The ‘Troll’ Metaphor and its Problems

The notions of ‘trolls’ and ‘trolling’ in digital media have become ubiquitous across online communities, journalism, and scholarship, capturing a range of different phenomena. Depending on the context, the metaphor of the ‘troll’ might invoke images of bored teenagers engaging in silly pranks, political activists mocking opponents, radicalized groups orchestrating targeted discriminatory harassment, or paid propagandists interfering in foreign elections.

In this paper, we analyze the origins and uses of the troll metaphor and – building on existing research – present a critique of both its vagueness and potential role in downplaying the severity of racism, misogyny, and state-orchestrated propaganda. The metaphors of ‘trolls’ and ‘trolling’, we argue, have become oversaturated with meaning due to their invocation of longstanding mythologies about tricksters and monsters.

Through an engagement with existing academic literature, we show how the notion of ‘troll’ is not only used to describe widely different types of online behavior, but also contradictory forms of actions, motives, and implications. In one instance, trolls act apolitically on nothing but primordial desires and impulses with no serious harm intended — in the next, they work systematically towards political goals and targeted harassment. In one instance, they act within a loose network of like-minded individuals, and, in the next, they act based on top-down orders.

Based on these findings, we discuss how the ‘troll’ metaphor has obtained a mythological oversaturation of meaning. Doing so, we put forward two main critiques of the current usage of this metaphor: First, this term adds a jovial and apolitical veneer to harmful behaviors, giving them a phantasmatic allure of otherness — something that transcends human motives and accountability — by invoking a sense of mythological agency. This added veneer can then easily be used to excuse or condone racism, misogyny, and harassment (e.g. “Relax, it’s just trolling”). Second, the term ‘trolls’ often conceals the level of organization behind transgressive behaviors, and by extension the similarities between offline and online (both contemporary and historical) forms of harm. The term frames perpetrators as individual rather than collective actors, while also obscuring the historical (and at times geopolitical) roots of online harm, including racism, misogyny, and state-backed propaganda. Taken together, the paper concludes that the term contributes with little clarity in academic research, while adding a problematic sense of more-than-human agency to social transgression online. This calls for critical reflection in the field of media and communication studies.