User:Stephen Ewen/Scratch Pad2

An Internet troll is a person who delights in sowing discord on the Internet. Typically carried out pseudonymously, but not always, they seek to achieve their task by provoking people with biased predispositions to take up their cause to damage a person, entity, or idea with which they disagree. Carried out within a psychology of meeting their own attention-needs, often lacking from their real life, Internet trolls are a perennial problem wherever they can find an immediate Internet platform: discussion boards (forums), USENET groups, blogs, wikis, and other Internet venues that allow open access. Whether trolling is a protected free speech activity or whether it amounts to libel and defamation depends upon the nature, content, and result of the statements by the troll.

Psychology of trolls

Because of the impersonality of the Internet trolls show a psychological disWhen trolls are ignored they step up their attacks, desperately seeking the attention they crave. Their messages become more and more foul, and they post ever more of them. Alternatively, they may protest that their right to free speech is being curtailed.

Trolling and the law

Libel and defamation

When the identity of a particularly troublesome Internet troll is known, remedies are much more probable. In a case involving the AudoAdmit discussion board (forum), two women at Yale Law School filed a suit on 8 June 2007 in a U.S. District Court against several Internet trolls, charging they had made false claims about the women that prevented them achieving positions as new, top law school graduates.