Asperger's Syndrome and the Internet Troll

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you dissin' the [english] motherchan, n***a

Anyway. Well the guy probably doesn't even know what *chan is!

EDIT: read this for moar info; DO IT fa***t
http://warsie.deviantart.com/art/Histor ... s-86407535

Last edited by Warsie on 03 Dec 2008, 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think that's pretty close to the first type. I think most are sincere about their opinions but they're still, to some degree, drawn to being controversial for attention. It isn't an either/or type of thing. There are various degrees of it and it's impossible to how much the person is sincere and how much the person is drawn to their own controversial nature. Probably even the person themselves doesn't really know why they act the way they do.

Other times I think the person may stir something up by accident due to naivety but then take the reaction of the offended party as a reason to escalate the conflict and start acting like a troll. The more angry the offended party becomes the more trollish the behavior becomes. The person becomes more inclined to stick to their guns and not give an inch while at the same time heaping on additional insults and attacks.

Last edited by marshall on 03 Dec 2008, 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

LULZ: A CORRUPTION OF L-O-L

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/images ... CHINED.jpg

EDIT: regarding trolls, an article on this. had to lol as a NYTimes reporter wrote on this. Yes, a 6-page article on trolls:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magaz ... lls-t.html

related (I think)
http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-4792.cfm

http://www.metafilter.com/73747/Malwebolence

Thank you for all your links and references... you post some great stuff.

I've found myself in some flame wars with some very nasty NT's on youtube in recent times. The more I do it, however, the thicker the skin grows. It barely gets to me. I can't let it see, for I'm fighting against these people on the side of victimized Autistics/Aspies. They might need my defense. Sure, it is kind of hurtful, but I'm doing what's right. I serve the side of justice, against these as*hole flamers on youtube; and I will continue to do so, for the human rights of the victimized Autistics.

They need help, and I am willing to help them out. The more people defending them from ignorant little s**ts, the better for them. Fight for justice.

Indeed. Unfortunately, some people who obviously have the potential and probably have the intent to become a contributing member to an online community, self-sabotage themselves in the infancy of their participation, in exactly this manner.
It is a loss not only to the person who unfortunately allows themselves to be caught in a retaliatory web of their own creation and misunderstanding, but also to the community to which they had all the potential to become a valued and contributing member of.

Most long-term members of an online forum have seen plenty of new members 'get their feet under them' and are inclined to readily forget early stumbles as an expected stage of developing into a regular member, if the new member will let them (by simply moving on). I sometimes suspect new members lack the perspective to realize this (especially if their overall internet forum experience is limited) and might be inclined (quite understandably) to make mountains over things that are not even molehills to the detriment of themselves, their tenure as a member of the community, and the overall tone of the community.

This is especially unfortunate in the instance of obviously intelligent potential contributors who did not intend to make trouble, but find themselves unable to disengage from their initial hot-headed knee jerk reaction., long enough or effectively enough, to gain some productive perspective on whatever non-event they are inflating, out of any realistic proportion, in the privacy of their own head, and, most unfortunately for all parties, publicly, on the boards, in full view of those who have seen it all before and are not in the least impressed.

I actually didn't even knwo what "trolling" was until i read this thread. I can get quite overwhelmed at times by some stuff on WP, and hence i am learning to take BIG breaks from visiting it, the longer i am a member. I enjoy popping in and having a look at the threads, and getting my teeth stuck into certain topics.

I am older - 46 - and while computer literate to some degree, i certainly haven't grown up with the net and with chat rooms. I find there are awfully opinionated people in real life and on WP. I can be one sometimes, and i do not like it in myself. i see it as very black and white and that is something i don't like in myself and try to work on.

There are people who communicate their views in a less blunt way, and then there are those who just want to bludgeon you with their "KNOWLEDGE" or their nastiness to the extent that it is really quite annoying and also sad. I view that kind of stuff on WP as a reflection of someone in unresolved pain or still pretty immature because they need to prove themselves to that extent. I don't like any kind of bullying - schoolyard or cyber - and i think we can have lightheared jokes on WP but perhaps it is good to be aware that others may view things very differently.

In saying all that, i still have a laugh on WP and i enjoy a bit of banter. I do not enjoy reading posts that are intentionally nasty and cruel and i do not enjoy AS or ASD people who bully. I enjoy new info and comical and clever posts and posts that are sincere and insightful. I also wonder sometimes if the use of avatars and little false names on forums gives really crappy people license to treat others appallingly. I wonder if they'd act in the same manner if they were out in public in their home town or walking down the street where they live.

My policy is always to act on WP as I would in real life and face to face.

Have a good day.





