What Positive Trolls®️ Doing?

Disinfo decoding.

What's Positive Trolling doing?

After eighty million readers, three-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand “Likes,” and one-hundred-and-ten-thousand “Retweets” @DecodingTrolls has been modelling Positive Trolling® since June 2021.

@DecodingTrolls we conceive of trolling as:

"ANY emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind."

So advertising, courting, intriguing, curiosity stirring,... all are encompassed into our understanding of trolling.

To assess if a troll or meme is Positive, Neutral or Negative trolling, we run it through an algorithm.

See @DecodingTrolls profile page Twitter or Mastodon for the Six Principles, Tests or Rules of Positive Trolling®.

If a troll passes each of these six tests, then, it's Positive Trolling®

If not, then, the meme or troll you're judging may be Neutral or Negative.

That's the essence of the practice of Positive Trolling®.

Trump or Putin are masters of disturbing others' emotions.

As I've written elsewhere, they operate almost wholly in the magical (as distinct from the juridical) dimension of governance: https://lnkd.in/eaDH-6mt

They're almost always Negative Trolling - they lie a lot, and so fail especially the second limb in the six tests - ethical discipline.

Liz Cheney, President Zelenskyy and Joe Biden, generally speaking, would be Positive Trolls®, even if I might not deem as positive a policy they were espousing.

Etymologically: I traced the signs (Trolls and Trolling) and their cognates back through the signifier "trolling" (as in fishing) and folklore/mythology as far as Sanskrit.

These cognate signifiers and signifieds across Indo-European culture going back at least to 1800BCE (around the time of the earliest Indo-European texts that we have) clustered around the idea of Movement; the active principle.

My starting point was trying to work out of what the similarities between Trump's magical brilliance at provoking others' emotions and the impact of artillery fire between two warring sides in eastern Ukraine consisted.

I spent three years as a diplomat running negotiations for local ceasefires between Russian occupiers of Eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian armed forces.

I had a lot of practice contemplating the potential to move emotions which artillery duels between two warring sides have.

That's how I came up with the idea, which I spent two years researching before launching @DecodingTrolls on Twitter in June 2021.

Positive Trolling® and Positive Trolls® are registered trademarks.