You kiss your mom with those troll fingers?

An internet troll is like someone in South Africa who supported apartheid: we know they must exist and yet no-one ever admits to being one.

i’m pretty sure no-one i know personally is a troll, right? i don’t hang with those kinds of people. You too i’m sure?

But i’ve also never met anyone who personally knows a troll: “Oh yeah, my friend Brian, he’s a total internet troll”

Yet we can watch something like Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘Celebs read mean tweets’ and have a bit of a laugh about it, because it seems like the celebs are being game in reading them and they’re famous and all so there’s kind of a distance or a bubble that exists around them.

But some of those tweets can be really mean and offensive:

And you can watch a whole video clip of them over here, that particular clip being number nine in an ongoing series…

But actually there is no protective celebrity bubble that makes hearing those things okay. And it was brought home in a way more effective way in this video where the website ‘Just Not Sports’  brought in a group of men and got them to read the tweets that had been written to female sportswriters to their faces. It gets beyond dark, but i think it’s important for us to watch and be aware of.

Here are a couple of examples:

“One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick.”

“I hope your dog gets hit by a car, [expletive].”

“Hopefully this [expletive] Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim. That would be classic.”

The point of the video being that when you are face to face with the victim [and it is a victim because this kind of trolling is abusive harrassment] it becomes so much harder to read the tweets. The troll who wrote them sat down at a keyboard and moved their fingers over the keyboard and typed out those statements. It is beyond me. And i am honest when i’m saying i cannot think of one person i know who could write something like that [even those people i don’t particularly like].

i can think of people i’ve interacted with on my blog or social media who i could see being more likely.

What is it that takes a person to a place where they think it’s okay to say, “I hope you get killed” or “I hope you get raped” to another human being? How messed up is our world?

Flip, i don’t know. i don’t know what the point of even writing this is cos i don’t feel like a troll is going to read this and go, ‘Oh wow, I’ve been a real jerk. I should really stop doing that.’ And i don’t know that the friends of the people who do this kind of thing know their friends are doing it because surely if any of us knew that our friends were behaving in this way we’d jump in and stop them?

Maybe we will get to the point where you have to get a licence to operate the internet, like a car. The space we have created for people to share opinions is super helpful and incredible in terms of what it can achieve. The space we have created for people to share anonymous opinions, not so much. Perhaps we need a fingerprint login so that every comment we write online has our face and name attached, to help us be a lot more responsible with what we write.

Your thoughts?