Troll

An internet troll is someone who posts deliberately inflammatory, off-topic or offensive things to provoke a reaction. Doing it is trolling.

What trolling means

Merriam-Webster defines trolling as antagonizing people online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant or offensive content. The troll’s goal isn’t to win an argument or share a real opinion. It’s to get people angry, confused or wound up, and then enjoy the chaos.

The word covers a lot of ground. “I was just trolling” can mean a harmless prank among friends, like insisting with a straight face that a hot dog is a sandwich. At the other end, trolling shades into targeted harassment. That range is why “don’t feed the trolls,” meaning don’t give them the reaction they want, is such common advice.

Examples

• “Don’t reply to him, he’s obviously trolling.”
• “She trolled the whole group chat by saying the movie was three hours long.”
• “The comments are full of trolls, I stopped reading.”

Where it came from

There are two older words behind it. One is the troll of Scandinavian folklore, a monster lurking under a bridge, from Old Norse. The other is the fishing verb “troll,” to drag a baited line behind a slow-moving boat and see what bites. Merriam-Webster says the internet verb probably comes partly from the fishing sense, while the noun picked up the monster image.

According to Wikipedia, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest online citation is from 1992, and users of the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban were talking about “trolling for newbies,” meaning baiting newcomers, that same year. One of the best-known trollers on that forum, David Mikkelson, later founded the fact-checking site Snopes.

Kinds of trolls

• Concern troll: pretends to be on your side while quietly undermining you.
• Troll farm: an organized group running many accounts to spread messages or stir up division.

Related terms

• Rage bait: content built to make you angry.
• Rage farming: provoking people again and again for reach.
• Shitpost: a deliberately low-effort or absurd post.
• Griefing: trolling inside a video game.

See more terms like this in our internet slang dictionary.