Twitter over time has become a largely political platform where many people spread their views and opinions. With the wide variety of views comes disagreement producing vile arguments that feature what is deemed trolling. In the political sphere of twitter there is no universal agreement on what type of political tweet is considered trolling, yet many times there are those who are labeled trolls, but who is deciding this? It is a degrading thing to be considered a troll that hurts credibility and effects how seriously one is taken. Because of this, it is a serious thing to be considered a troll. When a political argument is raging in a twitter comment section there is always one side that has the majority rule over the argument, depending on if it is a conservative or liberal person’s tweet that is being replied to. In these battles there are many ways people try to get their points across and doing so shows their biases in one way or another. Depending on the majority side in the comment section they will label the minority voice in that section as a troll if their opinion is far in the opposite direction. This system at play here is frequent on twitter and it mirrors how society deals with the “minority” in different ways, by dismissing and treating certain people as less than them. Not only one side is guilty of this, there are many instances where both liberals and conservatives take part in dismissing the minority opinion as a troll by joining the mob mentality. Instead of considering all aspects of what the person may say and why they are saying it in such a shocking or eye-catching way. Shock factor in these scenarios are sometimes the only way to get the attention of people on twitter who will not consider a different side.
This paper will look at the similarities between how political twitter labels and dismisses trolls to how people tend to dismiss others in real life. There are countless political debates happening in the world right now where this can be applied to and analyzed. A big problem is that people in society are starting to listen to each other less and less, and the people that think they can label trolls adds more to that.