Rae’s Rules to Remember #42: A Message to Internet Trolls

The fact that you go out of your way to start arguments with people that you don’t know is pathetic.  How can you be so bored with your life that you seek people to bully online simply for having an opinion different from your own?

Having a Twitter page that’s public doesn’t give you the right to try to attack me and denounce all of my opinions. The fact that my opinion is different from yours doesn’t mean that you’re right. Your ridiculous need to belittle people doesn’t make you powerful. It’s just sad.

There appears to be different types of trolls, so I’ll talk about all of the ones that I’ve been unfortunate enough to encounter.

First, there are the people who attack you for no good reason. These always end up being situations that can be easily avoided. Just know all of the facts before you leave an ignorant comment. Attacking me based off one simple tweet or statement is nowhere near enough information for you to actually know how I feel about an important topic. For example, I can tweet something extremely vague and within minutes get attacked. And the person who’s contradicting me doesn’t even have enough information to know my full opinion. So how can situations like this be remedied? It’s pretty simple really. If I haven’t provided the information needed for you to decide whether you agree with me or not, ask questions. The better option would be to just not say anything at all, but that would make too much sense. So we’ll stick with asking questions. Know all of the facts and know how I actually feel about the situation that we’re discussing. Get your facts straight before you try to come for someone based off of limited information. You’ll only make yourself look worse than you do if you don’t even bother to get all of the information. If you did take the time do that, it would save me the trouble of having to embarrass you and stop you from making a fool of yourself.

These people sometimes tend to fall into this next category as well. People who start calling you names when they can’t find any holes in your argument. Once they see that their attack on the topic isn’t working and they can no longer find anything to say about the topic, they attack you personally. Call you ignorant, an idiot, a slut, whore, feminazi (if you mention even one thing about equality) and sometimes much worse.

There’s also the people who write posts about you even though they’re wrong. I have had two people (so far) write posts about things that I have said all because they misinterpreted it. In both cases, we actually agreed on the topic of discussion but instead of starting a conversation they chose to passive aggressively attack me. Of course I defended myself and then what do you know – it was all a huge misunderstanding that could have been avoided in the first place. Seriously? As an adult you should be able to have a civilized conversation on the internet. It’s not hard. You should also be capable of getting all of the facts about a situation before you decide to go off and write about it.

The funny thing is. These situations typically with the person not responding to me because they realize that I was right but they don’t want to admit it.

Then there are the very worst of them all. They do all of the above and then go even further. They find every social media platform that you own to say the same things to you over and over again. But it gets worse. On top of that, if anyone else comments and agrees with you they find all of their social media and harass them over and over again as well. If you fall into this category….grow up and get a life.

For all you trolls out there, there’s something that you need to know. Quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck whether you agree with me or not. Your inability to have civilized conversations with people is a problem that I don’t give a damn about. If you think that you’re going to make me change my mind about something, you’re wasting your time. Get it through your thick skull that when your ‘almighty’ opinion contradicts facts, you’re wrong. Other people might not be able to stand up to you or speak their mind, but I am not one of them. I have no problem with calling you out and tearing you down. So when that happens, just remember that you started it, but I intend to finish it. I don’t mind people who disagree with me but if you can’t handle it, then don’t respond to anything that I say. Otherwise, I will shut you down and I won’t bother to be nice about it.

Sincerely,                                                                                                                                             Someone who doesn’t have time for your bullshit.