Monday, November 21, 2016
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Top 10 Richest People in the World 2016
There is a famous saying that hard work is the key to success although it is true but in my point of view good fortune is also very important with hard work. In this article we will tell you about top ten billionaires of world who have achieved peak of success with good fortune and hardwork, this list is according to American business magazine Forbes. It is said that billionaires control staggering portion of world economy, according to a list compiled and published by wealthx the top 50 richest people of world have total wealth of approximately $1.46 trillion.
Bill Gates an American business man, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and computer programmer has been on number 1 position on the top ten richest people list since last 3 years with a net worth of $75 billion. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg an American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist is one of the luckiest person in this year who has succeed to obtain 8th position on the list, last year he was on number 16 position he is CEO and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. If we see the list of top ten richest people in the world then we can easily see that men dominate the all tiers of this list, it doesn’t mean that there is no rich woman in the world while there are many female names in top 50 billionaires list.
We can say a person wealthy if the individual has pile of money in bank account and abundance of valuable resources like property and shares etc. Now we are going to tell you about the top ten richest people in the world according to this year.
1. Bill Gates
Bill Gates is the richest person in the world with net worth of $87.4 billion; he was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States. He is an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and computer programmer, he is son of a prominent lawyer William H. Gates, Sr. He co founded Microsoft and he served as its CEO, Chairman and chief software architect he was the largest shareholder of Microsoft until 2014. He is also a very generous person he and his wife has raised one of the most powerful charities in the world Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, most important aims of this foundations are to lift people out of poverty, eliminating HIV, Malaria and some other infectious diseases.
2. Amancio Ortega
Amancio Ortega is the second richest person in the world with the net worth of $72.3 billion; he was born on March 28, 1936 in Busdongo de Arbás, León, Spain. He is co-founder and chairman of the Inditex fashion group which is very well known for its largest brand Zara clothing and accessories retail shops, his father was a railway worker this Spanish fashion businessman also served as a delivery boy for a local shirt maker called Gala at young age of 14.
3. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett got third rank in the list of richest people in the world, this American business magnate, investor and philanthropist was born on August 30, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. He is the third richest person in the world with the net worth of $66.9 billion; he is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway Company. He is also known as “Wizard of Omaha” he is one of the most successful investors in the world.
4. Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos has third rank in the list of richest people in the world, this American technology entrepreneur and investor was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. He is the fourth richest person in the world with the net worth of $52.7 billion, he is the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Amazon.com, he is also founder and owner of a private aerospace company called Blue Origin.
5. David Koch
David Koch is the fifth richest person in the world with the net worth of $47.4 billion, this American businessman, philanthropist, political activist, and chemical engineer was born on May 3, 1940 in Wichita, Kansas, United States. In 1970 he joined his family business Koch Industries which is second largest private company in Unites States of America and he became co-owner of this company with his older brother Charles in 1983.
6. Charles Koch
Charles Koch is the sixth richest person in the world with the net worth of $46.8 billion, this American businessman, political donor and philanthropist was born on November 1, 1935 in Wichita, Kansas, Unites States. He is co-owner, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer of his family business Koch Industries, this company has approximately 100,000 employees.
7. Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison was born on August 17, 1944 in Manhattan, New York, United States; he is an American internet entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist. He is the seventh richest person in the world with the net worth of $45.3 billion, he is Co-founder and former CEO of Oracle Corporation which is second largest software maker behind Microsoft.
8. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York, United States, American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is on number 8 in the list of richest people in the world; he is chairman, chief executive, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. He was student of Harvard University when he launched facebook with his roommates and friends and this website rapidly became very popular in 2012, he is one of the young wealthiest people in the world.
9. Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg is on number 9 in the list of top ten richest people in the world, he was born on February 14, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He is the ninth richest person in the world with the net worth of $42.1 billion, is the founder, CEO, and owner of the global financial data and media company Bloomberg L.P; he also served as 108th Mayor of New York City.
10. Ingvar Kamprad
Ingvar Kamprad is last but not the least on our list he is the tenth richest person in the world with the net worth of $39.3 billion, he was born on 30 March 1926 in Pjätteryd (now part of Älmhult Municipality), Sweden. He started his career at very young age by selling goods like matches and fish to the markets, then he founded IKEA company in 1943 which is now world’s largest furniture retailer, he left the company in 2013 at the age of 87.
