What was once a fringe style of provocation is now a ubiquitous weapon.
Foreign Policy
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In 2013, the U.S. comedian Sam Hyde conned his way into the speakers’ lineup of a TEDx event at Drexel University by posing as a documentary filmmaker who had shadowed female humanitarian aid workers in Mogadishu, Somalia. Appearing on stage in a red track suit and what appeared to be the breastplate of a Roman centurion Halloween costume, he proceeded not to give a presentation but to deliver a rant. His speech jumped from fictitious research projects (teaching “African villagers” to use iPads with Elon Musk) to absurdist predictions of the future (the “neo upper class” will live in giant “pleasure domes”) to jokes about pedophilia and genocide.
To an extent, Hyde’s rant—available on YouTube under the title “2070 Paradigm Shift”—could be described as a parody of a TED Talk, poking fun at the brand’s ideas fetishism, techno-optimism, and self-aggrandizing speakers, among other common criticisms. At the same time, “Paradigm Shift” is an obvious example of trolling: a hard-to-define but easy-to-identify form of provocation that originated on the fringes of the early internet. More specifically, it’s an early example of trolling going mainstream, traveling from obscure message boards to mainstream social and legacy media, conventions, comedy clubs, college campuses, political rallies, and—eventually—the White House. Guests on CNN, the New Yorker, and his own followers have referred to President Donald Trump as the country’s “troll-in-chief” on account of the public outrage he stirs up—and the pleasure he seems to derive from doing so.
Throughout its evolution, trolling has become strongly affiliated with the U.S. right. Hyde, whose sketch comedy show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim was canceled for attempting to incorporate swastikas, is a prominent figure among the far right, as are other well-known trolls, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, and Nick Fuentes. As long-time vanguards of the MAGA movement and its adjacent cultural currents, their comedic taste and rhetorical style has rubbed off on Trump in particular and, increasingly, on the Republican establishment as a whole, influencing the party’s approach to politics and arguably contributing to its recent electoral successes.
But what is trolling exactly? When and where did it originate? And how did it come to dominate—and transform—contemporary U.S. politics?
An agreed-upon definition of trolling is difficult to come by, not only because it has for some time been used as a catch-all term to describe a variety of antisocial behaviors and controversial or contrarian figures (from Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek), but also because it can at times resemble other forms of comedy (like satire or lampooning) or public harassment (like pranking or cyberbullying). Phillip Hamilton, a writer and editor at the website Know Your Meme, which tracks internet and social media trends, described trolling to me as “any action or behavior, usually online, performed with the purpose of angering, frustrating, or annoying an individual or a group of people.” Trolling is different from pranking, he explained, insofar as someone who is pranked can still appreciate the joke; someone who is trolled generally cannot. It is also different from cyberbullying because the relationship between troll and trolled need not be overtly antagonistic; many trolls try to win their target’s trust by pretending not to be trolls, so as to better manipulate them. Ultimately, Hamilton said, “The intent is to make the individual lash out and harm themselves and their livelihood for the entertainment of others.”
Trolling is also distinct from other forms of provocative communication, such as satire, performance art, or even Socratic dialogue. (The Greek philosopher, whose surgical questioning annoyed and infuriated his interlocutors , is sometimes referred to as “the original troll.”) “What distinguishes trolling is the sadism behind it,” said Jason Hannan, a professor of writing and communication at the University of Winnipeg. “We can learn from satire, parody, and irony. There’s insight and illumination in Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, and the Onion, and the point of Socratic dialogue is to rethink our most basic convictions with the aim of arriving at a higher understanding.” There is, by contrast, “no educative value to trolling, despite what some self-styled trolls may say. Is there any educative value to Trump’s name-calling or [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis sending desperate migrants to Martha’s Vineyard? These stunts, gimmicks, and antics are pure theater for the sake of winning votes, and that’s because they don’t have any rational arguments on which to stand.” (Airlifts to Massachusetts, partly intended to reveal the hypocrisy of privileged progressives’ views on immigration, backfired when the new arrivals were granted temporary housing on Cape Cod, where they had access to food, hygiene kits, legal services, and counseling.)
A bright yellow charter bus labeled "YANKEE LINE" drives off a ferry at a terminal. In the foreground, a police officer on a motorcycle leads the way, while workers in neon safety vests stand by a small booth labeled "SLIP 1."