Everybody has a room in God's hotel

That is an insightful comment. But I think it's one-sided.

I think that many people tend to move on when they get bored or if it seems like too much of a hassle to deal with local cultures. Maybe people just move on when their period of free time has passed? Not all members who stop posting a lot are failed contributors. Some people might just have a couple of weeks to do something, and then that time passes and they are no longer here a lot.

My dog is sick and almost died last week. I"m nursing her back to health feeding her almost hourly. She's better and I probably won't be doing that after today because she had two full meals, and all I did today was supplement. If you're only going to be on a forum for a couple of weeks, it's not really desirable to spend it afraid to say anything or stick up for yourself.

You have valid points and you're obviously smart and have a lot of good suggestions. But there's another thing, too: I've been developing rhetorical skills for sticking up for myself in the real world and fighting for myself. I usually don't spend a lot of time with as*holes, and so don't get a lot of practice being a b***h. I'm in a phase of my rhetorical development right now that can more or less be summed up as: if anyone wants to pick at me, I'm grateful for the opportunity to get some practice being a b***h and kicking back. I've been practicing taking people down a few pegs for about 6 months now, even studying rhetoric.

So even if that is not my intention, I seem to err on the side of assuming someone is being intentionally insulting even if their behavior is borderline. So I am hypervigilant and defensive. It's a big part of having PTSD.

In general, it's not only inconsiderate but problematic to pick at someone with PTSD, even passive aggressively. It can lead to blowups. I reacted negatively to your post slamming me for referring to that jus4u76 as a "troll" by implication with that picture of a troll doll, when others were calling her a troll, too. But I changed my post to edit it to make it polite because you had valid points and I just didn't like how you said them.

But even if I am prone to negative initial reactions in response to negativity, that doesn't mean I'm going to edit my posts to be more polite not with everybody. Some people will evoke a negative reaction in me by attacking me personally, and I will let my post stand because I frankly want to. Now, I edited my post to you, but I didn't edit my post to the other girl to make it more polite. Why? There was no other point to that girl's post except to sneer at women who like jewelry... how polite is that? If some guy were talking about Harleys, would she pop up with, "Ugh. Guys like the above irk me." But for some reason, when a girl does it to a girl, people have no consciousness that it's rude or inappropriate. That whole mean-girl behavior seems to take place in some hidden dimension that people pretend they can't see or hear. So long as a girl is cute and flirting with the guys, she seems to be able to get away with backbiting other girls and everybody attacks the victim if the victim complains. Her mean girl game is one you can see in every high school parking lot. If I have to put up female mean-girl bully tactics here, I'm definitely not going to stick around.

If there's some crewe of female pecking order status enforcers around here, I'm definitely out. Because I don't play along that that kind of behavior is not social aggression. It is. Female "mean girl" bullying is just as much a kind of bullying as pushing someone physically, even if it is all low-grade and verbal.

Frankly, if you've seen it all before, I'm unsurprised.

I don't do mean girl games or henhouse pecking order rites. I'm not really like a woman, but more like a guy. Really.

In the past few months, I've been developing these verbal skills. I was never able to write well or express my feelings. Right now, I'm either on or off, and can't modulate or tone down or regulate the flow well. If someone steps on my toes and I blast them, it's part of my AS and the verbal skills developmental stage I'm at right now. Unfortunately, under those verbal conditions, my true opinions come out.

That girl (Mithra?) can go around telling members she wants to be seen as a sex object, that she thinks that women wear skirts to provide faster access to sex, that she wears tight clothes to show off her figure. I don't have to be here complaining that the "should girls be seen as sex objects" thread is sexist and cramping her I'm-a-sex-object flirting game. I know that I irk her. Any women who complain about sexism brings out as many female critics as male critics.

Do I care enough to hang around and be a lightning rod? No.

The best definition of a troll that I've heard is someone who tosses in a hand grenade on a message board then sits back to watch the fireworks.

That's an excellent definition Silver_Meteor.

It clearly points to the defining quality of a forum troll and trolling. The desire to cause disruption. I personally do not believe it is a word that should be used against those who are inadvertently disruptive, or perhaps even misunderstood.

Ephemerella, 'move on' in the context of my post, referred to an emotional/intellectual act, not a physical act. It certainly did not mean to 'go somewhere else' or 'stop being here', but rather to continue posting and contributing, without dwelling on one little error that no one else would think of if the poster concerned neither repeated it, nor repeatedly referred to it (however obliquely). Indeed, if every member who made a mistake or two when they were settling in 'moved on' in the sense of going away, there might not be any regular members.

If you feel that someone describing one of your comments as inappropriate is a personal attack on you, then I regret that your feelings have been hurt.

