The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit
This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It&#x27;s always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old.<p>However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of &#x27;trolling&#x27;. Today, &#x27;trolling&#x27; is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for &#x27;debating&#x27; in bad faith.<p>Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people&#x27;s time and energy, as they &#x27;debate&#x27; with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy.<p>Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual &#x27;debate&#x27; level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.