How is the "hostility gap" in the paper not just what happens when you remove physical consequences from these people and people like them? The authors appear to do some free association with status seeking and threatening others as well, and I'd wonder whether there is a clearer way to present the ideas.
Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get off on the attention.
The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments. They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er" operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been spies, prosecutors, or jail guards.
From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are trying to become something more contemptible than they already feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control, instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just can't get drawn in.
In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an expression of need.
Your comment about the removal of physical consequences reminded me of this quote from Robert E. Howard: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
Reminder that this quote does not describes real world in the slightest. You have in fact polite unarmed non violent societies and rude as hell violent societies.
Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get off on the attention.
The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments. They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er" operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been spies, prosecutors, or jail guards.
From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are trying to become something more contemptible than they already feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control, instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just can't get drawn in.
In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an expression of need.