addition to that, if you are actually running or moderating a message board, you know, it's it's you could you could say, well, I don't know if I want to even deal with this anymore. These people get on my board, what am I gonna do? They're gonna take over the place. Um, you know, if you if you moderate comments, that's a good way to to uh. You know, and some people call it censorship. But and the other point of view is if they're stating a rational point of view, it's one thing. But if they're trolling, well, really they're not really contributing much the discussion other than starting a flame war. So you know, there there are reasons to maybe look at stuff before it goes online. Um, you would probably want to tell people you're doing that. But on the other way, to suppress views that oppose your own, but definitely look to see if if they're legitimate or if they're just you know, if it's just a flame bait. Yeah, because honestly, that's not really contributing much to the conversation, you know, while in opposing viewpoint, you know, as long as it's rational, would help out with that. So and for other community members, really the best advice anyone can give you about trolls is don't feed the trolls as don't don't give in and and give them the attention. And because that's what they're after. They're after that attention. If if you don't fall for that, if you don't respond to them, there's no reason for them to stick around. They'll just eventually say, well, I'll go and find somewhere else where I can get the kind of attention that I'm I'm looking for. Um. Not granted that that really only applies to the trolls who are just out there to annoy other people. If they have the ulterior motive of bringing down a community or of undermining someone's position, they probably would stick around until a administrator steps in or bands them or whatever. But for the most part, the best idea is just ignore them, especially if there is an ignored feature on the community. I cannot recommend that highly enough. I have used the ignore feature on several communities to great personal joy. It's definitely made my my time on those communities much more pleasant. I'm sorry, did you say something nice? Uh? You so? Well? Do you have anything else virtual? Should we wrap this up? Yeah? I think I think we're getting close. Okay, Well, you know what. That's a that's definitely a good conversation. And there's more in the article so you can read it on how stuff works. So, Chris, can you think of anything off the top of your head that's more frightening or frustrating than Internet roll Uh? Children? That? Wow, you hit a soft spot on me. That's not what I was thinking. Of that definitely counts, you know, having my own and just saying anyway, well, I was actually thinking of something that that recently has been a cause of great frustration for many people. I'm talking about our article on how stocks and the Stock Market Works. Yeah, let's talk about frustrating and frightening. Okay, you beat me. Yeah. That's written by Marshall Brain. Oh yeah, her site. Oh yeah, so I thought i'd give it a little shout out to Mr. Brain. You can read How Stocks and the Stock Market Works right now over at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you against soon. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. 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