Trolling represents a taxonomy of behaviours that are impersonal, irrelevant, and unsolicited, a widespread phenomenon involving real persons, and, very often, harm, which varies by context, culture, impact, motivations, and tactics. Generally speaking, trolling describes strategies employing multiple techniques, both technical and psychological, with hidden intentions, mostly to provoke a desirable comportment.
With mythological and piscatorial roots, trolling is used nowadays to enhance multiple types of behaviour, often seen as inappropriate or undesirable, from deviant behaviour to forms of comedy. From an etymological point of view, there are some ambiguous explanations of the term that cannot frame the current use of the word, even though its significance is the same – following a person in order to cause her to act according to the intentions (set as objectives) of the troller.
Even though trollers are persons whose behaviour is intentional, including for their own amusement, trolling is defined as the art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off, using dialogue. If the behaviour of the trollers transposes into negative words or syntagms, trolling could become hate speech.
The spread of trolling is particularly facilitated by computer-mediated communication, where anonymity, freedom, and lack of control permit rapid contact in online mediums, but trolling is perpetrated within traditional communication channels, too. The media and Internet researcher Judith Donath describes trolling as a malicious and deliberately destructive lie.
Whitney Phillips distinguished between forms of trolling, according to which some trolling is incredibly aggressive, and meets the legal threshold for harassment. Other forms of trolling, for example “Rickrolling”, are comparatively innocuous; some trolling is persistent, continuing for weeks or even months, and some is ephemeral, occurring once and then never again.
