Trolling the Leviathan: How the use of social media by democratic organizations engenders monsters

Abstract

The proliferation of trolls may be one of the main reasons why democratic organizations fail to use social media to renew. The literature predominantly assimilates these trolls to psychologically deviant individuals. This article questions this individual-centric approach by suggesting that trolls may well be socially constructed organizational monsters. To investigate this phenomenon, for 2 years, we studied the interactions on a Facebook group between the leaders and members of a trade union. We identified three bi-directional effects at the heart of what we call the monstrification process: discording, disordering, and disgusting effects. The paper contributes to the troll and organizational monster literature by evidencing the four-stage process through which trolls are organizationally constructed as deviant online participants. Our work also adds to the democratic organization literature by metaphorically underlining actors’ emotional and moral distress caused by the dysfunctional encounter of offline and online democracy.