Bill Gates an American business man, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and computer programmer has been on number 1 position on the top ten richest people list since last 3 years with a net worth of $75 billion. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg an American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist is one of the luckiest person in this year who has succeed to obtain 8th position on the list, last year he was on number 16 position he is CEO and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. If we see the list of top ten richest people in the world then we can easily see that men dominate the all tiers of this list, it doesn’t mean that there is no rich woman in the world while there are many female names in top 50 billionaires list.
We can say a person wealthy if the individual has pile of money in bank account and abundance of valuable resources like property and shares etc. Now we are going to tell you about the top ten richest people in the world according to this year.
1. Bill Gates
Bill Gates is the richest person in the world with net worth of $87.4 billion; he was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States. He is an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and computer programmer, he is son of a prominent lawyer William H. Gates, Sr. He co founded Microsoft and he served as its CEO, Chairman and chief software architect he was the largest shareholder of Microsoft until 2014. He is also a very generous person he and his wife has raised one of the most powerful charities in the world Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, most important aims of this foundations are to lift people out of poverty, eliminating HIV, Malaria and some other infectious diseases.
2. Amancio Ortega
Amancio Ortega is the second richest person in the world with the net worth of $72.3 billion; he was born on March 28, 1936 in Busdongo de Arbás, León, Spain. He is co-founder and chairman of the Inditex fashion group which is very well known for its largest brand Zara clothing and accessories retail shops, his father was a railway worker this Spanish fashion businessman also served as a delivery boy for a local shirt maker called Gala at young age of 14.
3. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett got third rank in the list of richest people in the world, this American business magnate, investor and philanthropist was born on August 30, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. He is the third richest person in the world with the net worth of $66.9 billion; he is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway Company. He is also known as “Wizard of Omaha” he is one of the most successful investors in the world.
4. Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos has third rank in the list of richest people in the world, this American technology entrepreneur and investor was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. He is the fourth richest person in the world with the net worth of $52.7 billion, he is the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Amazon.com, he is also founder and owner of a private aerospace company called Blue Origin.
5. David Koch
David Koch is the fifth richest person in the world with the net worth of $47.4 billion, this American businessman, philanthropist, political activist, and chemical engineer was born on May 3, 1940 in Wichita, Kansas, United States. In 1970 he joined his family business Koch Industries which is second largest private company in Unites States of America and he became co-owner of this company with his older brother Charles in 1983.
6. Charles Koch
Charles Koch is the sixth richest person in the world with the net worth of $46.8 billion, this American businessman, political donor and philanthropist was born on November 1, 1935 in Wichita, Kansas, Unites States. He is co-owner, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer of his family business Koch Industries, this company has approximately 100,000 employees.
7. Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison was born on August 17, 1944 in Manhattan, New York, United States; he is an American internet entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist. He is the seventh richest person in the world with the net worth of $45.3 billion, he is Co-founder and former CEO of Oracle Corporation which is second largest software maker behind Microsoft.
8. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York, United States, American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is on number 8 in the list of richest people in the world; he is chairman, chief executive, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. He was student of Harvard University when he launched facebook with his roommates and friends and this website rapidly became very popular in 2012, he is one of the young wealthiest people in the world.
9. Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg is on number 9 in the list of top ten richest people in the world, he was born on February 14, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He is the ninth richest person in the world with the net worth of $42.1 billion, is the founder, CEO, and owner of the global financial data and media company Bloomberg L.P; he also served as 108th Mayor of New York City.
10. Ingvar Kamprad
Ingvar Kamprad is last but not the least on our list he is the tenth richest person in the world with the net worth of $39.3 billion, he was born on 30 March 1926 in Pjätteryd (now part of Älmhult Municipality), Sweden. He started his career at very young age by selling goods like matches and fish to the markets, then he founded IKEA company in 1943 which is now world’s largest furniture retailer, he left the company in 2013 at the age of 87.
Friday, November 11, 2016
7 Practical Tips on How to Make Time for Everything
The modern world is full of things to learn, adventures to explore, and people to meet. But how can we find time for all that when we are already so busy?
