Are Trolls Really Lonely Losers?

What actually motivates the trolls on my timeline, and do they even recognise that’s what they are?

Some of the replies under my posts on X have nothing to do with what I wrote. They’re there to provoke me, or anyone else reading, and I’ve started wondering about the people sending them. Do they know they’re trolling, or does it simply feel like having their say? And if they do know, are they enjoying it?

I write positive pieces. I look at the habits successful people use under pressure so readers can take something useful for themselves. I don’t write takedowns. Finding something worth learning from a person has never meant endorsing everything they’ve said or done. Most of the replies I get are positive, and plenty of people go out of their way to say something kind about a piece. There are a few, though, who it seems can’t resist a bit of abuse.

I’m about to publish a piece on J.K. Rowling and the mindset behind her stance against censorship and extreme trolling. I expect it to get some stick, so I thought I’d find out more about the people likely to be handing it out.

Trolling the police

Thinking about this brought back a memory from my police career.

A colleague of mine, a big lad who carried a fair bit of weight, walked along the touchline at a football match in front of a huge bank of supporters. Within seconds several thousand voices were singing “you fat b_stard, you fat b_stard” at him in perfect time, and the whole stand was in fits.

Take any one of those fans out of the crowd, sit them next to him on a bus, and I doubt they would have said a word. The crowd gave them what a screen can give a troll: somewhere to hide, a laugh to share, and a target who couldn’t really answer back.

I recognise that pattern on my timeline. Someone writes an insult, others approve, and the person on the receiving end becomes the entertainment.

My first explanation was that the people doing this must be missing something elsewhere. Perhaps nobody listened to them. Perhaps they had little respect or control in their lives, and online they finally found a way to be noticed.

That fitted neatly with the 7 Skills Identity model. The screen offered relative Safety, the group offered Belonging, and attention seemed to provide a substitute for Esteem.

It was also a convenient explanation for me. Thinking of someone as a lonely loser makes their judgement easier to dismiss.

Research does link loneliness and low self-esteem with trolling. So I wasn’t completely wrong, but it’s only part of the story.

Two kinds of troll

From what I’ve read, there seem to be two main patterns, and they give quite different answers to my question.

The first is the person who gets drawn in. They might never describe themselves as a troll. In a Stanford and Cornell experiment, putting people in a bad mood and showing them hostile comments roughly doubled the proportion of posts classified as trolling.

It’s a bit like road rage with a keyboard. You’ve had a bad day, someone else sets the tone, and one nasty comment leads to another.

The second type is the person who’s deliberately after a reaction. Research on political hostility in Denmark and the United States found that the people most likely to be hostile online were the ones who cared most about status, wanting to be seen, to dominate and to feel they’d come out on top. They were just as hostile offline. For them, provoking someone isn’t a side effect of having their say. It’s how they get the attention and the sense of standing they’re after.

An Australian study also found that, among people who enjoyed cruelty, higher self-esteem was associated with more trolling. So you don’t have to feel bad about yourself to do it.

For deliberate trolls, causing the reaction can be the reward itself. Researchers call this “negative social potency”: the pleasure of exerting harmful influence over someone. In research on Facebook trolling, this reward explained more of the trolling than personality traits like sadism and psychopathy did on their own.

So there’s the person who gets caught up in the mood, and the person who makes things unpleasant because they enjoy it. Some people do both.

It also helps answer whether they know. Someone deliberately trying to embarrass you knows the reaction they want, even if they call it a joke or a deserved rebuke. Knowing what you’re doing is one thing, accepting that you’re a troll is another.

What they get from it

That’s also why a reasonable reply often gets you nowhere.

You explain your argument because you want to be understood. The troll discovers which part of it matters to you and takes another swipe. You correct the misrepresentation, grow frustrated, and spend more time defending yourself.

To you, it feels like the conversation is going downhill. To them, it might be going very nicely.

Your irritation shows them they can get to you. They have made a stranger stop what they were doing and respond.

If other people applaud, there is a second reward. The insult gets them noticed by the group. Research on group trolling found that people who feel part of an online group are more willing to join in, which helps explain why an attack can snowball once it’s started.

That is the part I recognise from the football ground. Each voice added to the humiliation, and the sound of everyone else joining in made the behaviour feel accepted. The crowd was both the audience and the encouragement.

Belonging plays a part too. Some people will join in with cruelty just to feel part of a group they already care about. They don’t need to be lonely to want that group’s approval. They just want to fit in.

