Trolls are often considered the scum of the internet. They deliberately incite arguments and other hostile communications. They argue just to argue. They make the internet a worse place, for their own personal amusement. Only, this is not universally true. Not all trolls make it their goal to incite hostilities so they can sit back and watch the world burn. The trolls described above are merely the common, vulgar trolls. While the vulgar troll is certainly the most common kind of troll, there is another level of troll that is more sophisticated, that trolls for a purpose other than personal entertainment.
The most common purpose of trolling is to cause contention for personal entertainment, but trolling can have a higher purpose. Trolling can be used to extract information. It can be used to learn people's motivations and how they think. It can be used to find out the sources of their information and the biases that they use to support their opinions and beliefs. It can be used to drag false beliefs into the light, and it can even be used to teach. Higher level trolls do not use their powers for personal entertainment, though it can be entertaining. They use their powers to help others and to learn more about people.
As a personal example, I once trolled in the Google comments, in a thread discussing the health implications of GMO foods. If you are familiar with my articles, you may be aware that I wrote a few articles on GMOs a while back, and if you have read them, you will also be aware that I am strongly pro-GMO, because GMOs are important for increasing crop yield and nutrient content of foods, which are going to grow in importance as Earth's human population continues to grow. In this thread, there were a handful of anti-GMO people spreading lies and misconceptions about GMO foods, but there were also a lot of legitimately curious people who wanted to learn more. Due to the loud anti-GMO people, it was impossible to engage with those who wanted to learn. Thus the trolling began. I started by engaging the anti-GMO. I expressed my opinion that GMOs are generally harmless and that the FDA already does a good job of making sure all GMOs going into human food are tested rather excessively for safety. This was, of course, met with many examples of places that GMOs had caused harm to people, the most prominent of which was a case where GMO baby formula harmed many babies. I responded by demanding sources for these claims. Before that, I Googled each of the claims and verified that they were all false. They were lies made up by poorly educated anti-GMO authors to demonize GMOs, since there are actually no cases of GMOs harming humans. I did not want to call the anti-GMO people out on this though. I was fishing deeper, for bigger fish. Merely asking for sources verifying claims was enough to send most of the anti-GMO crowd into hiding. Only one person was brave enough (or foolish enough, perhaps) to respond. This person began making additional claims of instances where GMOs had caused harm, none of which were verifiable. After each claim, I demanded sources. At one point, I specifically said that I wanted sources who are well educated in genetic engineering and well researched on the impact of GMOs on human health. I specifically said I was not interested in journalists or fanatics who do not know the science. After many demands for sources, this person finally gave me a name and the title of a book. I instantly looked up the author on Wikipedia. He was a journalist who mostly writes about oil economics, who was hired by an anti-GMO activist group to write a book attacking GMOs. His credentials were a degree in journalism with some classes in economics. He had no background in genetics or health. He was exactly the kind of crummy source I had explicitly stated could not be considered a reliable source, and I immediately pointed this out. I explained that the incredibly low quality of the source made anything the author wrote on GMOs suspect, and at this point I also pointed out that I could find no evidence supporting any of the claims of harm caused by GMOs. The final anti-GMO commenter never responded again, but some of the people who actually wanted to learn more about GMOs did start to respond. I went through the comments looking for specific concerns about GMOs, and then I wrote a couple of blog articles (the ones I referenced before) answering those questions and clearing up a lot of misconceptions about GMOs. The final comment I left in that thread contained the links to those articles, for anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering and GMOs. Without the trolling, it would have been very difficult to identify specific, legitimate concerns people had. The trolling allowed me to identify and push out of the conversation those who were more interested in arguing than learning. Trolling was a critical element of providing a potentially very valuable public service.
I have also used trolling to shut down argumentative people (vulgar trolls) in discussions on religion, by leading them into a trap, where they made some absurd and invalid argument in an attempt to discredit a religion. I have a friend who was trying to tie a person in a martial arts forum who was slandering his practice group on Facebook to a person in real life who had been badly beaten by members of my friend's group during sparing. My friend used expert trolling skills to make the other guy angry enough to accidentally reveal bits and pieces of information that ultimately verified it was the same person. I have used milder trolling just to see how people would respond to something, to learn more about how they think.
Vulgar internet trolls, who are just trying to entertain themselves, can be pretty annoying and can cause all sorts of problems and contention, but trolling does not have to be used for evil. Trolling can even be used for noble pursuits, like shutting down vulgar trolls and learning what kind of information people need and want so you can provide it. Trolling can even be part of a valuable public service.
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