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Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

This article outlines who and what trolls are, and what they do. It also shows some extreme examples of trolls, and how language can be abused and used as a weapon.

"One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as "god of the Internet" for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what's known as Postel's Law: "Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others." Originally intended to foster "interoperability," the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel's Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could "speak" as clearly as possible yet "listen" to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance - the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you."

An alternative, more neutral view of trolling

The consensus among sociologists and psychologists who study online behavior is that all kinds of people can become trolls-not just the unwound, the immature or the irate. The Internet's anonymity produces the "disinhibition effect," in which "the frequency of self-interested unethical behavior increases among anonymous people." Online communication causes users to feel 'distant' from the people they're speaking to, and less focused on their own identities, resulting in increased aggressive behavior.

A comprehensive analysis of the behaviors of different troll species.

Talks about the correlation between trolling and the Online Disinhibition Effect

Robert Bowers, the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue killer, had an online life like many thousands of anti-Semitic Americans. He had Twitter and Facebook accounts and was an active user of Gab, a right-wing Twitter knockoff with a hands-off approach to policing speech. The Times of Israel reported that among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and slurs, Bowers had recently posted a picture of "a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption 'Make Ovens 1488F Again,'" a white-supremacist reference. Then he made one last post, saying, "I'm going in," and allegedly went to kill 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Only then did his accounts come down, just like Cesar Sayoc's, the mail-bomb suspect. This is how it goes now. Both of these guys made nasty, violent, prejudiced posts. Yet, as reporter after reporter has noted, their online lives were-to the human eye at least-indistinguishable from the legions of other trolls who say despicable things. There is just no telling who will stay in the comments section and who will try to kill people in the real world. It was not long ago that free-speech absolutism was the order of the day in Silicon Valley. But that was before anti-Semitic attacks spiked; before the Charlottesville, Virginia, killing; before the kind of open racism that had lost purchase in American culture made its ugly resurgence. Each new incident ratchets up the pressure on technology companies to rid themselves of their trolls. But the culture they've created will not prove easy to stamp out.

Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account and cause trouble anonymously, but an emerging field of research is making it easier to track perpetrators by looking at the way they use language when they chat.

All the technology in the world can't stop you from leaving a trail behind you when you broadcast your thoughts online or via text message. We all have individual writing styles and habits that build to create a linguistic identity. Forensic linguistic experts can penetrate technological anonymity by interrogating the linguistic clues that you leave as you write. Everything from the way someone uses capitalisation or personal pronouns, to the words someone typically omits or includes, to a breakdown of average word or sentence length, can help identify the writer of even a short text like a Tweet or text message.

The grass roots are at war with astroturf . Yellow Dog Democrats become boll weevils and then Blue Dogs. Beltway bandits troll Pennsylvania Avenue in search of earmarks and extenders . Say what? Every subculture has its lingo, but few add secret code faster than the American political class.

Patrick Cox, public radio journalist, is also a lover of language and podcasting. This interesting blog compiles those two passions, featuring stories about diverse aspects of language. Some recent posts: pro-Trump Internet trolling, Arabic in America, Who Says Humor Doesn't Translate.