10 of the worst trolling tribes on Twitter: from the nice-guy misogynists to the tween vigilantes

Twitter’s planned sale is rumoured to have been sunk by the site’s toxicity problem — but it’s not just buyers being put off. Phoebe Luckhurst names and shames the trolling tribes
The dark web
Paul Dallimore

In theory, Twitter is a marvellous idea. It is a space for sharing news and opinions, for public- service announcements and quick quips that are more illuminating than they seem. Accordingly, it is noisily influential: at the last quarter’s count, it was estimated that the micro-blogging site has more than 313 million users worldwide.

But this cacophony and its reach has peaked at a moment when the tenor of public discourse has become charged with hatred. Leave and Remain are still hurling mud months after the referendum result; meanwhile, the Labour party, which is consuming itself at a rapacious rate, is failing to address the internal misogyny and anti-Semitism that is manifest particularly on Twitter.

Outside party politics, female MPs including Maria Miller and Stella Creasy have spoken about the importance of addressing online harassment, specifically of women. The alt-Right continues its hostile march: notably, in July, the movement’s pin-up, writer and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, was removed from the site permanently after targeting Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones with racist, misogynist abuse.

And then, of course, there is Donald Trump and his attendant chorus. Trump’s tweets are by turns unpleasant and incendiary but he also animates others. When Trump was lampooned for his “locker room” misogyny, angry women were answered by misogynists defending their messiah.

How can we be certain it’s a problem? The prescient satirist Charlie Brooker takes Twitter storms as the topic of an episode in the upcoming series of Black Mirror. There is a bile-spewing columnist whom people are wishing dead — and then she dies. It escalates: soon someone at the centre of a

tweetstorm, with the hashtag #deathto[insertname], gets killed. It should sound more fantastical than it does.

Twitter’s 50 shades of hate has market implications. Recently it has been rumoured that the site is planning to sell: interested suitors reportedly included Disney, Google and Salesforce, and the company was said to have appointed Goldman Sachs to manage the sale. However, suddenly all is quiet. This week, Twitter shares fell sharply and its CEO, Jack Dorsey — who rejoined the company last year, promising to address the site’s hate-speech problem — is now wearing a rictus grin and being evasive about plans to sell.

In May, sites including Twitter and Google signed an online code of conduct that committed them to confronting hate speech. “We remain committed to letting the tweets flow,” said Karen White, Twitter’s head of public policy in Europe. “However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”

“It’s become a place for trolls, for hate speech,” says Jennifer Saba, a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. “Advertisers don’t want to be associated with that. They don’t want to be around a brand that is that controversial.” She observes that capital isn’t the issue: Google, for example, could easily afford the site. “But it has fallen out of favour with Silicon Valley.”

Granted, this is not just Twitter’s problem. This week the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) committed itself to tackling online hate speech. But undeniably, there is something about the frenzy of Twitter that enables this unpleasant racket. And these hate tribes will be difficult to silence: this is what we are up against.

1. Student snowflakes

What: Once upon a time, students were free radicals, questioning and outward-looking. Then they were lobotomised en masse and decided to reject the purest purpose of university — namely, exposure to testing ideas — and instead issued blanket bans on people with whom they didn’t agree. Suddenly they were arguing that entire sections of certain courses were triggering and therefore literally should not be taught, even though part of the point of studying history is the acknowledgement of its mistakes so that we do not repeat them. They use Twitter to rally their movement. The irony that they are acting a little like the despots they claim to be so disturbed by is entirely lost on them.

Notable moments: Last week, King’s College London’s welfare officer called for the national anthem to be withdrawn from the graduation ceremony for promoting “far-Right nationalism”. If only far-Right nationalism were as benign as that plodding song.

How to rile them: Start a club night called “unsafe space”.

Lily Allen has been taking on Twitter trolls
Rex

2. The withering Right-wing intelligentsia

What: The snowflake students find their natural enemy in the Right-wing intelligentsia: often arch, waspish columnists from publications with a Conservative bent, or fighty figures such as Louise Mensch. The more their young opponent tangles himself in knots, like a toddler throwing a tantrum, the shorter and more arch their responses become. Their worldview is anathema to that of the safe space.

Notable moments: Coining the phrase “Stepford students”.

How to rile them: Tell them their offspring is running for NUS president.

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3. The tween vigilantes

What: Perhaps the most frightening of all the denominations online. This group of technologically agile teenagers follows its icons with the irrationality of the zealot and will spear critics with figurative pitchforks. Any slight can animate them. Sub-groups include the Directioners (the tweens who are fanatical about One Direction), the Zayniacs (Zayn Malik) and the Beyhive, Beyoncé’s fans. These kids have the advantage of having no full-time jobs and an innate understanding of technology.

Notable moments: Last year, one journalist tweeted a picture of Cheryl Cole in what looked like a compromising situation; she was shellshocked by the vitriol levelled at her by Cheryl’s “soldiers”. “You are gonna be ruined by the time we’ve all finished with you. You awful human being. You’ve got what’s coming to you,” said one. “You f***ed with the wrong fanbase,” said another.

How to rile them: Tell them their favourite member of 1D is getting married.

