Trolling is slowly becoming popular on social media, or maybe it already is.
Then there are the satire blogs, which always get people riled up and angry. Satire blogs usually stick to something that actually sounds believable. Not all posts sound true, but there's always that one that make people share it. For instance there was this one site last year that wrote a blog post about Bow Wow, also known as Shad Moss, being fired from 106 & Park. Of course the show was cancelled a couple of months later, but this blog post had no truth to it. However, people of people's hatred toward Shad Moss, the blog received thousands of shares on twitter and Facebook.
While these forms of getting attention on social media work, that is not stopping people from creating fake profiles just to irritate the masses. The term for what these people do is called trolling.
These profiles are usually obviously fake. On twitter the easiest ways to recognize them are through their profile pics that are still eggs or sometimes they put up a random picture that is definitely not them. Then they hop in others people mentions just to disagree or call them names. A bunch of those kind hopped in my mentions once because I said something about Lil Kim.
On Facebook their tactic is to again create a weird profile. One example is this fake KKK spammer in one of the groups I'm a part of. The person gets on just to say crazy amounts of racially driven nonsense. Everyone knows that the person is not a real KKK because he (or she) spelled it out and spelled it wrong in a post.
Another example of trolling is this Instagram profile person that claimed he was the murder of an up-and-coming rapper that was killed this past weekend. While there was nothing funny about the confession, it caused people to pay attention to that person. It also caused them to report what they were seeing to police and several blogs to write about it. Whoever is over that account is not the killer, but the person got what they wanted. That is attention.
There is art in writing about the lives of others and fiction is also a powerful form of art. However, is there art in trolling the masses? There surely is attention there.