Trolls go pro

Keoni Galt explains why certain trolls are incredibly persistent these days and why they keep showing up under different names:

In the case of Vox Day, he’s certainly correct that trolls aren’t really a problem on both his Vox Popoli and Alpha Game blogs, since he is quick to identify and ban any obvious trolls that appear in his prodigious and popular comment threads.

But while the obvious trolls are easily identified as unhinged ideologues and usually true believers in the $ocial Justice Warrior cause (indoctrinated liberal progressive adherents of cultural marxism — useful idiots,) I believe the other, more insidious types of trolls, the paid shills and psy op agents are far more pervasive and common than honest to goodness “trolls.” – a.k.a. stunted individuals looking for cheap thrills by being an asshole on teh Interwebz.

These shills are trained in tactics to generate a “desirable outcome” of promoting and reinforcing an established narrative, and they are paid for by shady business fronts laundering Government agency funds in service to a covert agenda of FedGov PsyOps, all to promote and reinforce PC establishment propaganda.

In other words, their exists an entire industry of cubicle farm-desk jockeys who get paid to do nothing more than sit in a boiler room styled setup at all hours and troll teh Interwebz.

This is another reason that the moderators and I don’t hesitate to spam any commenter who exhibits any sign of being a troll-whore. How you can recognize these trolls for hire:

  1. It’s usually a new name you haven’t seen before, and often using a nomenclature that doesn’t quite fit the blog regulars.
  2. They tend to be monomaniacal and only comment on certain specific topics. Lately, those are a) immigration and b) Trump.
  3. Their comments are pure rhetoric and are either triumphal or defeatist in tone.
  4. They don’t pay any attention to dialectical responses, no matter how effectively their statements and arguments are addressed. They NEVER admit that they are wrong, even when it is clearly demonstrated.
  5. Unlike regular trolls, they don’t get upset when they are spammed and banned. They just quietly disappear, then return under a different name spouting very similar statements.
  6. They post similar, or even identical, comments on other right-wing sites such as Steve Sailer’s site or the Unz Review.
  7. They frequently have a written tic or some other tell that renders them readily recognizable.

How should you respond to them? By ignoring them. You are not helping when you engage with them, particularly when you attack them. That is exactly what they are seeking, to provoke some kind of reaction, any kind of reaction. Derailing the discourse is one of their top priorities, along with discrediting the primary blogger(s).

Just leave it to the moderators and I to handle them. We have various means at our disposal, from autovanishing comments with flagged words to spamming to simply deleting them as soon as they are posted. We’ve been doing this for a long time, most of the moderators are experienced and highly skilled in textual analysis, and it’s easy for us to keep these troll-whores under tight control as long as the regular commenters don’t fall for the bait and get in the way.