[digi_owl]

I can't shake the feeling that the media attention to Anonymous is what has given us this upsurge of "trolling" in recent years.

Meaning that people employ variations of Anon tactics, as reported by the media, against people and groups for the flimsiest of reasons.

[fl0wenol]

It used to be hard to discredit someone or their ideas; you had to have resources to make an idea seem grass roots or fund agent provacteurs.

Now we have trolling, sock puppetry, link echo chambers, and other mechanisms that attack our tendencies of contributing in social networks that make it easy for even a single individual with nothing but disdain and time to derail or discredit if sufficiently motivated.

It isn't Anonymous, but the penetration of internet and social network into everyday life that makes these tactics more effective than ever, and so anyone with a spare five minutes and a chip on their shoulder can froth the waters; they don't have to be living in their mothers' basement and have a file called "my_hidden_agenda.txt" on their Desktop.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Trolling and sock puppet accounts etc were already popular on Usenet in the mid 90s.

Someone who knows more history than I do can probably take them a lot further back to (e.g.) public pamphlet debates in the 17th century. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Roman and Greek equivalents.

Anonymous independent-action-under-a-common-pseudonym has a long history in politics. The Angry Brigade and King Mob are two recent pre-Internet examples - from the UK in the 60s/70s.

Historically, Internet trolling is a lot more civilised than some of the things that used to go in previous centuries. Trolls may be rude to you on Twitter, and they may even dox you and cyber-stalk you. But unpopular people don't often have to face a lynch mob or a riot outside their front door.

[phaus]

That makes sense. Anonymous started as trolls. In the beginning, it was for the lulz. There was actually a good amount of infighting when they started becoming interested in social activism. This infighting persisted up until at least 2013.

[tripzilch]

> this upsurge of "trolling" in recent years.

Why would you say there has been an upsurge in trolling recently?

I'm not disagreeing per se, but the amount (and type) of trolling you see on your daily web browse is one of those things that heavily depends on the particular filter bubble you live in.

If you were to ask me, personally I observe way less trolling than back in the day, but I wouldn't call that a general trend cause I know it's just the part of the web I see.

There's one thing maybe (but again it might just be a function of the things I like to look at), is that a whole bunch of different trolling techniques that would have been considered "creative" or "highly original", most of them related to culture-jamming/subversion (in a very broad sense), memetics, or absurdism/surrealism, are not quite as "special" any more and routinely employed by (young) people for fun on media like Tumblr, etc.