Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Internet Troll V6.0-A Short Story


Troll V6.0

I’m not your typical internet troll. I don’t wait for you to post photos of yourself, then creep on you. I don’t try to be your racist high school friend. I don’t start huge flame wars, then sit back and watch them play out. No, I’m a 2016 internet troll. The new troll. I have it down to an art.

You see, I have about 50 different blogs and at least double the Facebook profiles. I have a few Twitter accounts for each blog. I post on one of my blogs, link it one of my Facebook profiles, tweet it, then sit back and wait for the fear to set in.

I sit back and read what is popular. That breakfast cereal you feed your kids? That new coffee machine everyone is going nuts over? A new popular water bottle? The latest superfood? I’ve blogged about it. But I don’t just blog about it. That breakfast cereal your kids eat? It’s got drywall compound in it and several neurotoxins. That new coffee machine? It’s got fecal matter in it even though most people have never brewed coffee in the bathroom. That water bottle? It’s made out of plastic that causes anxiety.

There’s no science behind anything I blog. Most of the time, I just make it up. If you can claim it has formaldehyde and causes cancer, the better. I never clarify that your body converts formaldehyde into formic acid and gets rid of it. I never say that formaldehyde is naturally occurring in several fruits and vegetables. I never say it’s only a danger if you work in a lab. Nope, it’s in that thing you just bought and it’s going to give you cancer.

You can pick any big word off the back of a cereal box or ingredient list and claim it’s a neurotoxin. You don’t have to define neurotoxin or what happens if you really do ingest a neurotoxin, you just need a big word and neurotoxin in bold, or better, red font. No one will Google the big word you chose and fact check you, they will go to their cabinets and look for the big word and the neurotoxin.

Another good one is blaming the plastic. The plastic something is in could trap fecal matter, cause depression. Just think up something bad and blame the plastic. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kitchen item and has never once been in the bathroom, you can claim there’s poop trapped in there.

Once I’ve written a good blog with no science, just a bunch of scary claims I’ve made up off the top of my head, sometimes with the help of Dr. Google, I change up the wording and put it on a few of my other blogs. Then I post a few links on my random Facebook profiles. I might tweet a link.

Then I just sit back and watch the links get shared with all kinds of comments like “OMG Scary!” or there will be someone who sells something similar who uses my blog to push their products. Facebook blows up for a few days with links to my blog about how the FDA is evil for allowing these things in our products while I just sit back and admire my work. When it starts to die down, I start finding a new product and thinking up new ways to scare people.

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