We at Bright Side have a few tips to help you organize your time more effectively and get the most out of each hour, day, week, and month.
Try making lists of your usual daily tasks, books you want to read, movies you want to watch, work projects, household chores, and so on.
Creating a list of products to buy or even a list of your desires is a simple yet useful habit. It will help you plan your day and ensure you don’t miss out on any important activities.
"Dead time" is the amount of time between your tasks: train travel, standing in queues, waiting for friends, etc. Don’t waste that time by just playing those stupid games on your smartphone. Instead, use your dead time to read an interesting book, learn a new foreign language, or draw in your sketchbook.
Today, commercials on TV take up so much time that any TV program or series lasts one and a half times longer. To save you precious time, rent or buy your favorite movie or series. If you do so, you’ll spend less time watching commercials and you’ll have more time for other useful things.
Conduct a small experiment: grab your notebook and spend two or three days writing down everything you do during the day and how long it takes you. A detailed description of your daily life will help you understand where your precious minutes go. You will probably be surprised at how much time you spend on activities that don’t help you reach your goals, like browsing the web or checking unimportant e-mails.
Review the list of your daily household chores, and delegate some of them to other family members. Your husband will definitely cope with the task of throwing out the garbage, and your children can do simple and safe tasks at home too.
Some tasks take no more than 15 minutes to complete. Make a list of these chores, and complete them one at a time. You can sort through the e-mails in your inbox, dust the cabinets, or water your house plants. Doing these small tasks on a day-to-day basis will help you reach your bigger goals.
Ideally, you should take a 10-minute break for every 50 minutes of work and devote one day a week to yourself only. But if this way of resting is not for you, then try alternating your activities every 20 minutes. If you do so, you’ll feel less tired and have more time during the day. Remember: your productivity at work depends on your physical energy. So don’t deprive yourself of rest and restoration.
We at Bright Side have a few tips to help you organize your time more effectively and get the most out of each hour, day, week, and month.
Write down all your plans and daily goals even if you’re sure you won’t forget about them
Try making lists of your usual daily tasks, books you want to read, movies you want to watch, work projects, household chores, and so on.
Creating a list of products to buy or even a list of your desires is a simple yet useful habit. It will help you plan your day and ensure you don’t miss out on any important activities.
Use your "dead time" cleverly
"Dead time" is the amount of time between your tasks: train travel, standing in queues, waiting for friends, etc. Don’t waste that time by just playing those stupid games on your smartphone. Instead, use your dead time to read an interesting book, learn a new foreign language, or draw in your sketchbook.
Don’t waste your time watching commercials — rent or buy your favorite films or watch them online
Today, commercials on TV take up so much time that any TV program or series lasts one and a half times longer. To save you precious time, rent or buy your favorite movie or series. If you do so, you’ll spend less time watching commercials and you’ll have more time for other useful things.
Write down and keep track of everything you do during the day
Conduct a small experiment: grab your notebook and spend two or three days writing down everything you do during the day and how long it takes you. A detailed description of your daily life will help you understand where your precious minutes go. You will probably be surprised at how much time you spend on activities that don’t help you reach your goals, like browsing the web or checking unimportant e-mails.
Delegate as many of your duties and responsibilities as possible
Review the list of your daily household chores, and delegate some of them to other family members. Your husband will definitely cope with the task of throwing out the garbage, and your children can do simple and safe tasks at home too.
Don’t be too lazy to do 5-minute tasks throughout the day
Some tasks take no more than 15 minutes to complete. Make a list of these chores, and complete them one at a time. You can sort through the e-mails in your inbox, dust the cabinets, or water your house plants. Doing these small tasks on a day-to-day basis will help you reach your bigger goals.
Take a rest regularly, rather than just when feeling exhausted
Ideally, you should take a 10-minute break for every 50 minutes of work and devote one day a week to yourself only. But if this way of resting is not for you, then try alternating your activities every 20 minutes. If you do so, you’ll feel less tired and have more time during the day. Remember: your productivity at work depends on your physical energy. So don’t deprive yourself of rest and restoration.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet
They’re turning the web into a cesspool of aggression and violence. What watching them is doing to the rest of us may be even worse
This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava.
