Anonymous internet trolls

The worst people on earth right now are surely the radical Islamic terrorists in ISIS. They are evil people who murder children and prefer decapitating their innocent victims or burning them alive over shooting them in the head.

However, in my humble personal opinion, anonymous internet trolls come in a reasonably close second.

In case you don’t already know what an internet troll is, the definition describes a person who viciously attacks another human being with hateful rhetoric solely for the purpose of upsetting the victim and/or starting an argument.

Most of the time, the troll won’t even know the victim personally — he or she will merely dislike the way the victim looks, or disagrees with something the victim said. Simply pick a target, set phasers to incinerate, and start blasting away.

Trolls are so miserable in their own personal life that the only way they can feel better about themselves is by making another person feel bad. They take perverse pleasure from creating misery for another human being while cowardly hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.

Sometimes troll attacks targeting a specific person may go on for years, with the victim unable to use the legal system to intervene because the troll has hidden his or her true identity.

Many internet service providers have refused to reveal the real name and address of the troll to his or her victims until forced to do so by court order.

I have had some personal experience with internet trolls.

A few years ago I published articles under the title of the Atlanta Creationism Examiner after my very first book, titled Divine Evolution, was published. I saw the position as an opportunity as a chance to get paid to write articles that promoted my book. 

I anticipated that writing about creationism and evolution theory would inspire a certain amount of criticism, but I seriously underestimated the vitriolic and often hateful sentiments behind it. Naturally, some of the most vicious personal insults one can imagine were routinely thrown my way by people using colorful pseudonyms such as “Blackout”, or “Karate Monkey.”

I was called a liar, uneducated, idiot, moron, liar, imbecile, ignorant, ignoramus, dolt, liar, and narcissist by my anonymous critics — and those were some of the nicer things that were said about me. Quickly my skin grew thicker than an elephant’s hide, and I soon learned to let the insults roll off me, like water off a duck’s back.

Then interestingly enough, after the Examiner.com changed their policies on comments so that Facebook accounts traceable to real people were required for comments to be posted, the volume of nasty personal attacks decreased dramatically, and the most egregious were no longer posted. Threatened by the light of exposure, most of the vermin crawled back under the rocks from which they came.

Unfortunately, internet trolls learned to create multiple fake profiles so when one account is blocked by a user or banned by Facebook, the attacks may continue under another name.

Here’s a helpful tip — negative comments on any subject posted by people with no history, pictures or friends associated with their Facebook account should not be trusted. They are highly suspect, most probably troll accounts.

Recently I’ve discovered trolls trying to pass themselves off as Georgia Bulldog football fans by using some variation of the school’s logo or mascot as their profile picture.

Interestingly enough, one of these fake Facebook accounts could be traced to a man living in Alabama. While it is certainly possible, even likely that more than one fan of Georgia football lives in Alabama, but just how plausible is it that this person has never made a single post on his own Facebook page? It appears that this dummy account was created for the sole purpose of demanding that Mark Richt be fired in comments left after virtually every article published at Bulldog fan websites speculating about the future of Georgia’s coach.

Isn’t it more likely that those comments might actually be coming from an Auburn or Alabama fan impersonating a Bulldog?

In my opinion, internet trolls are truly evil people — okay, so maybe not “evil incarnate” in the case of the Richt bashers. However, most internet trolls are wicked people no redeeming qualities.

A good friend of mine endured a constant stream of vicious personal attacks from an anonymous internet troll for years — the relentless barrage of personal attacks and accusations created enough stress in my friend’s life to literally cause a heart attack.

My friend fought back. The primary media outlet the attacker frequented most often refused to reveal the true identity of the troll until forced to cooperate by court order.

It took years of effort and thousands of dollars in legal fees, but the coward has finally been unmasked.

Strangely enough, the attacks were coming from someone who does not even know my friend personally. The troll turned out to be an unpleasant lawyer who happens to live in the same small community. The neighbors all know about this guy, and nobody likes him. Nobody. He has no friends.

That case remains in litigation so I won’t say any more about it, except that no matter what the courts may decide in terms of reparations to compensate for years of unbelievable abuse, no amount of money would be enough to make suffering the sort of abuse my friend endured worthwhile. No amount of money can buy back the lost years during which the enjoyment of life was mitigated and diminished by the unwarranted abuse.

My friend and I are hardly alone with our tales of woe involving anonymous internet trolls, and we are both adults. Our personal tales of woe actually pale in comparison to the worst of the worst examples of abuse by an internet troll.

According to psychologists, internet trolls are psychopaths and sadists.

In one horrible example, trolls terrorized one teenager until she committed suicide and then taunted the child’s grieving family. These are people void of compassion; humans without a soul.

In more than one instance, an adult has been discovered to be impersonating a teenager in order commit a troll attack on another teen or a child. What sort of a human being would do such a thing? Why, psychopaths and sadists, of course.

When Bill Hadley was unjustly accused of being a pedophile by a cowardly troll, he spent $35,000 in legal fees to successfully unmask his accuser, who turned out to be a county attorney that Hadley barely knew.

Internet trolls are extremely unhappy, lonely human beings very likely to die young. But they reap what they sow.

These people are lonely because no one wants to be around such a thoroughly unpleasant excuse for a human being.

Some of my atheist friends get upset when I say that I’m happy to believe that hell exists. They think the idea of eternal punishment is cruel, inhumane, and completely out of character for a loving creator God. Indeed, the problem theodicy (the theological question of why God allows suffering and death; why bad things happen to good people) often leads to atheism.

However, in my opinion, death simply isn’t good enough for some people. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao — those guys deserve to suffer more than the temporary pain of death to atone for the millions of lives they collectively extinguished.

Personally, I take some comfort in the thought that the butchers of ISIS will face judgment from my God one day, but they won’t be rewarded with 72 virgins. I am even thankful that God has plans to punish truly wicked people, and to think their victims rejoice in paradise, ignorant of their persecutor’s suffering.

And as far as I’m concerned, the worst internet trolls can burn in hell right next to Stalin and Mao.