Why do people troll???!!

[KnackeredHag]

Why oh why do people do this?! Genuinely struggling to understand why someone would post such a heart wrenching post and appeal for help just for kicks, only for it to be some sick joke. I just can not get my head around this level of psychopathic behaviour. AiBU to ask for other people to tell me why individuals troll, as an anonymous on a forum, not even as themselves?

@NerrSnerr

I remember the one from a few years ago. She pretended to be a nurse and had nurse in her username. She gave regular medical advice and insights into nursing. One day there was a post started with another username asking for advice as they were about to start nurse training and I think they were asking for logistics. They had a name change fail and it was the nurse who had been giving medical advice for months! Must have been trolling all along.

The problem with many troll threads on here, the long ones, usually cheeky fucker or people leaving their partners is they get a haggle of cheerleaders begging for updates so they continue the charade,

I am pretty sure that same poster is trolling other sites as a nurse too. They never slip quietly away.

This has implications though for people who are being honest but maybe their enquiry is a bit out of the ordinary.

I had my account deleted recently by HQ because I'd asked a question relating to some dodgy terminology my DD had used. Also told me my posting history had inconsistencies. I was genuinely asking for advice but I think they assumed I was a troll or a paedophile. I know better to be safe than sorry but people being wankers and making stuff up (or worse) ruins it for people making genuine enquiries.

I really, really don't get it. But I'm quite happy not to understand it!

I wonder if they are just bored and think it's funny, usually the story gets more and more complicated and inconsistent but they can be hard to spot. what was the 999 one? the one about the ndn who cried out for help and the police came?

I think people feel so unheard in their real lives that they feel they need to. I’d never want to be so miserable with my life or disconnected from people that I had to troll a forum. Must be an awful place to be. No real connections

The nurse who isn't a actually nurse is a concern - but I noticed when Covid first came to the UK, there were a lot of supposed medical professionals posting misinformation and dispensing misleading advice. Medical professionals have governing bodies that are very strict on use of social media (and this forum counts as SM). I also doubt that any genuine doctor, nurse or paramedic would compromise their job and breach patient confidentiality in the way that these fake medics do.

I think they pretend to be something they're not to make themselves feel important.

@MashedSpud

They desperately want attention.

Sadly they will find a besotted audience to give it to them. As befuddling as the trolls are, I can never understand the floods of responses the more obviously ridiculous ones get.

The trolls hold up a mirror to the vanity of those who need to give their opinion no matter how ridiculous, goady and contrived the “dilemma”.

@LemonTT I’m interested why you think that.

Because they think it's funny. Either they're sociopaths, or they're bored, or they're just too immature to really think about what they're doing.

One story that haunted me was that person who posted the photos of Emiliano Sala's dead body - I'm not sure how they got hold of them. I think they must have worked in the morgue or something. His dad died of a heart attack not long after and I wonder if the fact pictures of Sala's mutilated corpse were available on the internet was a trigger for it. I mean, imagine losing your child, not knowing for ages whether he's alive or dead, and then having that happen. And the Nikki Catsouras story was even worse - people kept sending her parents photos of her body. Do not google it if you're squeamish. They honestly thought it was funny and didn't care that this was a real person and her parents were real people with feelings. The internet's remoteness desensitises you. I mean, you can tell a person to kill themselves on Twitter and not worry about getting punched in the face.

The story that really got me was some parents whose child was killed at Sandy Hook. They ended up having to move house because they got death threats from people who thought it was a set up. I just couldn’t get over the thought that your child could be killed, then people not believe you and then receive death threats. It was so unbearably sad and depressing.

Doesn't help that that twat Alex Jones claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax. I mean, it was quite obviously real but you've got people claiming a genocide of approx 11 million people didn't happen, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, so there you go.

Scammers are the absolute worst. Livejournal was full of them, as is Tumblr. One woman scammed a load of people claiming she needed money for her cat's op, and Tumblr is full of people begging for cash for surgery or repairs to their cars or whatever. I know medical treatment in the US is expensive as hell, but I'm far too wary of giving money to people I don't know. On an old forum I posted on, one woman was begging for money and/or a place to stay, I forget why, and there were a lot of teens on the forum and some of them were saying they'd asked their parents if this random woman could stay with them. I think one of the lads on the forum went out with her and she had a LOT of issues. Threatened suicide and everything.

Mumsnet is full of scammers. They're here all the time. You can tell they are because they come on a thread saying they only have 38p, no money for electric or milk for the baby (there's almost always a baby). You can tell scammers as there is always a reason they can't use a food bank or other support out there. People give them money though. Nearer Christmas the 'I have only got £1.37 to buy Christmas presents' threads will start, once again with reasons why they can't do anything advised.

And then there are the kinky ones, posters keep falling for them, I have fallen for them .

The poo troll
The pee troll
The bra troll
The period troll

Some people are kinky, bored, lonely, mh. I was on a teenage thread on MN where one of the mums warned that her dc trolled mn when bored, to wind up the aunties. Then there are the aggressive ones, they are flooding the boards atm.

The ones I don't get are posters claiming they have seriously ill dc or dc dying. What is wrong with people?

@WorraLiberty

Probably boredom for some and for others perhaps some sort of extreme attention seeking disorder?

Especially the ones who start 'live threads' that run into 2 or 3 follow up threads.

