A troll, defined

What is a troll? This term which systematically exercises our collective mental energies with its social media pervasiveness has come to dictate so many conversations on, say, Twitter, that it best be nailed down and investigated.

A troll can mean different things to different people but in general, he - and he is definitely a he - is someone who occupies the social media space with a single-point agenda: to discover outrage. He is abusive, hostile and shockingly persistent. He stalks your profile and will not rest unless you have conceded defeat, whose contours he gets to define as per his twisted rulebook. Such is his slipperiness that we are no closer to pinning him down.

Anushka Sharma jumped into the fray when she announced on Twitter this week that she would block anyone who crossed a line. Maybe that’s what a troll is then: someone you just cannot stand. Sounds as good a definition as the next.

Why have trolls become such a trending topic? They are covered by newspapers, discussed in podcasts, and even chided by Chetan Bhagat. The ubiquitous focus on them means we now have an explicit, if incomplete, profile of a troll: He is male, young-to-middle-aged, unwilling to debate, possibly sexually frustrated, likely uncomfortable with his lack of English fluency, and so on.

While all these definitions might apply, let me add another: A troll is someone who fears losing the status quo. That status quo could be religious, sexual, caste-based, or premised on any of the other social chasms that we as a society so lovingly nourish.

A troll, then, could be someone who attacks you if you are a woman who says something that he disagrees with. He takes after Sharad Yadav who hates “parkati” women or Abhijit Banerjee who thinks they are “dented-painted”. It’s not that the troll wants to genuinely rape you, as he so articulately invokes in his tweets. It’s rather that he does not know how to counter your argument without referring to your vagina. For him, a woman is either a slut or a mother figure. When he cannot call you a sister, he does not know where to place you. And if you, horrors, are one of those women who fight for that despicable thing called equality, he would have no recourse but to descend to talk of your anatomy.

Kavita Krishnan, a frequent target of trolls, wrote this week on Twitter: “Trolls, I will let you in on a secret. Randi as an abuse does not insult me since I respect sex workers. Only one word would hurt me: Sanghi.”

Krishnan’s tweet went viral because it captured, even as it excoriated, the nub of a troll’s mentality. Expectedly, this tweet itself was trolled because you cannot reason like that with a troll. The troll operates in a world where certain things are a given. One of which is: if a woman crosses her line, she must be shown her place.

Why just women, a troll will readily attack your caste even if the argument you make has nothing do with caste. He will target your religion. That said, while the troll is an equal-opportunity intimidator, he reserves the viciousness of his campaign for women. It is possible that the real source of his conflict emerges from his financial emasculation (he does not earn enough to ensure his upkeep) but this is arguable.

Also, a troll is not born but made. He becomes one in a certain context. Krishnan’s jibe in the last part of her tweet was meant to irk Hindu chauvinists who rise to defend anything that they even remotely associate as a risk to their idea of their religion. But trolls can belong to any religion. Look at the way Muslim and Christian bigots use their holy books to disparage gays. Or the hounding of Salman Rushdie and Tasleema Nasrin (which tells us that trolling as a phenomenon has pre-Twitter ancestry). This inability to allow doubt and debate because of fealty to a fixed worldview is what ultimately characterises a troll.

Anushka Sharma’s call to block trolls has a history. After India’s defeat in the World Cup in April, she was blamed for Virat Kohli’s poor performance. Trolls had threatened her physically, which is when a nebulous online conversation had threatened to tip over into real menace. A number of women, such as Shruti Seth and Neha Dhupia in recent times, have faced such threats and have had to either tone down their voice or leave Twitter altogether.

This too is a feature of the troll. He bands with others of his kind to create a wave that looks so all-encompassing that it concedes no breathing space to the one it targets. The threat from trolls can seem very real and intimate, as they go about desecrating your timeline with tales of blood and gore.

But like Krishnan, I too have a secret to let you in on: Trolls are pussies. They are so vicious in the virtual world precisely because they would not dare make good on their threats in the real one. Also, they don’t care ultimately. They move on to new outrage topics with surprising rapidity, finding new people and issues to shit on. If you are a target, you can rest assured that the next news cycle will have someone other than you in the line of fire.

Finally, and this may seem absurd, but trolls do serve a purpose. They raise, or rather drop, the argument to the gutter level every time they open their mouth, and therefore, let you frame your rejoinder without worrying about argumentative niceties.

Krishnan’s randi tweet works precisely because it kills the very assumption of the troll’s abuse. Trolls push you so far into the corner that you are forced to retaliate in the only language they understand - that which shakes the foundations of their faux-privilege. Those pushbacks open new lines of thought which the troll is obviously ill-equipped to counter, but leave you more certain of your stance.
Nothing like emerging blood-soaked but victorious at the end of a good intellectual boxing match. For this we have the troll to thank.