It would be smarter to be cautious, because the Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now, if you need help improving your upload speeds the web is eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.
The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There’s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.
They’ve been steadily upping their game. In 2011, trolls descended on Facebook memorial pages of recently deceased users to mock their deaths. In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. In June of this year, Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter, on which he had nearly 35,000 followers, after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. At the end of July, feminist writer Jessica Valenti said she was leaving social media after receiving a rape threat against her daughter, who is 5 years old.
Ever see harsh comments posted on a YouTube Video, and think, "What a Troll." TIME Reporter Belinda Luscombe takes takes it to the troll and reads her harsh YouTube comments with this Dramatic Reading.
A Pew Research Center survey published two years ago found that 70% of 18-to-24-year-olds who use the Internet had experienced harassment, and 26% of women that age said they’d been stalked online. This is exactly what trolls want. A 2014 study published in the psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences found that the approximately 5% of Internet users who self-identified as trolls scored extremely high in the dark tetrad of personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and, especially, sadism.
But maybe that’s just people who call themselves trolls. And maybe they do only a small percentage of the actual trolling. “Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And that could not be further from the truth,” says Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University and the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. You want to say this is the bad guys, but it’s a problem of us.”
A lot of people enjoy the kind of trolling that illuminates the gullibility of the powerful and their willingness to respond. One of the best is Congressman Steve Smith, a Tea Party Republican representing Georgia’s 15th District, which doesn’t exist. For nearly three years Smith has spewed over-the-top conservative blather on Twitter, luring Senator Claire McCaskill, Christiane Amanpour and Rosie O’Donnell into arguments. Surprisingly, the guy behind the GOP-mocking prank, Jeffrey Marty, isn’t a liberal but a Donald Trump supporter angry at the Republican elite, furious at Hillary Clinton and unhappy with Black Lives Matter. A 40-year-old dad and lawyer who lives outside Tampa, he says he has become addicted to the attention. “I was totally ruined when I started this. My ex-wife and I had just separated. She decided to start a new, more exciting life without me,” he says. Then his best friend, who he used to do pranks with as a kid, killed himself. Now he’s got an illness that’s keeping him home.
Marty says his trolling has been empowering. “Let’s say I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying I didn’t like your article about Trump. They throw it in the shredder. On Twitter I communicate directly with the writers. It’s a breakdown of all the institutions,” he says. “I really do think this stuff matters in the election. I have 1.5 million views of my tweets every 28 days. It’s a much bigger audience than I would have gotten if I called people up and said, ‘Did you ever consider Trump for President?'”
Trolling is, overtly, a political fight. Liberals do indeed troll–sex-advice columnist Dan Savage used his followers to make Googling former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name a blunt lesson in the hygienic challenges of anal sex; the hunter who killed Cecil the lion got it really bad.
But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.
The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.
In this new culture war, the battle isn’t just over homosexuality, abortion, rap lyrics, drugs or how to greet people at Christmastime. It’s expanded to anything and everything: video games, clothing ads, even remaking a mediocre comedy from the 1980s. In July, trolls who had long been furious that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters starred four women instead of men harassed the film’s black co-star Leslie Jones so badly on Twitter with racist and sexist threats–including a widely copied photo of her at the film’s premiere that someone splattered semen on–that she considered quitting the service. “I was in my apartment by myself, and I felt trapped,” Jones says. “When you’re reading all these gay and racial slurs, it was like, I can’t fight y’all. I didn’t know what to do. Do you call the police? Then they got my email, and they started sending me threats that they were going to cut off my head and stuff they do to ‘N words.’ It’s not done to express an opinion, it’s done to scare you.”
Because of Jones’ harassment, alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter. (He is also an editor at Breitbart News, the conservative website whose executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, was hired Aug. 17 to run the Trump campaign.) The service said Yiannopoulos, a critic of the new Ghostbusters who called Jones a “black dude” in a tweet, marshaled many of his more than 300,000 followers to harass her. He not only denies this but says being responsible for your fans is a ridiculous standard. He also thinks Jones is faking hurt for political purposes. “She is one of the stars of a Hollywood blockbuster,” he says. “It takes a certain personality to get there. It’s a politically aware, highly intelligent star using this to get ahead. I think it’s very sad that feminism has turned very successful women into professional victims.”
