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ORIGINAL: respectmen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBTMKLmdpho

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

Didn't the GOP smugly dismiss the DNC hacking as people who had bad Internet security protocol?

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Seems the GOP missed information safety day as well.

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...Trolls are anonymous Internet users who intentionally provoke others by writing inflammatory posts...

Lack of inhibition resulting from anonymity online is a phenomenon psychologists call the Gyges affect, after a Greek myth about a shepherd who possessed a ring that could make him invisible.

"Cyber-psychologists often talk about the disinhibition affect. People do and say things online that they wouldn't do in real life," said John Suler, a cyber-psychologist at Rider University in New Jersey. In cyberspace, the face-to-face cues people rely on to curb inappropriate behavior is missing.

"People can't see you. You can't see them. You can't see if people are cringing or looking uncomfortable, and so trolls continue to say things they would never say in a room full of people, Suler told ABCNews.com.

But anonymity alone does not breed trolls, said Claire Hardaker, a professor at Lancaster University in England who studies Internet troublemakers. Trolls often have some sort of personal grudge, she said.

"Motivations seem to be as varied as the individuals who are found to troll -- they can be trivial, for example, boredom, psychological, e.g. emotional/social issues, political, e.g. the righting of (perceived) wrongs, personal, e.g. grudges against exes," Hardaker said in an email.

"If the behavior goes 'unpunished' each time, it can readily escalate into more and more serious abuse so that the individual may not even themselves realize that they've gone from being mildly offensive to actually engaging in potentially criminal activity," she said.

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So, why do trolls troll and how should we manage them? Although research in this area is still in its infancy, a few psychological studies have attempted to answer these questions. There are three important lessons learned.

First, trolls are more likely to display noxious personality characteristics, that is, traits that impair one’s ability to build relations and function in a civilised or pro-social way. In a comprehensive examination of their psychological profile, trolls were found to be more Machiavellian (impulsive and charming manipulators), psychopathic (cold, fearless and antisocial), and especially sadist than the overall population. Trolls enjoy harming and intimidating others, so much so that the authors of this study concluded that trolls are “prototypical everyday sadists”, and that trolling should be regarded as online sadism. This is in line with the view of trolling as a form of cyberbullying.

Second, trolling – like other forms of computer-mediated communication – unleashes people’s impulses by providing anonymity and temporary identity loss. This phenomenon, called deindividuation, is well known to psychologists and has been found to emerge in several areas of interpersonal relations, such as gaming, role-playing and crowd behaviours, particularly hooliganism. Thus even when we are not naturally sadistic, trolling may bring out the worst side in us, by lifting the moral constrains and social etiquette that regulates our behaviour in normal situations, and by fuelling dissent and triggering abrasive reactions.

Third, trolling is a status-enhancing activity: by attracting readers’ attention, upsetting people, sparking heated debates, and even gaining approval from others, trolls can feel important, perhaps much more than they are in their real lives. Thus trolling is yet another internet activity that promotes narcissistic motives, since trolls may be expected to be far less successful in attracting people’s attention in the physical world. The only effective antidote to their tactics is to ignore them, but even then trolls won’t suffer a public humiliation because nobody knows who they are. This is what makes trolling so ubiquitous – it requires no skills other than the ability to be obnoxious…

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

In a comprehensive examination of their psychological profile, trolls were found to ...psychopathic...this is what makes mnottertrolling so ubiquitous – it requires no skills other than the ability to be obnoxious…