There Were Always Trolls

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

Trolls are not just pranksters on the margins. They are in replies, DMs, comments, and email inboxes, sharpening their knives for humiliation, baiting those with whom they disagree, and blurring the line between a joke and a threat.

The Atlantic has examined trolling as an internet behavior for decades. (First, a minute for definitions: Trolling is a centuries-old term for a common fishing technique that involves slowly dragging a line through the water to lure fish into taking the bait, which The Atlantic has also written about. That word is a possible etymological ancestor of trolling in the modern parlance.) In a 2006 story about the evolution of Wikipedia, the writer and historian Marshall Poe recounted the tactics of a prominent early user known as “The Cunctator” (Latin for “procrastinator” or “delayer”), who pushed for a no-hierarchy, no-constraints version of the site. “Cunc,” as he was known, spammed pages, left inflammatory comments, and, most notably, baited the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger into a prolonged edit war. (Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, later citing its takeover by “trolls.”)

Trolling is also a rhetorical strategy, and in that sense examples of it predate the internet. In a 2016 story titled “The First Troll,” my colleague James Parker highlighted trollish echoes in the work of Thomas De Quincey, an English writer best known for his 1821 addiction memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. James noted how, early in his career, De Quincey would lavish praise on his literary idols William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but later turned on them, hurling insults about Wordsworth’s appearance and Coleridge’s own addictions; he stoked feuds with them until the end of his troubled life. “Never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer: no,” De Quincey wrote in an essay published during his trolling era. “But, if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that by possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth.”

Today’s online actors make De Quincey and “Cunc” seem like noble satirists in service of a mission. The year before the 2016 U.S. election introduced the concept of “Russian trolls” into public consciousness, Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist and a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, warned of a new information warfare, conducted not by “mere pranksters” but by organized, paid, government-backed troll farms. In The Atlantic’s November 2016 cover story, “War Goes Viral,” Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer detailed how social media contributed to global political upheaval (remember the Brexit campaign, amplified by legions of paid trolls and bots?). Trolls have lent their support to all manner of policies and ideologies, and some have even ascended to power.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” President-Elect Donald Trump, who has been called a “troll in chief,” wrote in a statement on Tuesday. Musk (an unrelenting, undeniable troll) and Ramaswamy (another public figure with troll tendencies) could influence the employment status of hundreds of thousands of government workers. The acronym of the proposed department even winks at a long-standing Musk favorite, the cryptocurrency DogeCoin, which itself started as a joke.

Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, expected to return to the White House as the deputy chief of staff for policy, is another seasoned troll. In a 2018 profile, our staff writer McKay Coppins observed that Miller “slides from authentic insight into impish goading and back again. It’s a compelling performance to watch—but after an hour and a half in his office, I realize I’m still straining to locate where the trolling ends and true belief begins.” When pressed by McKay, Miller claimed that he was not a fan of “provocation for its own sake” and said he believed in “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” Miller went on to help shape one of the cruelest policies of the first Trump administration, as Caitlin Dickerson reported in her 2022 investigation into forced family separations.

To label many of the powerful people in Trump’s orbit as trolls shouldn’t undersell the danger of their behavior. “Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable,” my colleague Megan Garber wrote last month, after Musk appeared on a show on X hosted by Tucker Carlson (troll tendencies) to make a joke about Vice President Kamala Harris not being worth the effort of assassination. “Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation,” Megan explains. “Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying?” As trolling becomes both a path to power and a part of everyday life, exhaustion can set in. Fatigue begets numbness, a tuning-out. And then the trolls will really have won.