Electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Very true:

To me, what’s really interesting — and depressing — about the article is not just how easy it is for a mob to get whipped up by a dedicated troll, but by the (alleged) identity behind the trolling.

We’re used to thinking of trolls as teenaged or twentysomething male denziens of 4chan, reddit or Anonymous’ IRCs, and yet this article suggests that behind a troll who (again, allegedly) whipped up a hate-mob against a 14-year-old girl could lie a seemingly well-adjusted, gainfully employed middle-aged woman with a couple of dogs and a neatly tended split-level ranch.

In other words, trolling may be more of a universal phenomenon than we usually consider it to be. And if the woman in question was the true identity of the poster, her reaction suggests that she’s not the kind of dead-eyed psychopath we normally associate with “swatting,” “doxxing” and “the lulz” — and that trolls may be otherwise normal people who are in thrall to a kind of psychological compulsion occasioned by social networks, pervasive pseudonymity, and the thrill of socially transgressive behavior. Call it something like “electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder.”

Post external references

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    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8475979
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