Trolling

“Trolling” is posting, to an internet forum, material that is meant to get people to pay attention to you, rather than to contribute to a discussion. Some of the supposed Aro “controversy” is just trolling. (Some of it is not. I’ll discuss the aspects of the controversy that are not trolling briefly at the end of this page, and in much more detail later.)

Much work has gone into understanding trolling, because it is often highly disruptive. Trolls (habitual trollers) sometimes render forums uninhabitable, or consistently unpleasant. I haven’t been able to find a single really good article on trolling, but you can learn a lot from the pages here and here and here and here.

Trolls usually have poor self-esteem and a lot of free time. Trolls troll because they are lonely, or bored, or feel insignificant and need to be noticed, or feel unappreciated and want to be admired, or feel powerless and want to manipulate others, or are sadists and want to verbally abuse others, or are masochists and want to provoke others to abuse them, or are just plain crazy and want others to listen to their delusions.

trolling is a response to fear

From a Buddhist point of view, trolling is a response to fear of anatman (our own ambiguous existence/non-existence). We want to get others to confirm our own solidity by their words. We all troll sometimes because we all have that fear. (Take a minute to think about the history of your own on-line behavior and see if I am right. If you do not post on-line, think about your behavior in situations like office gripe sessions, or gossip-swapping at a party.)

In a Buddhist forum, we want to prove we are repositories of esoteric knowledge, demonstrate that we are powerful enemies of untruth, magnetize acolytes, write about every subject we have an opinion on, and we may ignore anyone whom we can neither magnetize nor attack. (These five are manifestations of the five elements.) This is inevitable, and can be productive if we also genuinely attempt to contribute to the discussion, if we respect other participants, and are aware of our own trollish tendencies.

Habitual trolls who lack these qualities can do immense damage. Egregious trolling was difficult before the internet came along, because you would be known and ostracized. The internet is anonymous, and that makes it possible to get away with behavior that offline would result in severe retaliation. Some forums are “moderated” by privileged users who delete trolling posts and evict habitual trolls. Many are not, because moderation is hard work, and because it is difficult to come to agreement about who should moderate and what rules they should enforce. Sometimes a troll becomes a moderator, which gives him or her enormous disruptive power.

If you have nothing useful to say, the easiest way to get attention, and manipulate people, is to post something outrageous like

Aro ROASTS AND EATS baby monks—ALIVE!!!

This is a baited hook. Inevitably, someone will bite, and replies

That’s ridiculous—I don’t know anything about Aro personally, but that couldn’t possibly be true!

And then others will counter with

I don’t know about baby monks, but everyone knows Aro is creepy, and even if they don’t eat baby monks, they should be banned!

And you can have confederates chime in with

Of course Aro eats baby monks. That was thoroughly established by discussion in this forum years ago. Numerous eminent scholars and prominent Lamas agree.

And then there will be a lot of insults along the lines of

What you just said is a gross violation of samaya, and you should be ashamed to call yourself a tantrika!

and

You are clueless – everything you say is wrong because you haven’t read [some obscure Tibetan text]!

And then you have a big brawl that lasts for days or weeks until everyone is so cross and exhausted that it starts to die down. Then you just need to post

With KETCHUP!!!

and it starts all over again.

The point of trolling is to get people to react. So the universal advice is

“Do not feed the trolls!”

“Feeding” trolls means responding to their nonsense. If trolls realize that everyone in a particular forum has the discipline to simply ignore them, so they won’t get the attention they want, they’ll go and cause trouble somewhere else.

The Aro Sangha has shown admirable restraint, I think, in not feeding trolls. We don’t participate in such “flame wars,” because we know that there is nothing useful that can be said in an troll-infested environment. And we have generally thought that it should be obvious to reasonable people that most of what is said about Aro there is untrue.

I’ve started to think that last bit is wrong, though. Because we have allowed the trolls’ misinformation to go uncorrected, some intelligent readers have been taken in.

Not all of the Aro critics are trolls. Some are sincere and decent people who are taking a sensible stand based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Aro’s refusal to respond to trolls has left misinformation uncorrected.

where there is smoke, there must be fire

There are also sincere and decent people who assume that “where there is smoke, there must be fire.” Even if many of the accusations are silly, there are so many of them that something must be wrong there. And why are Aro practitioners silent about them? Surely if Aro could refute them, they would. Presumably they have something to hide—or maybe anything they could say would only make things worse for them.

I hope to show that not only is there no fire, there isn’t really even much smoke.

It is important to say, though, that some of what critics say is true. Because there has been no confirmation from Aro of the true statements, there may be an impression that Aro wishes to deny them. I expect that this adds to the critics’ frustration—they feel that Aro is covering up things they know to be true. On this site I will agree with some of the central claims of the critics. I hope that this can help clear the air.