Trolling as speech act
P. J. Connolly · Journal of Social Philosophy · 2021
The acceptance of trolling as a feature of internet communication and the clustering together of behaviors that range from playfulness to abusive bullying under the term "trolling" has interesting moral implications.For it seems that sometimes such behavior is dismissed as "mere trolling" and consequently the trolls who perform these acts are granted a partial exemption from responsibility for the content or consequences of their speech.A result of this is that some acts which might ordinarily be considered bullying, abuse or threats when uttered outside of the internet can be dismissed as mere trolling when carried out on the internet.One popular response to this is to categorize acts of trolling based on perceived intentions or to argue that, for more virulent acts particularly, "trolling" is not an appropriate label to be applied.Although I agree that, for example, there should be no special exemption granted for racist speech on the basis that it is used in an act of trolling, I argue here that we also should not ignore the structural similarities of the range of speech acts often described as "trolling."Application of tools from the philosophy of language and consideration of an act of trolling as a complex speech act can make clear some of these similarities.Once these similarities are made clearer we can then start to understand a little more about what trolling is.I suggest that central to acts of trolling is a notion of seriousness and its interplay between the troll, their target, and any onlookers to the act of trolling.By viewing trolling in this way we can understand better the rhetorical nature of an act of trolling and why we can often end up facing what I call the trolling dilemma-that is, in many acts of trolling the directions of reply are either to respond seriously to an utterance and so be trolled, or to acknowledge it as an unserious act of trolling and so dismiss it as mere trolling.Though far from a complete account of the speech act of trolling, what I present here are the grounds for understanding trolling as a systematically divisive act.In an act of trolling the audience targeted by the troll is a mere prop to be manipulated for the entertainment of the troll and their onlookers.This in-built division between different audiences makes trolling a particularly powerful political device, Correction added on 15