Trolling as a tactic won, because DFTT was never sufficient and banning was the only way. Once trolling was normalized by a presidential candidate, it was impossible to argue that he should just be ignored.
Trump isn't a troll, he has no sense of whimsy and he obviously cares way too much. The whole point of old-school trolling is to wind up the rubes over some trivial nonsense for your own amusement.
Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.
But the modern meaning is basically either just "someone I disagree with", "someone I don't like", "someone acting in bad faith", or "someone in the out group". It's a word that means practically nothing now.
You completely misunderstand trolling if you think a real politician using his real name would be trolling on the internet!
Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views. If you actually believe your stupid points of view, you should not be called a troll, merely an idiot.
> Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views.
Are you implying that there is some other motive to the President's tweeting? I always understood it as simply a way to piss off his opponents (and thus distract them with nonsense while energizing his supporters).
Gleefully annoying people by posting is the very definition of trolling.
It seems pretty clear that he’s narcissistic, it’s not like his behavior has all of the sudden changed when he had a shot at being the presidential candidate. So I would say the motive is always to keep the spotlight on him and to bully others. He doesn’t want to be viewed as weak so he’s always on the attack. It’s not some well thought out strategy but it’s working with his base because a lot of them agree with that strategy. It’s the terrible way of thinking that you are manly and strong by picking on others, when in actuality you are insecure. I mean there are a lot of things behind his rise but each party invokes the name of the other party to convey negative feelings. I mean I heard my father call something communist, it actually wasn’t but that word is used by Republicans mean something that is bad. It’s an odd time in US politics, and you can see that the actual Conservative Republicans are stepping aside from their real views and values because it doesn’t matter as long as their team is winning, even if their leader loves Russia and is actively pushing the US towards authoritarianism.
That was sort of a rambling comment, but it’s just so odd to me that hate can be amplified so easily now a days. It’s been good to see the fight for equality lately with BLM, equality is a very American value (despite us needing to go so much further in that regard). But we have a President saying there are good racists out there and how we need to preserve the Confederacy. It makes no sense.
Is it? The USA has one of the least egalitarian societies in the developed world.
Assuming you're talking about equality of opportunity: given the ridiculous cost of higher education and healthcare in the USA (as opposed to most developed countries, where it's nearly free to attend even the best universities or get treated in hospital), do you really believe there's a high level of consideration given to equality in American society?
We've all stopped saying provocative things on social media for fun, because it's become too easy to rile people up like that - it used to actually take effort before people would take your flame bait seriously. Shooting fish in a barrel is no fun!
"the troll in the proper sense is one who speaks to a community and as being part of the community; only he is not part of it, but opposed. And the community has some good in common, and this the troll must know, and what things promote and destroy it: for he seeks to destroy. Hence no one would troll the remotest Mysian, or even know how, but rather a Republican trolls a Democratic blog and a Democrat Republicans."
"... indeed some say that Socrates was a troll, and so that the good man also trolls. ... he told the Athenians to care for their souls, rather than money and honors, and showed that they lacked knowledge. And this is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling— even if the citizens get very annoyed. For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity [idion] of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree."
> unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views
Trump does it precisely for that reason. You can see his trolling spiking when he has to divert attention from bad news. Most of his activity is basically 50/50 between "energize base by creating outrage that feeds into victim narrative" and "define what news media will talk about next".
It's not particularly original, Berlusconi did it too (albeit with more traditional means).
Anyway, riling people up for your own entertainment is both contemptible and far too mainstream at the moment. Rod Liddle has had a newspaper column out of it for decades. As have the Sp!ked magazine lot.
There is a subtle difference in traditional propaganda and modern troll-influenced versions.
Traditional propaganda wants to be true, it wants to persuade you that what it saying is the truth. It bombards you with consistent messages that, repeated often enough, become true in the collective conscience. That’s the classic XX-century playbook.
Modern techniques are not meant to expose a consistent truth. Statements are often retracted or modified (“i was misinterpreted”). The real aim is to generate an immediate fightback, a virtual altercation, so that your side can claim to be a victim of “the system”; to force opponents into arguments that are based on false premises (and hence “unwinnable”) but that enable dogwhistling your sentiment to people; and to manipulate the media into covering these arguments rather than more substantive issues, effectively performing a DDOS on the capacity of regular people to be informed.
Modern politicians like Trump and Berlusconi thrive on the opposition arguing their proclamations as they were traditional propaganda, because it ends up amplifying the subtexts that establish an emotional bond with their electorate. Truth does not matter (“enough of experts”), not even establishing truth matters; what matters is triggering the response you want out of your opposition, which cascades into positive electoral effects by counterpoint. That’s very troll-like.
Some of these techniques are not entirely new, of course, but they seem to have become the principal instruments of political action now, and that’s novel.
