The Internet menace just wants to pick a fight – and it doesn’t matter if there’s no issue to pick on in the first place.

WHEN I was young, I was frightened of pontianak, hantu tetek, toyol and babalan (a head with entrails that flies at night looking for newborns).

But I’ve grown up and I’ve become less afraid of them.

Now I’m more frightened of trolls. Internet trolls, that is.

According to socialmediatoday.com, a troll is “someone who likes to disagree for disagreement’s sake; someone who just likes to argue. Someone who seeks to make others upset. Those who ridicule as an end-goal, who likes to insult others at the slightest provocation. They are the online equivalent of the aggressive person at a bar, itching for a fight. They want to cause trouble, and they’ll either find the first opportunity to fan the flames or just instigate it themselves”.

Want an example?

Here’s a tweet from a troll to one of the funniest and lovable tweeters in Malaysian Twittersphere.

“Ya, replied then blocked me, unfairly deprived me answering u, it only shows your low & despicable + ular (snake) character, stand & fight like a man.”

That’s one of the milder tweets from that troll.

On Saturday, that troll tweeted me: “I will tell your wife, your (deleted) pricked and pointed at communist (deleted)”.

Since I have become immune to his abusive tweets, I kind of pity this particular troll.

Sometimes, I worry about him.

Was he abused as a child? Was he an unpopular boy in school? Does he own a humongous spenda (underwear)?

Is he somebody who just has very bad manners? Is he divorced?

Twitter, for me, rules the world. But it can be a nasty world.

For example, the other day I tweeted “hello” to a 30-something woman contesting for the first time in a general election.

That attracted half a dozen haters and trolls who abused her just because she was going against the party they supported.

Some hardcore ones have a “you are either with us or against us” siege mentality.

For them, you can’t have friends on the other side.

Funny thing is they don’t realise that in real life, the politicians they worship actually have personal relationships with their enemies.

But politics is so black and white for them that they can’t see the grey areas.

My philosophy when dealing with trolls is – Don’t fight with a pig. You’ll both get dirty and the pig likes it.

I’m quite sure that a troll is the type of person who when their father/lover whacked them, they would scream: “That was painful. Do it again! Harder!”

It seems trolls enjoy a dirty fight.

I’ve followed a troll-a-thon that started at 2pm and ended at 11am (as the troll had a flight to catch).

Both were like foul-mouthed gladiators, abusing his opponent and his wife, mother, sister, daughter and even the grandmother was not spared.

Both didn’t sleep. Me, too.

It was quite entertaining to watch a troll-a-thon when you are not the target.

My other philosophy is – Don’t feed the troll.

“An Internet Troll is hoping to raise some ire,” reports socialmediatoday.com.

“They want someone to take the bait to their scandalous comments. They live for the sucker, he who falls for the lure; the person who argues back.

“Arguing with a troll is like trying to stop a fire with gasoline. The more intense and impassioned your retort, the more you fuel the troll’s efforts. The longer you draw out the conversation, the more you saturate the troll with the attention they crave.”

I’ve come to learn that if I starve them of attention, they will retreat to the hole where they came from.

There’s another creature on Twitter that I’m getting to be frightened of.

This creature will anonymously and silently follow your tweets, screen capture some of them and publish them on their blogs.

That’s why for #GE13, I’ve kind of stopped making jokes on Twitter as someone might use it against me.

Another reason why I’m more subdued on Twitter is politics in Malaysia is so heated that there are people out there who have lost their sense of humour.

For example, take the recent photographs of a (allegedly) politician and his humongous spenda (the size of Perlis).

I’m so tempted to tweet about it.

But there are people who might misconstrue that I’m attacking the political party the politician belongs to.

Plus I’ve considered the feelings of that humongous white spenda.

Nowadays, I tweet mostly for thestar.com.my Storify timeline.

I’ve tweeted nostalgic photographs of politicians.

If you want to check them out, go to http://storify.com/staronline/13th-malaysian-general-election-ge13.

But yesterday, I got itchy and tweeted: “If flags can vote, @RajaNongChik has won Lembah Pantai. #GE13”.

I just wanted to see how Twitterjaya would respond.

It received a couple of responses.

Elviza (@elviza) tweeted: “deep :-)” and PepsiTwist (@lilichan79) tweeted: “this is hilarious Philip!!! Muahhahahahahaha farney wei! I agree man”.

But no response from trolls. Probably they don’t get paid to troll on Sundays.

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