4. The Momentum deselectors

What: Momentum — nicknamed Mob-mentum by critics — is the fifth column inside the Labour Party that has a pro-Corbyn manifesto of varying levels of radicalism. On the side, its activists pursue an online agenda that seemingly includes calling for the deselection of Labour MPs whom it considers to be traitors. It all sounds a bit Dolores Umbridge and the Inquisitorial Squad; it is, in fact, targeted bullying, though the organisation has insisted that these members are rogue, not acting from a directive from on high.

Notable moments: After the BBC Panorama documentary on the group there was out-and-out warfare.

How to rile them: Come out in favour of parliamentary democracy.

5. The anti-Semites

What: Linked inextricably to the growth of the hard-line anti-Zionism stance on the far Left, Twitter has a seeping anti-Semitism crisis. Earlier this year, some Jewish users of the site changed their handle to include three brackets around their name, to express solidarity with those who had been targeted.

Notable moments: In July, decorated New York Times journalist Jon Weisman quit Twitter after experiencing a series of anti-Semitic attacks. His departure was a turning point. He has returned — warily — to the network.

How to rile them: Please, don’t even engage.

6. Nice-guy misogynists

What: The mantra of the “nice-guy misosgynist” is best explained using a Facebook status that went viral on Reddit. It reads simply: “Wish I had a gf… god I hate women :(”. The stupid phrase invokes perfectly the “nice-guy complex”: these men think women owe them something because they haven’t tried to rape said women. Women who turn them down for a date are “whores”, women offended by cat-calling are “ugly sluts”. They will end most back-handedly misogynist tweets with the expression “haha”.

Notable moments: Any time they talk about the friend zone.

How to rile them: Tell them they’re in the friend zone.

Victim of trolling: J K Rowling
Getty

7. The men’s rights activists (MRAs)

What: The men’s rights activists are a distinct group of men who truly believe that the objective of feminism is to destroy men. They are incensed by it: one MRA Twitter account recently compared it to fascism (“feminists are okay with feminism just as Nazis are okay with Nazism”). This group intersects neatly with much of Trump’s army and members of the alt-Right movement. Your average MRA thinks sexism is fantasy, and that women cannot run companies because they might get their period and crash the stock market. They are furiously baffled by issues including equal pay and maternity leave.

Notable moments: Every International Women’s Day, when MRAs are apoplectic with rage about the absence of an equivalent day for men (“TELL ME WHY THERE IS NO DAY TO HIGHLIGHT THE ISSUES MEN FACE EVERY DAY #everydaysexism #feminazis #prejudice”).

How to rile them: Be a woman.

8. The alt-Right

What: The ultra-conservative movement is messy and untrammelled: pulling in misogyny, religion, Trump supporters, nice guys and MRAs and conspiracy theorists. They are typically white men. Clearly, it is competitive, but they are probably the most furious people on the internet — this week, they spent hours arguing with a fake bot set up by American activist Sarah Nyberg. They rant and rave and attack and crow at those who have been “doxxed” (had their personal details published on the internet).

They “dog-pile” — virtually leap on users and attack them — and whip up virtual mobs. They hate liberal ideas and political correctness, and they hate anyone dissenting from or criticising their idols, namely Yiannopoulos. Reading material includes the news site Breitbart, which The Week calls “the unofficial media hub for the alt-Right”. Yiannopoulos used to work there.

Notable moments: The #freeMilo hashtag, in the aftermath of his banning from the site.

How to rile them: Exist.

9. The racists

What: One particularly unpleasant outcome of the Brexit fallout is the normalisation of racist speech. Racism has always existed in inky corners of the internet but the current public discourse — pitched against migrants — has accelerated the pace of the language online. Today, the scale of hate crime since Brexit will be revealed in official figures; it is feared there has been a rise in Islamophobia and attacks on foreigners. Last week it was revealed that some commentators are using the names of technology companies, including Google and Skype, as a racist code to refer to specific minorities. These people are, obviously, vile and defy any rational explanation.

Notable moments: The trolling of Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress and comedian, caused Jack Dorsey to — finally — intervene and ban Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter.

How to rile them: Please, don’t even engage.

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AND THE GOODIES...

10. The straight-backers

What: Straight-backers take on the haters; accordingly, they bear the most violent brunt of the hate speech. Traditionally, straight-backers became entrenched in meandering, frustrating back-and-forths with irrational trolls, bile filling their mentions. But the new straight-backer knows there’s a better way: shutting abusers down by quoting their tweet, appended with their juicy last word. It is the verbal version of the nail-varnish emoji — in other words, sass distilled — and is also very retweetable by their sensible army of disciples. Notable members of the tribe include singer Lily Allen and author J K Rowling.

Notable moments: The time Rowling retorted to an officious twentysomething calling Corbyn the “Dumbledore of our generation” with, “I forgot Dumbledore trashed Hogwarts, refused to resign and ran off to the forest to make speeches to angry trolls”.Yesterday, Allen was loudly answering those who oppose a humane solution to the migrant crisis and cannily retweeted the most vituperative critics (“used to be a huge fan before i knew you were a leftist racist traitor to your country and kinsmen. F*ck you very, very much”). She’s not scared.

How to rile them: Prejudice.

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