Are these the kinds of trolls that hunt people down in the physical world, or send nasty letters to employers to get people fired, or send SWAT teams to people's houses?
All of those have happened. All of those are trolling.
That's basic linguistics. It's not new or controversial among linguists. It's why dictionaries are built by looking at usage and citing sources, as anyone who knows how they're made knows.
I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...
There is a rather huge difference in the psychology of the two. A committed racist is dangerous, while your average troll has some internal issues that have a low danger level. Trolls can escalate, but the type of people they talk about in the article are already there.
"If it looks like a duck..."
I would be interested where you fall on zero tolerance.
IMO there is an enormous difference. I've always defined hatred in terms like "motivated to kill, for real." Less serious is anger. Far less serious is mischief, which is where I feel most trolling sits.
Put another way, if a person is being irritating (in text, at that), and you find yourself feeling terrorized, there's a massive failure of communication occurring.
Agreed. Trolling, in the classic/historical internet sense, is trying to irritate others by baiting them into an online argument that they take very seriously. Trolls are generally pests, but not hateful.
This is a pretty shallow nitpick. The article outlines pretty well what kind of people they mean. Yeah, it's different from the common meaning of "troll" but so what.
Your right, the title really doesn't go with the article. Its like seeing a title "Flooding issue on the Japanese coast" and then reading about a tsunami.