I am sorry your dog is not well. I hope she is back in the best of health very soon.

It is very admirable that you are working on personal and rhetorical development. You've made some very good contributions to the forums, and clearly your work is not vain since you often produce very insightful and interesting posts that I am certain others enjoy as much as I do.

I hope you do not take it untowardly if I suggest that an important task to learn in 'standing up for oneself' is contextual appropriateness. I commend your decision to improve your ability to resist being the undeserving victim of the aggression of others, but I also request you reconsider whether WP (a support site) is the best place to intentionally practice one's 'b***h skills'.

It is great that you are taking such efforts towards self-improvement, and whether or not it's my place to comment, I do think you are doing well. You say you have never been very good at expressing yourself, but this is less than apparent now, as much of what you post is clearly worded, with good prose. I certainly would not hesitate to say that in this particular circumstance, you have expressed yourself and your particular concern very clearly. I hope you are proud of your success in deepening your self-expression skills, and that the achievements you have already made in this area, encourage you to continue pursuit of your fullest potential.

Hi pandd. Thank you for your thoughtful reply with constructive suggestions, for taking the time to point these things out. (Comments below.)

Oh, I thought you were inviting me to move on. I misunderstand people quite often.



It's not that my feelings are hurt, but that I have a very strong negative reaction now. In order train myself in the art of verbal abuse, I have been blogging on political forums all through the election year. I got real mean. That's kind of like going into a barfight without a knife, for an Asperger person. I need to get used to not doing that anymore. Political blogging is useful to develop verbal attack skills for dealing with NTs who are abusive, which is why I did it (the political supporters were especially passionate and hostile this year and so the poisonous, toxic atmosphere was good battleground training). But it doesn't belong here.



The reason I mentioned this is that the only reason I've been sitting here all day lately is to feed her constantly, which is more or less over with today. (As an interesting side not, because she can't speak, I have to learn to read her body language and needs better from small signals in her expression and ears and understand her little doggie head games. So I've been learning doggie Theory of Mind).



That's nice of you to say so. I'm working on theories and practices supporting software engineering of human cognitive functions. I.e. going in and doing things on purpose to create functions and change traits. It's nice to know that the verbal skills, and the structure of semiotic and rhetorical constructs that support them, are starting to shape up.



Well now that you put it that way, it does seem kind of out of place on a support site (see comments from above re: political slugfest blogging).



It's kind of you to give me this feedback. I added the verbal skills feature using my cognitive function "software engineering" techniques that I've been working out. It's worth a few minutes to explain.

It sounds like a simple thing: to add a verbal capacity. But it's complex. Verbal capability is interdependent on cognitive metastructures for how we define the world and our place in it (ego). You have to have almost the entire social mind: social consciousness, ego (identity-personality), political agendas, plus whatever you want to verbalize in the moment, in order to have a high verbal performance that is a match for any Machiavellian sociopath you might encounter.

There isn't only one flavor of high performance verbal trait, there are variants. Some glib people are also shallow and vacuous, with neither physical or intellectual talent. Why? -- Because the complex metastructures require such a large amount of cognitive processing that those who are personally shallow and not deep intellectually too have all the "bandwidth" they need to develop construct, mediate and verbalize what comes out of their simple world. As another example of highly verbal variants, some glib people (e.g. professors) are anti-sensual. I.e. they are so underwhelmed by their sparse and dry sensory process (kind of the opposite of Asperger people who have to process sometime overwhelming sensory function rates) that they have a lot of "free bandwidth" to support both their intellectual depth and the metastructures of ego. So lacking any real "body presence" these "all braniac no body" types develop hyperintellectual skills and also can develop the inflated, complicated egos to support glib social skills. They underperform in the physical, sensory arena, but overperform in intellectual and social. Jocks, dancers, etc. tend to be intensely physical and not intensely intellectual or socially complex.

From the foregoing view of "cognitive phenotypes" we can infer that there are three "consumers of brain processing power" that compete for real time "bandwidth": (1) intensity and complexity of sensory processing, (2) intellectualizing, and (3) maintaining the complex metastructures of the social mind, from ego to political agendas. These three areas of cognitive specialization can be simply referred to as sensual, intellectual and social The NT high performance verbal variants seem to suggest that most NTs can be high-functioning in up to two of the three at the same time. You rarely see a football player, for example, who is also both intellectually profound and socially complex, although you will see one who is very intellectual or very socially developed. Also you rarely see a professor who is also both very physically well developed (sensually intense) and a social leader, although you may find some professors who are also physical people and some professors who are also social leaders. Most highly talented people are intensely specialized in one area to the exclusion of all others: you are only one of the following: a jock, a professor or a social butterfly. You never see someone who is talented in all three performance modalities (1) - (3). There just isn't enough cognitive processing bandwidth.