Esteem can be involved as well. Someone may already have standing and still want to assert superiority, defend their position, or put another person in their place.

Being behind a screen makes all of this easier. Nobody can see you, you might not even be using your real name, and you don’t get the looks and reactions that would normally make you think twice in person. You can say something hurtful and never have to face the person you’re attacking.

The Identity model helps make sense of it. Feeling safe makes joining in seem low risk, and belonging means you’re rewarded for taking part. Esteem might come from the audience egging you on, or just from feeling a cut above the person you’re having a go at. Then there’s the satisfaction of knowing you got a reaction.

That makes my “they’re all lonely losers” a poor explanation. It misses the point about enjoyment, the audience and the wish to look important. It also means anyone who joins in can imagine that trolling is something other people do.

What the reaction gives away

The one part of this you do control is how you respond.

Stand-up comic Ola Labib describes answering a heckler with: “Do people not listen to you at home? Are you a bit lonely?” It works because everyone laughs at the heckler. But a comedian has a microphone and an audience to work with. On a timeline you have much less control over who joins in or how the exchange develops.

Football managers offer another approach. Mikel Arteta stopped using Twitter after threats against his family. Thomas Tuchel said in 2021: “I had to learn and train myself not to read about me, not in good times and not in bad times.”

He ignored the praise as well as the abuse, so strangers’ opinions mattered less to him either way.

What this means for you and your children

The first pattern, getting drawn into an ugly exchange, is a Manage Your State issue. Children can learn to notice when frustration, or the excitement of joining in, is taking them down the wrong path. Before they post, ask them what they want their comment to achieve and how they would feel saying it to the person face to face.

For anyone receiving abuse, the Elevate Formula is useful: another person’s insult is Other. It says nothing about who you are or what you are worth. A passing comment can stay Fleeting. It doesn’t have to become a Lasting judgement you carry around.

Repeated harassment needs action too. Children should know they can bring it to a trusted adult, block the account and report the behaviour. Managing your state includes deciding when to leave an exchange and get support.

Back to my timeline

I began this research asking what was missing from the lives of the people abusing me. I now think the better starting point is what the behaviour gives them. What comes through most clearly is the reward: influence over the target, approval from the audience, a feeling of superiority and, for some, enjoyment of distress.

That changes how I think about the replies to my work. Not every insult has an argument in it that needs answering. Sometimes getting a reaction is the whole point.

When I publish the Rowling piece, readers will be free to challenge the evidence and disagree with the conclusions. I welcome debate. It’s where the best ideas come from.

But when someone ignores the substance and keeps returning to the insult, explaining myself again may simply prolong something they are enjoying. I’d rather spend my time on readers who want a proper conversation.

My colleague had to stay on the pitch while the crowd entertained itself at his expense. On my own timeline I have more choice. I think I might just send them this post and say I wrote it for them.

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Sources

• Labib, O., interviewed by Harriet Curzon, Stylist
• Suler, J. (2004). “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” How anonymity, invisibility and fewer social cues can reduce restraint online.
• Masui, K. (2019). “Loneliness moderates the relationship between Dark Tetrad personality traits and internet trolling.” Links loneliness, personality and trolling. Summary
• Santos and colleagues (2023). “Low Self-Esteem, High FOMO? The Other Side of the Internet Troll.” Links lower self-esteem and fear of missing out with trolling. Abstract
• March, E. and Steele, G. (2020). “High Esteem and Hurting Others Online: Trait Sadism Moderates the Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Internet Trolling.” Among people high in sadism, higher self-esteem went with more trolling. Summary
• Craker, N. and March, E. (2016). “The dark side of Facebook: The Dark Tetrad, negative social potency, and trolling behaviours.” The reward of exerting harmful influence over others. Study
• Marrington and colleagues (2023). “An exploration of trolling behaviours in Australian adolescents: An online survey.” Links adolescent trolling with enjoyment of antisocial social rewards.
• Li, Y.-J., Cheung, C. M. K., Shen, X.-L. and Lee, M. K. O. (2022). “When Socialization Goes Wrong: Understanding the We-Intention to Participate in Collective Trolling in Virtual Communities.” Group identity, disinhibition and joining collective trolling. Paper
• Bor, A. and Petersen, M. B. (2022). “The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis.” Status-driven people are hostile online and offline. Study
• Cheng, J., Bernstein, M., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. and Leskovec, J. (2017). “Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions.” How a bad mood and hostile comments encourage further trolling. Study
• Arteta, M., reported by Scroll.in
• Tuchel, T., reported by Free Malaysia Today