Chatting with the Trolls: Exploring Some of the Reasons behind the Leslie Jones' Cyberbullying (Part I)

*** WARNING: THIS CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE ***

Like most people I was utterly disgusted by the cyberbullying on Twitter directed at Leslie Jones, so much so that I felt I had to do something about it, so for several days I monitored all tweets to Leslie Jones, and reported all of the abusive ones.

After a few days I concluded that reporting the bullies wasn't enough, I wanted to find out what was going on in their minds when they sent their abusive tweets, so I decided to have a chat with them. Here's what I did, I created a new generic twitter account, and every time a new abusive tweet was send to Leslie Jones, I'd report it to twitter, and then ask them why they were doing it; the answers were varied and surprising. I chatted to at least 250 trolls and below are some of the most striking.

I selected a fairly neutral logo for my twitter account:

SOME OF THEM THINK THEY ARE PARTICIPATING IN A MEME
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SOME OF THEM THINK THAT LESLIE JONES HAS TOO MUCH INFLUENCE OVER JACK DORSEY, CEO OF TWITTER
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SOME OF THEM THINK THAT LESLIE (OR TWITTER) ARE IN ISIS
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SOME OF THEM ARE JUST JERKS
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SOME OF THEM ARE A BIT SADISTIC

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SOME OF THEM FEEL THEY ARE JUSTIFIED BECAUSE LESLIE RESPONDS TO TROLLS, AND THINK SHE IS TROLLING BACK

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SOME OF THEM FEEL JUSTIFIED BECAUSE THEY THINK HER RESPONSES TO HER TROLLS MAKE HER A TROLL AND THEREFORE A HYPOCRITE
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SOME OF THEM KNOW THAT THEY ARE HATERS

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SOME OF THEM THINK THAT BULLYING LESLIE IS A WAY OF EXPOSING TWITTER'S LEFT-WING AGENDA

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SOME OF THEM DON'T KNOW WHY THEY ARE DOING IT

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MORE IN PART 2