Afrasianet - Zainab Barjawi - A digital troller no longer needs to make a big effort to fake an image, make news, double accounts, or generate a torrent of comments. What used to require a publicity device is made possible at the push of a button.
Hatred no longer needs a face. In ancient times, the hater would go out into the arena, sign his name, shout, threaten, and engage his body in his feud. Today, a pseudonym, an image of an animal, a cartoon hero, a small flag, and a phone lit at the end of the night, is enough. From there, from behind a cold screen, he can drag the world into a battle that no one knows who started it or who will stop it.
This is the digital troll: not just a bad person on the internet, nor a sarcastic user who comments with a heavy joke. The digital troll, in its most dangerous form, is malice and has found the perfect medium: speed without responsibility, presence without a body, speech without a signature, and aggression without direct cost. He is the secret citizen of the Digital Grudge Republic.
At first, it seemed funny. Social media opened the door to popular ridicule, to jokes, to the dismantling of official discourse and woody language. Anyone could ridicule a transcendent politician, an arrogant establishment, or a hypocritical moral discourse. Memes were, at their best, a form of laughing democracy: a single image undermining a long statement, and a clever commentary defeating heavy propaganda.
But laughter, as anyone who has meditated on its nature for a long time knows, is not entirely innocent. We don't always laugh because we're happy; sometimes we laugh because the other person stumbled, because someone's image was broken, because the prestige didn't fall.
There's something about laughter about aggression. There's a bit of schadenfreude. And in humor, sometimes, there's a hidden desire to get the other off the pulpit to which he's ascending. That's where the difference between the ridicule that liberates and the irony that pollutes begins.
The digital trolls don't want to argue. They don't enter the public space in search of truth, they look for a wound. They watch the words like a hunter watches the movement of a bait. He waits for the missing phrase, the small lapse, the mismatched image, the hesitation, the grammatical error, the vague comment. And then he reverses. His goal is not to correct, but to expose. Not to understand, but to make the speaker regret the speech.
Therefore, the digital trolls are an interactive and ineffective being. The actor produces, writes, proposes, takes risks, declares a position. The digital troll, on the other hand, waits for the action to attack him. He does not build a house, he throws a stone at the window of the house.
He does not write a book, he puts on one star and leaves. He does not go through an experiment, but he judges the experience of others. All his power is borrowed from the weakness of others, or from a moment of confusion that he succeeds in amplifying and turning into a scandal.
Deep down in this phenomenon is an old feeling called grudges.
Resentment is not a fleeting anger. Anger can be noble when faced with a clear injustice. Resentment is anger that has failed to become a reality, and it has become an internal poison.
The owner of the grudge does not just say, "I have been insulted." He says, "Someone must be responsible for my imperfect life. Someone must have stolen the place that should have been mine." Hence, the success of the other becomes a personal insult, his appearance a provocation, and his joy an assault.
In this sense, the digital trolls hate the other not only because they don't know him, but because he sees them too much. He watches them, follows them, saves their posts, goes back to their old photos, looks for their contradictions, rejoices in their fall. It's a contemporary form of jealousy: seeing without love, following without admiration, closeness without familiarity. In social networks, the "follower" can turn into a stalker at any moment. The distance between following and being stalked is no longer as great as we think.
The problem is that the platforms themselves don't stand outside of this game. Their economy is based on attention, and attention feeds on provocation. A quiet post dies quickly, an angry post turns into a storm. The algorithm doesn't ask if the words are right, fair, or responsible; it just asks: Did it provoke an interaction? Did it prompt people to respond? Did it keep them in front of the screen more?
This explains why digital trolling is no longer just an individual phenomenon, but a political tactic. In the past, propaganda was trying to persuade. Today, a lot of propaganda doesn't want to convince you as much as it wants to exhaust you. It doesn't matter if you believe the whole lie; it's enough to doubt the truth. It doesn't matter if you believe in the alternative narrative; it just says, they all lie. Then the public sphere collapses, not because people consciously chose to lie, but because they are tired of distinguishing between truth and lying.
Politics, when it learns from the digital troll, ceases to be a software conflict and becomes a provocation administration. The leader doesn't need a coherent argument; he needs a hurtful sentence that makes headlines. The party doesn't need a vision of the future; it needs an army of calculations that attacks opponents, questions journalists, and turns every debate into an indictment. When a daily scandal becomes the normal rhythm of public life, the scandal loses its meaning. Everything becomes shocking, and therefore nothing is shocking.
The most dangerous thing is that the digital trolls don't just distort people; they distort the language itself. It turns a debate into a trial, a disagreement into treason, a mistake into a crime, an apology into evidence of guilt. In the world of digital trolls, no one learns, because every retreat reads like weakness. No one explains, because explanation is used against them. No one makes mistakes as human beings, but as an enemy to be overthrown. This is how language loses its first function: To be a bridge between minds, and to turn into an ambush.
With artificial intelligence, the phenomenon is entering a new phase. The digital trolls no longer need to make a big effort to fake an image, make news, double accounts, or generate a torrent of comments. What used to require a propaganda device is made possible at the push of a button. If the old digital trolls are stabbing the truth with a small knife, the new digital trolls can drown it in a sea of dubious copy. Is this picture correct? Rather: Does the image have any meaning as evidence?
But confronting the digital trolls is not to become like him. His worst victory is to impose his language on us, to make us respond with insult to insult, to slander to slander, and to grudge against grudge. He doesn't necessarily want to defeat us in argument, but to drag us into his psyche: the zone of yelling, convulsion, immediate response, and the desire to hurt. When we do that, he wins even if he loses the debate.
The solution is not absolute silence, because silence sometimes allows the poison to spread. Not blind censorship, because it can become a tool to stifle legitimate criticism and ridicule. The first solution is ethical before it is technical: to reconsider responsibility in speech. To remember that the screen does not cancel out the effect of the word, that a pseudonym does not absolve its owner of meaning, and that the person we are attacking is not just a profile picture.
The second solution is educational and political: to learn how to distinguish between criticism and disparage, between ridicule and contempt, between accountability and defamation, between just anger and hatred disguised as justice. The public space does not live from consensus, but from difference. But it dies when every difference turns into a desire to cancel.
Networks promised us to make the world a cosmic village. But they revealed, on a dark side, that the village can also be a great gossip arena, and that proximity doesn't necessarily produce sympathy, but it can produce surveillance and envy and scandal. And yet, it's still possible to regain some meaning. To laugh without being crushed. To disagree without being chased. To criticize without canceling. To use the speed of the digital world without surrendering our lives to its moral lightness.
The digital trolls are a child of their time, but they are not our destiny. It just reminds us that technology doesn't create morality on its own. It amplifies what is in us: our intelligence and stupidity, our courage and cowardice, our cynicism and our anger. Unless we learn how to love ourselves in a less satisfying way, we will continue to hate others under pseudonyms, thinking that we are commenting on a post, when in fact we are writing a biography of our grudge.
* Lebanese Journalist
