The Research: 65,000 Mentions

In February 2020 I started to look at the use of the terms “troll” and “trolling” in contemporary culture. So I read through sixty-thousand media articles with those terms in the Dow Jones Factiva database of thirty-three-thousand sources going back to the early 1970s.

I went down the Word Origins’ route, too. This brought me through the first written texts in Indian culture back across ancient Persia to eastern Ukraine where the first Indo-European language was spoken.

The third route that led me to this Common Denominator definition (“Emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.”) was from contemporary culture. This led me from Trolls films and dolls, early northern Californian computer culture, through Scandinavian folklore, legal texts (Yeph! There’s even references to trolls in Icelandic legal texts!) and back through all the Indo-European literary and religious traditions.

Source: Disinfolklore (5)

Three routes converged on one definition: the Factiva database, the word-origins route through millennia of Indo-European culture, and the contemporary culture route from troll dolls through Silicon Valley.

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