A bus with Venezuelan migrants departs the ferry from Martha’s Vineyard to Joint Base Cape Cod in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, on Sept. 16, 2022. Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Tracing the origins of trolling can be just as tricky. David Rudrum, a senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Huddersfield, argues that the practice predates the dawn of the World Wide Web itself. In his book Trolling Before the Internet: An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics, he identifies parallels between today’s trolls and historical figures like Martin Luther, whose deliberately crass and inflammatory remarks—he frequently referred to the pope in scatological terms—contributed as much to his popularity as his theological critiques against the Catholic Church. The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer also understood the potential of trolling. “This trick,” he wrote in his sarcastic treatise The Art of Always Being Right, “consists in making your opponent angry; for when he is angry he is incapable of judging aright, and perceiving where his advantage lies.” Anticipating modern social media discourse, Schopenhauer suggested angering an opponent by “doing him repeated injustice, or practicing some kind of chicanery, and being generally insolent.”
Similarly, contemporary observers have retroactively bestowed the title of troll onto 20th century demagogues and fearmongers like the Catholic radio host Charles Coughlin; the senator who led the second Red Scare, Joseph McCarthy; and far-right French leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, all of whom used outrage, controversy, and deliberately bad-faith arguments to grow their influence. Hannan picks up echoes of present-day trolling in the vitriolic, capricious, early-career provocations of far-right political commentators Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Limbaugh “introduced childish name-calling into conservative rhetoric, calling feminists ‘feminazis’ and comparing Black leaders to slaves working on a ‘liberal plantation,’” Hannan said. Meanwhile, Coulter—who once said, “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president”—“perfected an instinct for going after hypersensitive liberals, knowing exactly where they were most likely to hurt and bleed,” Hannan said. “She would say outrageous things—racist, misogynistic, homophobic—in some sort of perverse contest with herself to test the limits of liberal tolerance.”
A triptych of two black-and-white and one color photographs. On the left, a man in a suit speaks passionately into a vintage microphone with a raised fist. In the center, a woman with blonde hair smiles and waves. On the right, a man in a suit gestures while seated at a table with microphones.
From left: Father Charles Coughlin delivers a radio speech, circa 1930s; Marine Le Pen waves while voting in parliamentary elections in Hénin-Beaumont, France, on June 30, 2024; and U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy during a hearing in Washington on May 1, 1954. Getty Images
Online trolling wasn’t always overtly political in nature. As Caleb Madison wrote in an Atlantic article titled “Trolling’s Surprising Origins in Fishing,” the practice—which first appeared on Usenet discussion boards in the early 1990s—initially served a practical, administrative purpose: to discern newcomers from veteran users. The former, he wrote, would reveal themselves by responding in earnest to intentionally garbled or irritating messages—in short, by nibbling at the proverbial bait that the veterans had set up for them.
Though not political as such, this gatekeeping function helped facilitate trolling’s shift to the alt right and, subsequently, the far right more generally. Take, for example, the case of Pepe the Frog, a now-controversial cartoon character that was not always a well-recognized hate symbol. Originally used as an apolitical reaction meme on the anonymous imageboard website 4chan and other such platforms in the late 2000s, Pepe did not acquire his present-day connotations until around 2015, as 4chan users began to associate Pepe with fringe groups like neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the then-emerging MAGA movement.
A man with a beard wearing a red baseball cap stands outdoors holding a handmade sign. The sign features a large drawing of a green cartoon frog with a sad expression and the handwritten text "GREEN LIVES MATTER."
A man in a Make America Great Again hat holds a sign with Pepe the Frog during a rally in Berkeley, California, on April 27, 2017. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
Once a means to an end, trolling eventually became an end in itself. Largely unmoderated forums like 4chan, 8chan, Something Awful, and Encyclopedia Dramatica now in part function as places where trolls can share potential targets and organize campaigns against them. The most popular targets are known as “lolcows”—people who react strongly and predictably to trolling and can thus be easily and reliably “milked” for laughs. Ways of generating those laughs range from flooding email addresses with spam messages to doxing (publishing personally identifying or otherwise sensitive information without consent) and “swatting” (making a false report to emergency services, prompting paramedics, police, or SWAT teams to show up on someone’s doorstep).
Mainstream media coverage that scandalizes trolling has only added fuel to the fire, motivating trolls to surpass one another by inflicting ever greater harm onto their victims. “Rage-baiting” (provoking angry responses) has evolved into “suicide-baiting.” Though rare, this practice has occasionally achieved its goal, with three suicides linked to trolling website Kiwi Farms.
Trolling campaigns vary in length and intensity. Some last days or weeks, but others (depending on both the persistence of the trolls and the receptiveness of the lolcows) have continued for months, years, or even decades. The online forum CWCki—later renamed Kiwi Farms—was created in 2013 to promote and document the still-ongoing emotional, financial, and sexual exploitation of a single individual from Virginia known online as Chris-Chan. Often referred to as the “most documented person on the internet,” Chris-Chan has been doxed, hacked, and tricked into posting adult content on the internet, among many other things.
