7.3. Activity: Evaluating Trolling Examples#
This page has several examples of trolling. For each one, consider the following:
What are the potential benefits of this example (e.g., it’s funny, in-group identifying)? And who would get the benefits?
What are the potential harms of this example? And who would suffer the harms?
These examples will range from mild to much more extreme.
7.3.1. Banana Slicer Reviews#
In 2011, Amazon users started leaving parody reviews of a banana slicer on Amazon [g22]
Fig. 7.2 The Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer on Amazon.#
Here are some examples of parody reviews of the banana slicer:
Fig. 7.3 A review about how hard it is to cut bananas without a banana slicer#
Fig. 7.4 A review about the slicer and bananas being curved the wrong way (you could just rotate it)#
Read more at knowyourmeme [g23] and see also the related Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt [g24]
7.3.2. Fake Pronunciation Guide#
Below is a fake pronunciation guide on youtube for “Hors d’oeuvres”:
Note: you can find the real pronunciation guide here [g25], and for those who can’t listen to the video, there is an explanation in this footnote[1]
In the youtube comments, some people played along and others celebrated or worried about who would get tricked.
Fig. 7.5 Various comments on the fake pronunciation video#
7.3.3. Forever Alone Involuntary Flashmob#
In 2011, a group on 4chan started spreading a plan for making a “Forever Along Involuntary Flashmob.” You can see their instructions below:
Fig. 7.6 A meme spread on 4chan trying to recruit 4chan trolls to catfish single men and have all the single men show up to the same location at the same time with no one there to meet them. Then 4chan users can watch a webcam to laugh at the lonely men.#
Read more about what happened in this Vice article [g26].
Note
As we look at more cruel trolling examples, be aware of this online troll’s explained the justification for trolling (though we, the authors, do not think this justifies the cruelty):
The purpose of the community … I guess is to exchange ideas and techniques, and to plan co-ordinated trolling. The underlying philosophical purpose or shared goal, anyway, would be to disrupt people’s rosy vision of the internet as their own personal emotional safe place that serves as a proxy for real-life interactions they are lacking (i.e. going online to demonstrate one’s grief over a public disaster like Japan [2011 Tsunami] with total strangers who have no real connection to the event).
From Interview with a troll [g27]
7.3.4. RIP trolling#
RIP trolling is where trolls find a memorial page and then all work together to mock the dead person and the people mourning them. Here’s one example from 2013:
A Facebook memorial page dedicated to Matthew Kocher, who drowned July 27 in Lake Michigan, had attracted a group of Internet vandals who mocked the Tinley Park couple’s only child, posting photos of people drowning with taunting comments superimposed over the images.
One photo showed a submerged person’s hand breaking through the water with text reading “LOL u drowned you fail at being a fish,” according to a screen grab of the page shared with the Tribune after the post was removed.
Cruel online posts known as RIP trolling add to Tinley Park family’s grief [g28] from the Chicago Tribune
7.3.5. Flooding Police app with K-pop videos#
To go in a different direction for our last example, let’s look at an example of trolling as a form of protest.
In the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, Dallas Police made an app where they asked people to upload videos of protesters doing anything illegal. In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.
Read more at the Verge: K-pop stans overwhelm app after Dallas police ask for videos of protesters [g29]
For another example of trolling as protests, this one with bots, see: A TikToker said he wrote code to flood Kellogg with bogus job applications after the company announced it would permanently replace striking workers [g30]