Directed Trolling

In the context of discussions, the term "trolling" or "troll" traditionally refers to people who have no actual interest in the discussion or in the topic of the discussion: instead, they simply aim to annoy people or to hurt their feelings or even to cause maximum harm, simply because it amuses them to cause such reactions. There are several ways in which such trolling can be connected to categorism.

• 1. Persons who are genuinely bigoted against a category of people can pretend to simply be trolling for the fun of it.

• 2. Persons who want to incite hatred against a certain category of people can encourage people who are already trolls to join such discussions, or encourage other people to start engaging in trolling behavior. A person who thusly encourages trolling may be genuinely bigoted against the category, or may see it as a convenient way to divert bigotry from targeting another category which they want to protect - such as inciting hatred against one gender or against one sexual minority as a misguided strategy for trying to gain respect and peace for another gender or for another sexual minority.

• 3. People who simply want to troll are likely to target people in whatever categories they can socially get away with targeting. The same person will harass women if their social environment accepts/condones/encourages misogyny, will harass men if their social environment accepts/condones/encourages misandry, will harass homosexuals if their social environment accepts/condones/encourages homophobia, will harass sadomasochists and/or fetishists if their social environment accepts/condones/encourages kinkophobia, and so on.

• 4. People who simply want to troll are likely to target people in whatever categories are likely to contain a lot of vulnerable and traumatized people who are easy to hurt.

• 5. People who simply want to troll are likely to do whatever is perceived as harmful to vulnerable people, as this gives people an incentive to stand up against the troll's bullshit. The malicious troll will verbally hold their targets hostage, being as obnoxious and exhausting and boring as possible while squeezing attention out of whoever tries to defend the targets.

When at least one of these five are in effect, the trolling becomes "Directed trolling" as an expression of categorism

(To combine the above #3, #4 & #5 with each other typically goes with a dose of gaslighting, stopping just short of outright bragging “muahaha, you can't prove that I'm being malicious on purpose – nyah nyah nyah”.)

See also Depolitization of Categorism, Energy Drain and Schrödinger's Joke.