trolling - The Art of the Prank

August 20, 2025August 20, 2025

Is it a Bird, Is it a Plane, No! It’s Gavin Newsom to the Rescue

Maggie Reed, @mermaidmamamags, asks: Are We Doing This Right MAGA? And Adam Wren of Politico, ‘splains how Gavin Newsom is the new Trump troll.

Click this link to play the video:

“How Gavin Newsom trolled his way to the top of social media,” by Adam Wren, Politico, August 20, 2025.

With an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn’t like what it sees.

There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

If this genre of social media post provokes deja vu, there’s a good reason for that.

Read the whole article here.

September 22, 2017December 15, 2023

White People Take On Facebook Racists

As most celebrities know, there are advantages to letting other people handle your social media. Significantly, you don’t have to spend hours of your day engaging with strangers who hate you for no good reason. Now, a volunteer Facebook group gives non-famous people of color the same advantage.

“These White People Will Respond To Your Racist Trolls So You Don”t Have To”
by Sara Ruiz-Grossman
The Huffington Post
September 19, 2017

“If a white person is filling your social media with white nonsense “• anything from overt racism to well-intentioned problematic statements, tag us and a white person will come roundup our own,” the group”s Facebook post reads.

The volunteer-run Facebook group, founded last year by friends Layla Tromble and Terri Kompton in Washington state, has white people respond to racist trolls online at the request of people of color.

At a time of deep political divides and tensions around racism and white supremacy, the group exists to support people of color, who are all too often the targets of online hate but are also often asked by white people to explain everyday race-related issues, from why NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to why you can”t just touch a black woman”s hair.

“It”s the responsibility of us white folks to do the emotional labor that”s required to educate other white folks “• and it shouldn”t be required of people of color again and again,” Tromble told HuffPost. “One of the goals of the service is to do some of that labor for people. Let them go have a drink and not worry about nonsense going on on their Facebook.” Read more.

August 23, 2016December 15, 2023

Trolls are Eating the Internet

If a prankster is a surgeon, a troll is a drunk swinging an axe. They are distinct but have a few things in common, including a tendency to thrive on the internet. In this piece, Joel Stein addresses a particularly artless strain of digital hate and warns that it’s poisoning the pool.

“How Trolls are Ruining the Internet”
by Joel Stein
Time
August 18, 2016

AOTP_Trollface This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava.

It would be smarter to be cautious, because the Internet”s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now, if you need help improving your upload speeds the web is eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you”re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it”s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.

The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There”s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim”s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny. Continue reading “Trolls are Eating the Internet”

June 14, 2016December 15, 2023

The King of Comment-Section Trolls Unveiled

Meet Ken M, an uncommonly sharp internet troll whose mix of surreal humor and remarkable tenacity has helped him build a fanbase.

“The world’s greatest internet troll explains his craft”
by Phil Edwards
Vox
May 6, 2016

“How does an internet troll build his own following?

That’s a question that Ken McCarthy, a.k.a. Ken M, can answer: He’s the subject of a dedicated subreddit with more than 150,000 fans, as well as popular Facebook and Twitter pages. And that following is all for … leaving comments. As the above video shows, those comments are funny enough to create a legion of devoted fans.

Calling Ken a troll is a bit of a category error “” though he does lure in commenters with false premises and hilariously mistaken information, his act is more like a new kind of improv comedy. To my critical eye, he’s an internet love child of early Smothers Brothers and Jack Handy, with a dash of Greg Packer, too. (Packer is a non-comedian famous for showing up as the “man on the street” in countless news articles, the same way Ken M is likely to pop up in comment sections.)

Ken experiments a lot. His persona easily transforms from that of a confused old man to a punctilious professor, but the result always has the same absurd sense of humor. Though his audience changes as well “” he shifts between news comment sections and branded Facebook pages, among others “” he adapts to each with jokes that he constructs on the fly.”

November 7, 2009December 15, 2023

“Anonymous” Attacks: Is the Snake Biting Its Tail?

The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
by Julian Dibbell
WIRED
September 21, 2009

mf_chanology_f-200 In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley’s ghastly “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world’s injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Continue reading ““Anonymous” Attacks: Is the Snake Biting Its Tail?”