Bully in Your Pocket (eBook)

Chapter 1

Anatomy of a Troll

“A fool’s lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating.”

- Proverbs 18:6

Let’s start with the first question. What is a troll? As my branding mentor once told me, the simple message always wins. In this case, defining a troll is no different. Urban Dictionary has a pretty good definition, which is:

“Someone who deliberately pisses people off online to get a reaction.”

The Lorenzo definition is even simpler.

“A troll is an online bully.”

It is plain and simple. Throughout this book, you will see me use the words “troll” and “bully” interchangeably.

They can be the customer who flames a restaurant in their Yelp review, making it personal and not constructive. The celebrity who uses Twitter to cancel a person or company. Even journalists and news outlets can be trolls. For most of us reading this book, it will show up as a friend, acquaintance, or family member who loves to comment on your posts just to get a reaction from you and everyone else who is watching.

Then there is the person who is almost a troll. They are not one yet, but they are in the middle of a transformation. I see this often with new users who have avoided the internet and finally join by creating an account on one of the platforms, like Facebook. As the normal human desire to be seen and heard gets stronger, they also get more aggressive with their post. They don’t really want conflict, but posting something controversial seems the only way to get people to interact with them.

These people are going through a transformation online. They are like caterpillars; their metamorphosis will not turn them into a beautiful butterfly but rather a fire-breathing troll. I add them to this list because there is still hope for them. And I hope this book will encourage them to reverse their course and take a different path in their online behavior.

The final type of troll I will discuss is the one you will see the most in this book — the person or persons who design and launch a coordinated campaign against a person, group, or organization.

These are the people who peddle hate in bulk. They are the terrorists of the internet and are as sinister as a drug cartel or the Mafia.

This form of trolling is the most toxic because it is carried out with a predetermined goal of destroying the person or thing on the other end. They offer no quarter to their victims. They seek complete destruction whether it is emotional, financial, reputational, or physical.

In a time before the internet, we would have called these people bullies. However, the old label of bully is not strong enough for this new behavior. The bullies of old would harass you, make fun of you, and even, in extreme cases, maybe beat you up. But in the old-world, black eyes heal. In the new world, many of these wounds do not go away. In this new world, marriages are destroyed, careers ruined, and even suicide or death. On top of that, there is now a digital record of the entire ordeal which will live forever in some computer database on the internet.

But I don’t need to convince anyone reading this book that we have a problem. The hard part is knowing how we defend ourselves against this new threat. I am here to confidently tell you that trolling is something you can overcome and defend yourself against.

Step one is understanding the mind of a troll and accepting certain parts of their personality that you cannot and will not change. Once you understand how they think, you will be ready to face them with more realistic expectations and, more importantly, the upper hand.

Keyboard Killers

Keyboard crusaders, keyboard cowboys, and keyboard warriors are the most popular names they have been called. You may think my rebranding them to Keyboard Killers is a tad dramatic, but I do this with great intention. The original trolls of yesteryear may have been a more passive version of the ones today, but the trolls who roam the streets of the internet today are not.

The reason I have renamed them is to put forth a simple and important idea. In today’s online world, the modern-day troll has one desire — to hurt you. And over the last ten years, the world has watched as they have stacked up a body count so massive it should make everyone concerned.

Behind the keyboard, everyone feels like they are 6 foot 3, 250 lbs, bullet proof, fighting for the UFC. They are the people who post stuff so mean and so vicious you sit back and say, “Wow, I can’t believe they just said that.” But to truly understand them, we must understand their history. And like everything else in life, I had to learn about them the hard way, by trial and error.

When I was 20 years old, I was hired by a managed hosting company called Rackspace. What is managed hosting, you may ask? It took me 20 years to explain to my friends and family, but let me say that it’s sort of the plumbing of the internet. We would host computers (called servers), and businesses would put their websites on them.

I first started working at Rackspace in August of 2001. Back then, I didn’t really understand the internet other than the fact it was a big deal, it was used to send email, and that Napster had punched all of the record companies in the face for making us pay $20 for a CD that cost $2 to make and had only one song that we wanted. So, I was down with this kind of technology that lets us stick it to the man.

Back when Rackspace was first founded in 1998, its primary service offering for hosting was Linux servers. For those of you who are not tech geeks, just know back then, most websites sat on a computer somewhere with one of two operating systems: Microsoft Windows Server or Linux Redhat. Linux is an open-source operating system, which means it is free for anyone to download, and because it was free, it was the most popular one on the internet.

But even if you don’t understand any of that, all you need to know is this. Even though Linux was free, it was very difficult to learn. That meant the Linux customers who paid us to host their websites were the geeks of all geeks. They were power geeks, and I would say they laid the foundation for the modern-day internet. Their websites, applications and code are what expanded the universe of the internet. So, in short, they were smart, prickly, and they did not suffer fools. Especially little 20-year-old account managers who were still developing their technology skills like me.

I was dealing with a group of people who were used to everyone around them not understanding what they did for a living. And because of this, they felt extra safe to do and say whatever they wanted. For me, this was the birthplace of the keyboard crusaders. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was interacting with a new species of internet user which was evolving and adapting as the internet expanded.

I would also submit to you that it was from within this group of power geeks that the internet ancestors of trolls were born.

The Christian Dating Website

My first direct run-in with a keyboard killer came from one of my customers at Rackspace. The website we were hosting was The Christian Dating Website, and the primary contact I interacted with was a guy named Kevin. I came in one Monday morning, and my entire support team was abuzz over something that had happened overnight.

I logged into our system and opened up my email. As my email loaded, I realized something crazy had happened because I had dozens of automated emails from our customer support and data center teams about one of my customers. I looked up their account to see which customer, and low and behold, it was The Christian Dating Website. I read through all the emails, but all I could determine was that their website had stopped working sometime during the night. Our team had got it back up several hours later.

It didn’t explain why there was such a stir, though. Websites went down all the time. Although it’s not a good thing, it had never gotten everyone riled up like this. I decided to get to the bottom of it. I walked over to my mentor, Omar’s, cubicle. Omar was wise, smart, and always got to the office really early so he could chat with the overnight engineers. I knew Omar would give me the scoop.

“Omar, what’s going on with Christian Dating?”

“You didn’t hear?” Omar said, laughing.

“No, what happened?”

“So apparently, the Christian Dating website went down around midnight, and no one caught it for a couple of hours. Then their primary contact, Kevin, called in screaming at everyone.”

He said, “I’m losing thousands of dollars every minute, and if you don’t get my site up asap, I’m going to come down there, and I’m going to KILL YOU!!”

“What?! No way. He did not say he was going to kill them. “

“Yeah, dude, he literally said he was going to kill the 3rd shift guys if they didn’t get his site back up.”

I laughed. I couldn’t believe how absurd this story was.

“I guess he wasn’t wearing his ‘What Would Jesus Do’ bracelet.”

I walked back to my desk. My stomach turned as I realized I needed to call Kevin and follow up with him to make sure everything was...