Nicholas Clairmont is the life and arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine and a freelance writer.
An online petition calling for Denmark to purchase California has garnered more than 266,000 signatures. Opponents of President Donald Trump, who had been making noises about Denmark selling Greenland to the United States and threatening unspecified military consequences, knew that the proposal was offensive.
The Danes' petition was written to mock Trump's blustering rhetoric, noting that "most people say we have the best freedom. Colossal freedom." Its signers were trolling the American president. And they aren't alone. The X account of the press office for California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has been pulling the same trick with posts like this (minus the original all-caps to spare your eyes): "Donald 'TACO' Trump, as many call him, 'missed' the deadline!!! California will now draw new, more 'beautiful maps,' they will be historic as they will end the Trump presidency (Dems take back the House!). Big press conference this week with powerful Dems and Gavin Newsom -- your favorite governor -- that will be devastating for 'MAGA.' Thank you for your attention to this matter! -- GN"
Welcome to the third modern age of trolling -- a tradition that predates the internet by many centuries.
Trolling is hard to define, but most people agree it has something to do with malicious provocation and something to do with the internet. The first modern era of trolling, from the early 1990s to the 2016 presidential campaign, featured largely cheerful attitudes toward the internet. Trolling usually was viewed as lighthearted. Take, for instance, "The Troll Handbook," an e-book by popular pseudonymous Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her. The author writes about making inflammatory but benign viral trolling posts in the 2000s and early 2010s, such as one about hosting a Harry Potter-themed wedding where the bride melts down because she has sorted her guests into their Hogwarts houses by personality and can't believe the Slytherins would complain.
This was a period of optimism about the internet's role in world events. There was the Arab Spring, a rash of Middle East uprisings dubbed "Twitter Revolutions." In November 2008, U.S. News & World Report enthused over how Barack Obama had won office through the "Facebook Election," a stark difference from how Facebook's role in the 2016 election would end up being characterized. "A Nobel Peace Prize for Twitter?" asked a 2009 Christian Science Monitor article that X would now roundly mock.
But by 2015, perceptions about the internet's impact on politics and society started changing dramatically. And the alleged culprit was trolling. That year, Reddit CEO Ellen Pao resigned, declaring in a Post op-ed that "the trolls are winning the battle for the internet." She said she "endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history" from users angry that she had banned five Reddit communities over what she saw as their offensive content.
The second age of trolling thus began with the rise of Trump, who trolled in his campaign just as he had trolled online before it. Over the next few years, rhetoric around trolling as something evil rather than merely edgy became more heated. "How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office," went the subtitle of a 2019 book. In the Atlantic in December 2020, Helen Lewis wrote about how memes and ironic bigotry won the internet. "What was once dismissed as 'trolling,'" she wrote, "is now recognized as harassment and abuse."
By 2020, Reuters ran the headline "Pope to Catholics: For Lent, give up trolling." "We live in an atmosphere polluted by too much verbal violence, too many offensive and harmful words, which are amplified by the internet," Pope Francis said.
The cultural image of a troll became an online brigade of neo-Nazis leveling death threats. In truth, people who provoke reactions in whomever they deem as enemies, on and off the internet, include sinister and benign figures, just like there are mean-spirited jokes and good-hearted ones.
The third age of trolling should be different. Now that panicking about trolling and the internet has proved ineffective at vanquishing Trump, his supporters and opponents should agree that some trolling is good. The Danes and Newsom seem to think so. And unlike after 2016, when we let political exigencies rule over how we thought about art and comedy, we now have an opportunity to declare that politics, while important, is ultimately secondary to these highest of human endeavors. Though trolling comes at the cost of some offense and chaos, a world without it would be a shallower one.
The internet supercharged the possibilities for trolling by connecting everyone. Yes, that is scary. But remember that trolling -- much like how the "disinformation" panic of recent years simply gave a scary new name to the timeless habit of lying -- is just the internet's term for the age-old practice of provoking to make a point. And it isn't going to cause the apocalypse.
Though trolling was named by the internet, people who performatively poke fun at society's values litter our history books.
Think of the Greek philosopher Diogenes -- "a Socrates gone mad," as Plato described him -- who is famous for originating cynicism and living his life as an elaborately offensive prank while living in a tub on the street. Ancient sources record the gadfly trolling the likes of Plato, mocking his definition of a man as a "featherless biped" by bringing a plucked rooster to the Academy. ("Behold, for I give you man," cried Diogenes.)
Diogenes' most iconic moment came when he met Alexander the Great. As the story goes, Alexander in his glorious finery approached Diogenes’ tub, where he was enjoying a bright afternoon. Casting a long shadow, the king introduced himself. “I am Alexander the great king.” “And I am Diogenes the dog,” the philosopher replied. Alexander asked if there was any one favor he might do with all his power for the penniless exile. Diogenes, unimpressed by the display and the offer, replied dryly: “Yes, step out of my light.”
“Diogenes’s philosophy brought together both humor and moral seriousness,” as scholar Jill Locke puts it in “Democracy and the Death of Shame.” “He taunted, shamed, and humiliated conventional authority; and upended the boundaries and principles that nurture it.” But the ancients didn’t panic; they recognized Diogenes as a valuable character not despite but because of his trolling.
Or think of Voltaire, who, like the people who probably frustrate you online, used a large number of pseudonyms as he mocked the religious and governmental authorities around him. Think even of the exalted Benjamin Franklin, who wrote abusive satirical political pamphlets, including an entreaty to the Royal Academy of Brussels "to discover some Drug ... that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes."
"Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking," Franklin wrote of his own character in his autobiography. No, Ben. The world should value the saucy and provoking more. We should learn to value the troll.