Not all political trolls are right-wing, of course. The artist-activist duo Yes Men and actor-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen—whose show Who Is America? on Showtime centered largely on MAGA—can arguably be described as left-wing trolls. The same can be said about the creators of the animated sitcom South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who ironically issued a public apology to the White House for creating an AI-generated video that shows a naked Trump crawling through a desert. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, took to trolling the president in the wake of the June 2025 Los Angeles protests, sharing memes mocking his Republican opponents and launching a “The Patriot Shop” selling MAGA-inspired merchandise, including signed copies of the Bible.
A triptych of three images. On the left, two men pose in full-body spandex suits, one camouflage and one gold. In the middle, a cartoon parody shows two political figures in white suits. On the right, a man in an elaborate white military uniform and sunglasses holds a gold urn between two women in olive-drab uniforms.
From left: Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 20, 2001; a depiction of U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance on an episode of South Park; and Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed as his character “Admiral General Aladeen,” at the Academy Awards in Hollywood on Feb. 26, 2012.Getty Images
Still, left- and right-wing trolling differ in important ways. Right-wing political trolling bears a much closer resemblance to its online, apolitical counterpart. While Who is America? and South Park mock ultraconservative ideology as a form of criticism, right-wing trolling is usually devoid of intellectual criticism. Its only objective is to provoke, enrage, and “trigger” the trolled. Meanwhile, a study analyzing tweets directed at U.S. political candidates between 2016 and 2020 found that Democrats “were provoked more often than they were insulted.” At the same time, the study also noted “trolling asymmetry with significantly more trolling comments toward Republicans than toward Democrats.”
When and how right-wing trolling first began exhibiting these characteristics is up for debate. Amanda Marcotte, a politics reporter at Salon and author of the 2018 book Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-f*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself, points to Gamergate, a harassment campaign targeting feminist video game critics and developers that started in 2014. According to Marcotte, this campaign—whose victims were hacked, doxed, swatted, sexually abused with “revenge porn,” and inundated with rape and death threats—marked a moment when the heteronormative, patriarchal, white-supremacist ideology of hard-line conservatives fell in line with the misogynistic sensibilities of young, white, male internet users who are thought to make up the vast majority of online trolls. “Obama was in the White House,” Marcotte told me, “and college-educated women were starting to earn as much as their male counterparts, at least in urban areas. There was a growing fear among men that their longstanding privileges were eroding, and that resentment—of feeling left out or displaced—manifested through Gamergate.”
Hannan describes Gamergate as the point when alt right figures such as Yiannopoulos became acutely aware of trolling’s political and ideological utility, and what Hannan calls the “right-wing instinct for inflicting harm on the vulnerable” exploded onto the internet. “Mimicking the obnoxious styles of Limbaugh and Coulter,” he said, “the alt-right adopted online trolling’s longstanding sadism and took it in a reactionary direction.” For Yiannopoulos (who gained notoriety trying to speak at, and being turned away from, liberal college campuses), the aim was never to engage with students but to incite protests that he could then denounce as attacks against free speech. As Hedwig Lieback, a Ph.D. candidate in political and legal theory at Columbia, put it in a 2019 article: While Yiannopoulos and his ilk “very rarely want to be challenged on their stance or actually engage in a debate, they revel in strong opposing reactions and cast themselves as underdogs in an oppressive environment.”
The budding relationship between trolling and the extreme right formed in the wake of Gamergate reflected shifts in the U.S. political climate. Sure, trolling had always involved a degree of what one researcher refers to as “boundary maintenance,” harking back to its message board era, but this function didn’t acquire ideological significance until U.S. society had been divided to the extent that someone’s political orientation became a legitimate motive for ridicule and ostracism. As debates around issues like racism, abortion, and trans rights intensified, trolls discovered that some progressives could be easily provoked if they denied, dismissed, or disparaged the importance of these issues. Guides for triggering “libtards” began circulating across the web, while compilations of social justice warriors “getting owned” and suffering “meltdowns” generated millions of views on social media, facilitating the rise of now-ubiquitous far-right commentators like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro.
The politicization of trolling is also linked to the social, technological, and economic dynamics of social media consumption. A 2015 study of Reddit’s role in Gamergate showed how various facets of the forum’s design—from its “karma” and upvote systems to its lack of tools for removing harmful content—not only enabled but actively encouraged anti-feminist harassment. Reddit’s anti-doxing rules, while helping keep discussions in check, only applied to activity on the platform itself, with harassment spreading to other, less regulated sites. On fringe platforms, right-wing trolls spoke openly about their misogynistic and transphobic motivations, while on Reddit, they reframed their outrage as a principled stand against corruption in the video game industry. This process, repeated during 2024’s Gamergate 2.0 and other similar controversies, highlight how trolls use mainstream platforms to gain legitimacy, earn sympathy, and recruit others to their cause.