Twitter Suspends Account of Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos
Twitter is permanently banning a prominent conservative reporter for starting a Twitter war with Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.
A gay, 31-year-old Brit with frosted hair, Yiannopoulos has been speaking at college campuses on his Dangerous Faggot tour. He says trolling is a direct response to being told by the left what not to say and what kinds of video games not to play. “Human nature has a need for mischief. We want to thumb our nose at authority and be individuals,” he says. “Trump might not win this election. I might not turn into the media figure I want to. But the space we’re making for others to be bolder in their speech is some of the most important work being done today. The trolls are the only people telling the truth.”
The alt-right was galvanized by Gamergate, a 2014 controversy in which trolls tried to drive critics of misogyny in video games away from their virtual man cave. “In the mid-2000s, Internet culture felt very separate from pop culture,” says Katie Notopoulos, who reports on the web as an editor at BuzzFeed and co-host of the Internet Explorer podcast. “This small group of people are trying to stand their ground that the Internet is dark and scary, and they’re trying to scare people off. There’s such a culture of viciously making fun of each other on their message boards that they have this very thick skin. They’re all trained up.”
Andrew Auernheimer, who calls himself Weev online, is probably the biggest troll in history. He served just over a year in prison for identity fraud and conspiracy. When he was released in 2014, he left the U.S., mostly bouncing around Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since then he has worked to post anti–Planned Parenthood videos and flooded thousands of university printers in America with instructions to print swastikas–a symbol tattooed on his chest. When I asked if I could fly out and interview him, he agreed, though he warned that he “might not be coming ashore for a while, but we can probably pass close enough to land to have you meet us somewhere in the Adriatic or Ionian.” His email signature: “Eternally your servant in the escalation of entropy and eschaton.”
While we planned my trip to “a pretty remote location,” he told me that he no longer does interviews for free and that his rate was two bitcoins (about $1,100) per hour. That’s when one of us started trolling the other, though I’m not sure which:
This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava.
It would be smarter to be cautious, because the Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now, if you need help improving your upload speeds the web is eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.
The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There’s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.
They’ve been steadily upping their game. In 2011, trolls descended on Facebook memorial pages of recently deceased users to mock their deaths. In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. In June of this year, Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter, on which he had nearly 35,000 followers, after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. At the end of July, feminist writer Jessica Valenti said she was leaving social media after receiving a rape threat against her daughter, who is 5 years old.
Ever see harsh comments posted on a YouTube Video, and think, "What a Troll." TIME Reporter Belinda Luscombe takes takes it to the troll and reads her harsh YouTube comments with this Dramatic Reading.
A Pew Research Center survey published two years ago found that 70% of 18-to-24-year-olds who use the Internet had experienced harassment, and 26% of women that age said they’d been stalked online. This is exactly what trolls want. A 2014 study published in the psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences found that the approximately 5% of Internet users who self-identified as trolls scored extremely high in the dark tetrad of personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and, especially, sadism.
But maybe that’s just people who call themselves trolls. And maybe they do only a small percentage of the actual trolling. “Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And that could not be further from the truth,” says Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University and the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. You want to say this is the bad guys, but it’s a problem of us.”
A lot of people enjoy the kind of trolling that illuminates the gullibility of the powerful and their willingness to respond. One of the best is Congressman Steve Smith, a Tea Party Republican representing Georgia’s 15th District, which doesn’t exist. For nearly three years Smith has spewed over-the-top conservative blather on Twitter, luring Senator Claire McCaskill, Christiane Amanpour and Rosie O’Donnell into arguments. Surprisingly, the guy behind the GOP-mocking prank, Jeffrey Marty, isn’t a liberal but a Donald Trump supporter angry at the Republican elite, furious at Hillary Clinton and unhappy with Black Lives Matter. A 40-year-old dad and lawyer who lives outside Tampa, he says he has become addicted to the attention. “I was totally ruined when I started this. My ex-wife and I had just separated. She decided to start a new, more exciting life without me,” he says. Then his best friend, who he used to do pranks with as a kid, killed himself. Now he’s got an illness that’s keeping him home.