It's obvious some of them are complete bullshit but you'll always get a bunch of clappers and squealers shouting "UPDATE NEEDED OP!" and hanging on every word until they're finally deleted.

It makes me wonder who's worse sometimes.

Oh how I have fallen for so many of these threads. But, I have realised that when a thread has so many ‘amazing, extraordinary, melancholy’ updates that run into new threads that they’re probably not real.

There was a thread a while ago where everyone piled on, the poster seemed to be giving live updates and it ran into pages. Then poof, it was gone.
Think I’m slow on the uptake.

I'm always really scared that people will think I'm a troll because my life has been really extreme at times. I can't understand why people make up such horrible stories or try to make people suffering feel worse.
I'm useless at spotting fakes. I even thought Sistine chapel story was genuine

I think there's also an element of fantasy too. Some trolls who make up very elaborate stories that go on for ages seem to get really caught up in the whole thing which is why they can be so convincing. They probably are bored and don't have much meaning in their lives, so make up an alternate reality which they actually start to believe.

@NerrSnerr

Mumsnet is full of scammers. They're here all the time. You can tell they are because they come on a thread saying they only have 38p, no money for electric or milk for the baby (there's almost always a baby). You can tell scammers as there is always a reason they can't use a food bank or other support out there. People give them money though. Nearer Christmas the 'I have only got £1.37 to buy Christmas presents' threads will start, once again with reasons why they can't do anything advised.

They are easy to spot though. Tyey say they have absolutely no friends, no family, no acquaintances and an excuse for every good suggestion.

Thing is, without an audience, there wouldn’t be trolls. And some of the posters on here are desperate to be rescuers and as such are first to offer their support/tell the poster how fantastic they are/shout for updates.

How many threads do we see where a poster has experienced years of abuse be that physical or emotional, within a relationship and within the first five pages she’s packed his bags and thrown him out, all to the cries of “you’re so fantastic, you’re such a strong inspirational woman, your children have the best mummy” etc etc etc.

And those giving updates in real time. There was one a few years ago who had just found out her husband was having an affair and while she was writing the husband pulled into the driveway so she went off to confront him, only to come back half an hour later to report that he’d now left and was going to live with the OW.

She had twins, of course. Never said whether they were boys or girls it was always “the twins,” and even when one fell ill it was “one of the twins was ill,” but she actually ended up having no less than five threads because posters were so desperate to help her create the story.

Which is another red flag. Multiple threads “thread two/three/four/I want to update people....”

@KnackeredHag

I agree with all the above. I just can't comprehend how someone can be so self involved/deluded/piss taking etc as to pretend they are actually in danger, with strangers investing in their well being. I'd like to say never again, however no doubt I'll get sucked in again as hate to think of anyone in a horrid situation that they need help with.

They are disconnected from people and reality, they have zero empathy, they enjoy stoking up drama, they like to be the centre of attention, they don't care about the consequences of their action but like the effect they have.

I think mostly it’s a power thing. It gives people a sense of control to wind people up.

And I bet they have no self-esteem or validation in RL, and are probably angry with the world so take it out on people they will never ever have to face. Cheap thrills.

That probably just about sums them up. I don't have much sympathy for them because they're pretty callous individuals who upset other people. One thing being unhappy in your life a whole other ballgame posting on children's memorial pages or being a GF preying on people struggling with the C19 pandemic.

Yes phil. That Alex Jones is an awful person, isn’t he. I don’t get the scammers thing. I don’t even give money to people I know let alone a stranger on the internet.

The sort of trolling that the OP describes has a name which is Munchausens by Internet. It has been around a long time and MN gets a lot of it. I used to moderate discussion boards in the early 2000s and we would notice and increase in the holidays. Internet discussion boards were still quite new and in specialist areas the moderators often knew each other and would compare notes and that helped us spot the MbI people as there would often be common threads, a pet, twins, a hospital that didn't have a cancer unit yet there they were receiving treatment.

Another form of trolling is crusading where someone goes onto a pets board and starts a fight over pet ownership, or a vegetarian board and posts provocative info about meat eating or a religion board and demands that everyone should be an atheist. MN gets a lot of that as well.

As a priest I hear a lot of tall stories. They are usually scams to get money. Sometimes they are about attention. Those are the saddest. Very, very rarely they are genuine. It helps that I can see people's body language which is absent online and the desperate mother is in fact Barry, a bored teenager.

I read some statistic somewhere that 85% of deaths reported on internet boards (i.e. such and such a user has died) are fake.

I used to moderate an Internet forum as well and we had one who trolled over the years, she would create a persona with major health problems, depression, looking for friends, and it was a board where others shared her afflictions so she made friends easily. She would then get very close to people, only by email but close enough to talk of meeting up etc etc and then out of the blue she would commit suicide.

After I banned one of her persona’s (the last one, having discovered who she was,) she kept that one alive on twitter for almost a year before killing it off.

And the worst of it is, I know who she is in RL. I don’t know her personally but I know people who do. And she stands as an advocate for disability, has a decent reputation in her own right although is known to be difficult.

I'm sure I've been sucked in by trolls but there is always the chance that the person is in genuine need of advice.

Or somebody with a similar problem could read the advice and it would help them.

It's always as well to change a few details if you are worried about being indentified in real life.