Video: ‘If you can’t convince them, confuse them’, Or, 101 ways to train a social media troll

Twitter is a battlefield with the objective of taking no prisoners, which is no longer as a surprise to its regular users, thanks to vicious trolling and the deliberate use of sarcastic or inflammatory comments. Whether you like it or not, there are times when they make you wonder why you went online at the first place.

“That is our motto,” reveals “Manu Kapoor”, founder of the “Troll Training Center” (video below) which claims, tongue firmly in cheek, to be a “a breeding ground for India’s booming online trolls”.

 
“A person who cannot understand a raita of swearing and accusation, won’t be able to clean it either!”

The video, made by Vipra Dialogues calls out cyber-bullying with black humour. “I know that to argue is our birthright and every argument needs a comeback and we provide them. But tell me who wins the argument? Not the one who is logical, it is the one gets blocked first,” remarks Kapoor, who says the secret to building a successful troll business is to channel employees’ frustrations.

One of them, named “Chandan Patel”, for instance, flaunts how he has received “certificate of nuisance” six times and feels that his sexist and hateful messages don’t really do any harm.

With images of academician Romila Thapar, writer and activist Arundhati Roy, and journalist Ravish Kumar crossed out in the background, the army of trolls is seen them brainstorming absurd reasons to attack political criticism on social media.

Although the video doesn’t get into political specificities, it eerily resembles the description of using trolling as a form of strategy in Swati Chaturvedi’s recently released book I Am A Troll: Inside The Secret World Of The BJP’s Digital Army.

A lot of questions have been asked about the psychology of trolling. The video below doesn’t offers some insights beyond the “just for fun” answer.