I have been doing a little bit of reading on “troll” psychology, and in the end, I wonder about the validity of any of these studies. Why does anyone write on the Internet?

I used to see the Internet as a vast public library and a forum for discussion. I was too optimistic about human nature. Finally we are all good people and all bad people. Good and evil are in each one of us and we all live with our shadows. The Internet is what we have all made of it, millions of soap boxes where people scream to the world without having to listen to anyone else. Religion and politics are the two taboo subjects of any respectable English public house.

Are we becoming more polarised, or has we always been like this in other forms at different times of history?

Why are people so aggressive on the Internet? The other day, I compared the Internet with a person in his or her car. It is the phenomenon of deindividuation – losing one’s own individuality. The Internet and the public highway have two things in common, the former more than the latter – you can insult someone and you don’t have to face physical retaliation. Get anonymity and you still have teeth! It must be a little like getting drunk.

The Internet brought freedom of speech, but some people cannot live with being free! This is the greatest paradox for us all. It is perhaps Nicholas Berdyaev who has come to the closest to defining a theory of “freedom of the spirit” according to whether a person is of the “aristocracy” of the spirit or the herd of modern urban life, whether one is more motivated by higher things or by money, possessions and power. Most of us are probably a mixture of the two and determined by necessity.

So we have freedom, and will lose it through being unable to live with it. This is the supreme tragedy of humanity. The greatest temptation of the Internet is freedom without responsibility. Thus the troll is born – of anonymity. The obvious cure is to remove anonymity – make the commenter engage his responsibility as a human person and suffer consequences for the abuse of freedom. That is easier said than done!

Looking at reasons for trolls “doing it” when they have “kicked the habit” vary. The attitude is quite nihilistic, the mentality of people who – at a more extreme degree – go in for planting bombs in public places or serial killing. For some, it is a sport, like killing animals and not having to face the prospect of being put in prison for life or strapped to an electric chair. There can be a sense of domination and control. Absolute cynicism in the “pathetic” lives of others would motivate some to provoke and escalate a war, a conflict between two or more people who hate each other, yet never met or knew what each other looked like.

So, for some, it is a game. One can play computer games that involve killing virtual people. They are said to contribute to young men who flip, buy firearms and go and massacre a number of people in a public place. James Holmes for example among so many others… Trolling is assassinating people “virtually”. You don’t actually kill them, so you don’t end up on the wrong side of the law for murder. But, in the Gospel, thinking about killing people is already murder, and the sinner will get back what he gave.

The one thing that gives immunity from retaliation is anonymity. I once fell foul of trying to force the issue by exposing e-mail addresses and IP addresses. What happened?

Remember the last time? I contacted WordPress, threatened them with legal action over your posts, and they immediately shut your blog down. I received a very nice reply again later informing me that should I find out you have breached their rules, to please inform them and they themselves will initiate legal action against you. So think before you try schoolyard bully-boy actions. You might just end up with more than a bloody nose.

This was from a person calling himself a “Catholic” and a “Christian” using the trick of “hiding behind authority”. Then the troll projects his own character as a bully (I know that my own life history and temperament show me as exactly the opposite of the bully profile). The comment on another blog containing these threatening words was removed by the blog’s moderator at my request. If I could get that man permanently disconnected from the Internet and his computer confiscated together with all his data, would I go for it? Frankly, I see no point. Anger must calm and the only response can be a Christian one – turning the other cheek and praying for him.

No dialogue is possible with the troll. In this particular case, the troll ratcheted up a conflict from early 2011, and ended up threatening physical violence. Blog sites do not offer the possibility of forcing commenters out of anonymity.

There are various ways to react. Let them “win” and close down one’s blog. That is what happened to the English Catholic. I gave in, but had the intuition of setting up another blog on a subject that would be interesting to “genuine” readers but would bore the pants off trolls. Another reaction is trying to get even by “trolling the trolls”. One can get a sickly Schadenfreude over imagining how grotty those people must be and how unhappy their lives are. To what end? Taking pleasure in other people’s unhappiness is just another way of man doing what man does best – killing, the curse of Cain and Abel. What is the point of all this? I can imagine nothing more futile, time-wasting – and sinful – about out-trolling trolls!

There is a potential troll in each one of us, motivated by anger or the playful instinct. The Internet is one place where we have a measure of control, unlike real life where our fate is determined by things like the amount of money we have. Perhaps the elites of our world are happy to see people trolling, because their power base in the real world remains intact – but we have to be careful about “conspiracy” thinking.

Trolling could become the subject of legislation like spamming, sending viruses and scamming. Would it work? Who does the policing, hunting down and actually going to a person’s home, confiscating his computer equipment and taking him to the police station for interrogation? Surely, the police are busy enough hunting real murderers, muggers and robbers. If that is so, their priorities are right. However, trolls who have been proven to have caused their victims to commit suicide have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The law can only act on the basis of proven damage either to life or property.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is a slogan that is widespread, but difficult to implement. There is the possibility of refusing all comments unless the person clearly gives his or her identity and a valid e-mail address. That is difficult to implement, because people are deceitful and give an unverifiable false identity. One can switch off the comments altogether, and exclude those who send constructive and genuine comments. It is not an easy one. One can put all comments on moderated status, and large numbers of comments take a lot of sorting and wading through. Myself, I ban a handful of the worst e-mail addresses known to me, moderate a few others and leave as much freedom as possible.

The greatest difficulty is commenting on the blogs of others, where I have no control over troll comments, and then I begin myself to go on the slippery slope towards trolling by counter-trolling. The best is to stop commenting on other people’s blogs and mind my own business. This is a learning curve for us all, and it is up to each of us to be vigilant. Things change little except the technology. In the old days, we had anonymous letters written with printed letters cut out of newspapers, the green inkers, and the chain letter people. There have always been pathologies out there, and we are all affected to one extent or another. We are surrounded by spooks and we carry our own ghosts.

It’s a choice we have to make.