ext_6685 ([identity profile] author-by-night.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] orangerful 2016-08-21 05:07 pm (UTC)

Yeah, liberals can troll hard. I think it's where you go in general. For instance, because I've never really veered into "geekspaces", I didn't realize how much misogyny there was - my spaces had always been very feminist or at least female positive. So when I voiced surprise that a more "geek" oriented site had so many sexists, someone was like "well, yeah, duh." Who knew! (This was before GamerGate and twitter in general brought out a lot of the misogyny.) And my online circles are still pretty liberal, so much of the trolling I see is from fellow liberals who take things too far.

However, I don't think it's always trolling, just people overreacting. To me, trolling is more deliberate. Like if I said "well of course you think that, you watch Buffy." Even if watching Buffy has nothing to do with anything and I'm clearly just digging at you to get a reaction. And of course the really dark and twisted stuff, although in those cases I actually think "troll" is too nice a term.* Whereas some people are just argumentative and defensive. Especially online, where it's so easy to read what you want to read, or what you cynically assume the other person must "really" be saying.

*It's like when you read about bullies, then you find out the bullies tried to kill the kid's dog or something. That's not bullying anymore, that's animal abuse and possible childhood psycopathy.

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