“There is nothing more satisfying than corrupting something beautiful and pure.”
That quote, often misattributed to Anonymous or the hacktivist ethos, captures the core drive of internet trolling. We like to think of trolls as ordinary people who lose their inhibitions behind a screen. It’s a convenient excuse. But a 2014 study in Personality and Individual Differences titled “Trolls just want to have fun” suggests this view is wrong.
Trolling isn’t just a lack of self-control. It’s a specific personality trait.
How Trolling Differs from Harassment and Flaming
The word “troll” has been hijacked by media outlets. It’s now a catch-all term for any digital rudeness.
Students insulting professors on message boards? That’s flaming. It’s an online tantrum.
Someone tweeting death threats or rape threats to public figures? That’s cyber harassment. It’s the adult version of cyberbullying.
A self-described “old guard troll” told Vice.com that threatening to rape someone on Twitter isn’t trolling. It’s just threatening to rape someone.
The distinction matters. Trolls don’t want to terrorize. They want to disrupt.
Their goal is to provoke discord. They want to derail serious discussion. They are mean-spirited jokesters looking for entertainment.
This behavior led Popular Science to disable comments on its articles in 2013. It also led a troll to convince a woman on Facebook to deflate her tires to “reset the flux capacitor,” then instruct her mechanic to install more gigawatts.
In 2011, the worst kind of troll posted “Help me mummy, it’s hot in hell” on the Facebook memorial page of a 14-year-old girl. That was Mother’s Day.
Most experts agree on one thing. Trolls crave attention. They crave a sense of importance they likely lack in real life. They are the kids blowing spitballs at the back of the class.
Why Trolling Escalates Over Time
Why do some users get worse the longer they stay in a community?
A 2015 study by Drs. Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec looked at posting styles in online discussion groups. They found that trolling behavior evolves. It’s guided by negative attention.
“When users get their posts negatively evaluated (via down-votes)… they contribute more,” Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil wrote.
The pattern is predictable. Trolls spend more time in a community. They start behaving worse. Eventually, a moderator bans them.
Does a ban change their behavior? Unlikely.
Dr. Delroy Paulhus, co-author of “Trolls just want to have fun,” says trolls tend to have a self-righteous attitude. They see themselves as morally justified.
Dr. Paul Trapnell, the study’s other co-author, explains this mindset. Many dedicated trolls view their actions as “moral purification.”
They believe they are puncturing hubris. Unmasking hypocrisy. Punishing online violators of values.
It’s not all nasty for nasty’s sake. Not in their minds.
The Role of Anonymity and Identity
Anonymity enables this nastiness. It triggers deindividuation.
This is a temporary loss of self-awareness. It releases people from social norms. It’s similar to what happens in a mob.
Many attribute trolling entirely to this disinhibiting effect. If you’re hidden, you act out.
But many find this hard to swallow. The average person doesn’t enjoy upsetting others. Not even anonymously.
The 2014 study backed up the suspicion that trolls aren’t average people.
They have specific personality traits. Traits that set them apart from the rest of the internet.
The Psychology Behind the Keyboard
Researchers Paulhus, Trapnell, and Buckels didn’t just guess who the worst offenders were. They surveyed more than 1,200 internet users to find out. The goal was to identify actual trolls by asking blunt questions. Did you agree with statements like “I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites”? Did you find satisfaction in corrupting things that are beautiful and pure? Did they list “trolling other users” as their favorite activity on comment-based sites?
The answers helped categorize them. Then the team looked at personality. Specifically, they tested for the Dark Tetrad. This is a cluster of traits scientists link directly to bullying. It includes four specific components:
- Narcissism: Pathological self-absorption.
- Psychopathy: A distinct lack of conscience and empathy.
- Machiavellianism: Willingness to harm others for self-interest.
- Sadism: Taking genuine pleasure in the pain of others.
The results were stark. Almost every troll scored significantly higher on these traits than non-trolls. Narcissism was the only outlier, showing no strong correlation. But sadism? That was the heavy hitter. The link was so robust that the authors called online trolls “prototypical everyday sadists.”
Anonymity’s Role
This doesn’t absolve the internet of its design flaws. Anonymity matters. A lot. When asked what would happen if online identities were transparent, Paulhus had a clear estimate. He believes trolling would drop by 90 percent.
So, are trolls just regular people acting out because they can hide? The data suggests otherwise. Most of what passes for trolling is not a temporary lapse in judgment. It’s sadistic behavior fueled by the shield of a pseudonym. Trapnell puts it simply. Most of it is just plain pleasure in others’ suffering.
Detecting the Dark Tetrad
If human moderation is slow and subjective, algorithms can be fast and precise. Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec built a troll-detecting algorithm with funding from Google.
The system doesn’t need weeks of history. It can identify a troll in as few as five posts. The accuracy rate sits at 80 percent. That’s high enough to flag issues early. It changes the game for community management. Instead of waiting for damage, you can spot the pattern before the comment section burns down.
Why It Matters
Understanding this distinction shifts how we fight back. If trolls are primarily driven by sadism rather than mere anonymity, then blocking them isn’t just about silencing a voice. It’s about denying a reward. The algorithm helps. It removes the ambiguity. You don’t have to debate intent. You can just act.
But the algorithm is only as good as the data it’s fed. And the data comes from people who feel safe enough to admit they enjoy causing pain. That’s a rare thing online. Most people hide. These ones admit it.
Which brings us to a tricky question. If we can detect them with 80 percent accuracy, what do we do with the other 20 percent? The false positives. The people who just have a bad day and say something sharp. Do we
