Worth reading to the end: http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/

Most illuminating is perhaps what happens when there is an opportunity to listen to the trolls face-to-face, one-on-one.

The increasingly violent discourse is a real problem. I see many angry people online. We need to talk about it more. In schools, at home, with our friends. Internet is the fabric of modern society. How do we proceed when laws are insufficient or law enforcement is insufficiently trained?

What is this doing to our own behavior? How are we affected by seeing these things online? How are the norms for our online conversations changing? The answer is potentially pretty grim:

« Troll culture might be affecting the way nontrolls treat one another. A yet-to-be-published study by University of California, Irvine, professor Zeev Kain showed that when people were exposed to reports of good deeds on Facebook, they were 10% more likely to report doing good deeds that day. But the opposite is likely occurring as well. “One can see discourse norms shifting online, and they’re probably linked to behavior norms,” says Susan Benesch, founder of the Dangerous Speech Project and faculty associate at Harvard’s Internet and Society center. “When people think it’s increasingly O.K. to describe a group of people as subhuman or vermin, those same people are likely to think that it’s O.K. to hurt those people.” »