Marty says his trolling has been empowering. “Let’s say I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying I didn’t like your article about Trump. They throw it in the shredder. On Twitter I communicate directly with the writers. It’s a breakdown of all the institutions,” he says. “I really do think this stuff matters in the election. I have 1.5 million views of my tweets every 28 days. It’s a much bigger audience than I would have gotten if I called people up and said, ‘Did you ever consider Trump for President?'”
Trolling is, overtly, a political fight. Liberals do indeed troll–sex-advice columnist Dan Savage used his followers to make Googling former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name a blunt lesson in the hygienic challenges of anal sex; the hunter who killed Cecil the lion got it really bad.
But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.
The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.
In this new culture war, the battle isn’t just over homosexuality, abortion, rap lyrics, drugs or how to greet people at Christmastime. It’s expanded to anything and everything: video games, clothing ads, even remaking a mediocre comedy from the 1980s. In July, trolls who had long been furious that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters starred four women instead of men harassed the film’s black co-star Leslie Jones so badly on Twitter with racist and sexist threats–including a widely copied photo of her at the film’s premiere that someone splattered semen on–that she considered quitting the service. “I was in my apartment by myself, and I felt trapped,” Jones says. “When you’re reading all these gay and racial slurs, it was like, I can’t fight y’all. I didn’t know what to do. Do you call the police? Then they got my email, and they started sending me threats that they were going to cut off my head and stuff they do to ‘N words.’ It’s not done to express an opinion, it’s done to scare you.”
Because of Jones’ harassment, alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter. (He is also an editor at Breitbart News, the conservative website whose executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, was hired Aug. 17 to run the Trump campaign.) The service said Yiannopoulos, a critic of the new Ghostbusters who called Jones a “black dude” in a tweet, marshaled many of his more than 300,000 followers to harass her. He not only denies this but says being responsible for your fans is a ridiculous standard. He also thinks Jones is faking hurt for political purposes. “She is one of the stars of a Hollywood blockbuster,” he says. “It takes a certain personality to get there. It’s a politically aware, highly intelligent star using this to get ahead. I think it’s very sad that feminism has turned very successful women into professional victims.”
Twitter Suspends Account of Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos
Twitter is permanently banning a prominent conservative reporter for starting a Twitter war with Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.
A gay, 31-year-old Brit with frosted hair, Yiannopoulos has been speaking at college campuses on his Dangerous Faggot tour. He says trolling is a direct response to being told by the left what not to say and what kinds of video games not to play. “Human nature has a need for mischief. We want to thumb our nose at authority and be individuals,” he says. “Trump might not win this election. I might not turn into the media figure I want to. But the space we’re making for others to be bolder in their speech is some of the most important work being done today. The trolls are the only people telling the truth.”
The alt-right was galvanized by Gamergate, a 2014 controversy in which trolls tried to drive critics of misogyny in video games away from their virtual man cave. “In the mid-2000s, Internet culture felt very separate from pop culture,” says Katie Notopoulos, who reports on the web as an editor at BuzzFeed and co-host of the Internet Explorer podcast. “This small group of people are trying to stand their ground that the Internet is dark and scary, and they’re trying to scare people off. There’s such a culture of viciously making fun of each other on their message boards that they have this very thick skin. They’re all trained up.”
Andrew Auernheimer, who calls himself Weev online, is probably the biggest troll in history. He served just over a year in prison for identity fraud and conspiracy. When he was released in 2014, he left the U.S., mostly bouncing around Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since then he has worked to post anti–Planned Parenthood videos and flooded thousands of university printers in America with instructions to print swastikas–a symbol tattooed on his chest. When I asked if I could fly out and interview him, he agreed, though he warned that he “might not be coming ashore for a while, but we can probably pass close enough to land to have you meet us somewhere in the Adriatic or Ionian.” His email signature: “Eternally your servant in the escalation of entropy and eschaton.”
While we planned my trip to “a pretty remote location,” he told me that he no longer does interviews for free and that his rate was two bitcoins (about $1,100) per hour. That’s when one of us started trolling the other, though I’m not sure which:
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