Please Don’t Feed The Trolls

Satyajeet Marar is a nutella conneisseur and law/arts student at Macquarie University

Satyajeet Marar explains why feeding the trolls isn’t such a good idea.

So, there is a dude who plans on holding a ‘neomasculinist” gathering at Hyde park. The same dude who has written articles saying that rape on private property should be legalised and that women are meant to follow the orders of men. I won’t mention his name or alias for reasons that will become clear as you read more of this article.

Let’s consider what actually happened here.

Until yesterday when the story broke, you had probably never heard of this person before. You wouldn’t know his face from a bar of soap with hairs stuck to it. He could’ve been just some other blogger writing random articles no one or few people read.

Anyone can go online and write an inflammatory article that would upset a large group of people. It’s quite easy, I often manage to write things that piss off people without even trying. In his case, the formula was simple. Find a highly touchy topic with 99% of the human race on one side of the fence and write a seemingly sincere defense of the morally indefensible other side. Do it in a way that at least attempts to sound like an attempt at a serious argument.

Step #2, sit back and watch the fireworks. Love and admiration are great, but they don’t generate hits. Hate on the other hand, works wonders. How else do you explain how an article more than a year old has gained international attention?

This guy doesn’t seem like an idiot – malicious sexist perhaps. But idiot? nope. He’d be a fool to think that he could make a public announcement about a meeting at a public place given all the heat on him. He insists that he’ll be Sydney in a few days, yet Peter Dutton clarifies that he has made no attempt to apply for a visa. What gives? Something smells strongly of shenanigans.

Because the people feeding this guy’s machine and helping him attract followers aren’t the dudes in fedoras with an ax to grind with women. They are actually the feminists, male allies, newspaper journalists and anyone else who has, with perfectly good intentions (except for some of the journalists), made this dude a target. I’m sorry to say ladies and gents, but you’ve been royally duped and you’ve given an internet troll exactly what he wants – helping him sell more books and website views in the process to jaded, disenchanted and bitter men on the fringe of society. Men who until now, did not know this guy existed and who were predisposed to endorse his misguided, bigoted views assuming they did not already.

Making things even more complicated, are the lines being rather unsubtly toe’d by his legions of detractors. Many have quite literally come out to say that him and his followers should be banned by police force from meeting publicly or privately to socialise or discuss their views in order to protect those to whom these views are offensive i.e. society as a whole. Though the views are offensive and I don’t have much sympathy for these sycophants, this again plays into their narrative of oppressed individuals threatened with a denial of their ‘freedoms’. This not only places an even greater focus on their views, but ironically affords them a degree of legitimacy they would not have gained on their own.

One single article and an announcement about a meeting – a total cost of a few cents, are all it took to give this man international press coverage with even the Immigration minister of our country adding to the mix following demands from (ironically) the same people who want to shut him down. The public outrage machine, though perfectly justified, has given him something private companies pay millions for.

So let these dudes have their little boys club. Treat them as you would the drunken guy yelling obscenities about Zionist conspiracies outside the kebab shop. Once the trolls are no longer being fed, they will return back to their homes – under bridges and in the basements of disappointed parents.