Today, social media platforms actively encourage trolling through monetization. As X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube developed into algorithm-driven economies of attention, it became clear to many that content that annoys, angers, or confuses—in other words, trolls—could dependably generate engagement and, by extension, revenue. Some of the most popular social media personalities and accounts—including Andrew Tate, Logan and Jake Paul, and Libs of TikTok—were able to generate income precisely because they adopted this strategy. Struggling legacy media companies, from broadcasters to newspapers, subsequently followed suit to a degree, tweaking their online content to optimize social media performance.
Over the years, right-wing trolling has reshaped U.S. conservatism in its own image, contributing to both polarization and radicalization. This, Lieback indicates in her article, is partly because the calm and aloof troll compares favorably to their outraged interlocutor. In contrast to the seemingly unhinged progressive and cringe-worthy social justice warrior, the conservative troll assumes the more sympathetic role of underdog, nonconformist, truth-teller, and adult in the room. This exaggerated, misleading juxtaposition between the two sides of the political spectrum reinforces the now widespread belief among many right-wingers that the left has been brainwashed by woke, so-called cultural Marxist ideology while they—having taken the “red pill” and woken up from “the matrix”—serve as the uncorrupted defenders of freedom of speech and thought.
A high-angle shot in a crowded indoor arena. A man in a dark blue suit and red tie stands with his arms wide open, approaching another man in a black shirt. Security personnel and people with cameras surround them in the background.
Joe Rogan greets Trump during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden in New York on Nov. 16, 2024. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images
“The rebels are Republicans now,” Joe Rogan (whose hugely influential podcast has hosted a variety of far-right figures, from Tate and Musk to Alex Jones) said in a three-hour conversation with Trump released shortly before the 2024 presidential election. “You want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to buck the system? You’re a conservative now.”
In addition to polarizing U.S. politics, right-wing trolls have radicalized voters by gradually shifting the Overton window, a sociological concept that refers to the range of topics, ideas, and opinions that a society’s general population considers politically acceptable. Whether it’s Hyde dressing up as a police officer and using racist epithets for a sketch or the president’s campaign team selling “Trump 2028” merchandise on its website, trolling’s trademark use of irony and ambiguity offers enough plausible deniability for someone to say whatever they want without fear of serious repercussions. “You can get away with a lot more if you frame it as humor, even if the humor’s not particularly funny,” Marcotte said. “Instead, the strategic value lies in something I like to call Schrödinger’s intent: Are they joking, or are they serious? They’re not joking if they get what they want; in that case, they were serious. But if they lose, they get to say, ‘It was just a joke.’” Through trolling, the unacceptable not only becomes acceptable, but normalized to the point of banality.
Trolling has helped transmit right-wing ideology across the political boundaries of today’s fragmented media landscape. At a glance, Hyde’s sketches—from “Paradigm Shift” to his canceled Cartoon Network show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace—are as stylistically absurd and thematically incoherent as the largely apolitical The Eric Andre Show. However, upon closer inspection, what appears random to the point of neutrality turns out to communicate a consistent message, albeit a concealed one. Beyond parodying TED Talks, “Paradigm Shift” lampoons a variety of distinctively liberal talking points, including trust in scientific expertise and concern for climate change, environmental protection, and social injustice. World Peace, for its part, used irony and comedy as excuses to promote conspiracy theories and make overtly racist, misogynistic, and transphobic statements. Does a sketch in which Hyde appears in blackface and talks in street slang make fun of racists or of Black people? Because author intent is obscured, audiences can interpret the content in any way they see fit. As a result, shows like World Peace and Fishtank—Hyde’s version of Big Brother, which ups the psychological torture while removing safety procedures—function as the entertainment equivalent of a Trojan horse, delivering ultra-conservative ideology under the guise of harmless laughter.
“Many of the young men who first got pulled to the right by trolling started off with loosely held, maybe even somewhat liberal views,” Marcotte said, “and kind of inherited a worldview they hadn’t really interrogated. A lot of the people who started off as quasi-liberal internet trolls ended up storming the Capitol on January 6. They radicalized themselves through jokes. And I wonder how many thought it was still a joke right up until they were cracking cops’ skulls.”
The true power of trolling is best illustrated by Trump, whose status as troll-in-chief rests not only on his vulgarity, sadism, and political outsider status, but also on his lack of a coherent set of beliefs and values. Described by psychologist Dan P. McAdams as an “episodic man” whose actions are based on momentary whims as opposed to deeply rooted convictions, his statesmanship is constant only in its unpredictability and propensity to shock, confuse, enrage, and troll. Following Trump’s fancy, the Republican Party and its followers are no longer defined first and foremost by what they want, but what—and who—they dislike and oppose. Just as fans of Hyde and Yiannopoulos cheered when they were kicked off networks or campuses, so do Trump’s supporters measure his worth not in terms of what he actually accomplishes for them, but how much he manages to frustrate the people they dislike.