So here's the problem: how to you implement high verbal performance skill in an Asperger, if Asperger people are already both sensually intense (sensory integration dysfunction) AND intellectual deep (their special interests, etc.). Where do you get the bandwidth, or cognitive processing power, to add social metafunctions? Asperger people are, for the most part, anything but "shallow" and it's not easy for some of us to shut out our sensory input, because it's part of the hardwiring. If you can't tune down the sensory integration dysfunction or your intellectual interests, it would take the equivalent of a human supercomputer to add social mind, because you'd have to be talented in all three performance modalities (1) - (3) at once.

So what did I do to add my verbal capacity? I induced in myself a kind of Tourette's syndrome. I.e. I figured out how Tourette's syndrome works and induced some of its features into myself. I have worked on connecting the trait to my intellectual process. This is a direct connection, with no other features of a "social mind" of any real complexity. Hopefully, whatever comes out is coherent, as there is no real-time self-awareness when I write. I am trying to train myself to express myself as an art form, like dancing, so that it comes out right the first time without the need for me to be self-checking and self-conscious in real time.

This makes it also difficult for me to self-monitor my verbal behavior when someone irritates me, for example. My verbal function, modeled on Tourette's syndrome, just blasts out emotional stress or a swipe. It also makes it difficult for me to shape an agenda or online personality. I just blurt what is in my mind in the moment, given my mood, focus and interest on that day.

The only real chance for improvement is for me to continue to try to perfect what I have been doing: work on what I think of as the "Art of Stream of Consciousness" verbal flow. That's how I work on it.

In the meantime, presumably until I become a master of un-self-conscious verbal stream of consciousness, my verbal behavior is poorly regulated and can shift with my mind's moods and I can lose control of my tone of voice if my attention wanders.

Perhaps Tourette's syndrome was not the best choice of neurological model on which to base a synthetic hookup for verbal skills. On the other hand, it seemed necessary because it allows one to bypass the hearing-speech delay problem, which IMO was critical in causing some of the communication confusion. Because the point of the verbal skills was to speak and hear well, too, not just write, that delay is a problem. To overcome the hearing-speech delay problem, without the conscious mediation of social mind, the Tourette's-like feature essentially allows me to "channel" real time speech while focusing abstractly on the semiotics and rhetorical. Any other solution imposed the hearing-speech delay and required focus on the mechanics of the hearing and speech (or keyboarding) instead of rhetoric and semiotics.

I will try to keep my new, half-wired, not yet finished, verbal skills more constructive. Perhaps when I am not in a hostile environment (e.g. political slugfest blog) I can ignore the negative and focus only positive people, and so train myself to not "see" or "hear" negativity while I am verbalizing. Maybe I can intentionally switch on this "positivity filter" when I am in particular environments.

But there are two separate issues, really. My PTSD-driven reaction against negative or backbiting behavior is separate from the verbal Tourette's flow issues. The PTSD stuff tends to rear its head from time to time.

Anyways, my dog can now eat full meals now without me sitting here all day with her as I have been for the past couple of weeks. So I won't be leaving in a huff if I more or less disappear anyways. I've been dog-nursing, these past couple of weeks.

BTW. you called me a "contributor". What makes you think that I'm not also here for help that I need?

Thanks for another considerate post.

Hi,

NT troll (GNAA/ANUS) here.

I think there's two types of trolls:

(a) angry, upset, embittered people who want attention. These are no different than your average heavy message board user, EXCEPT THAT they desire attention by being upsetting because they are fundamentally very angry. If you go to reddit, you can find lots of NT users exhibiting these behaviors to a lesser degree than trolls, but of the same root archetype. My diagnosis: no power in life = big man on the net.
(b) ideological trolls, like myself. We believe that this society suppresses some vital truths. We also believe that most people are incapable of logical thought. As a result, our goal becomes to disrupt and seed our memes through the suffering and discontent of others, BECAUSE OTHERWISE they will ignore us as truth is optional.

Would Aspies be more prone to trolling? I would think so, merely because Aspies are less socialized (in my experience) and so more likely to become upset when people are talking nonsense or citing incorrect "facts."

My $0.02, hope it contributes to discussion.

Exactly.

Six years of my life I have been an Internet troll. I was a major troll from Mid 2009 to Early 2015. I have trolled once or twice afterwards, but it isn't common anymore. I am lonely and need attention almost constantly, and trolling was one way of getting it at the time.