On June 28th, a Reddit user named HanAssholeSolo posted a grainy
animated GIF of Donald Trump body-slamming a person with a CNN logo for
a head. Less than a week later, Trump himself tweeted a version of the
short clip, and turned HanAssholeSolo’s life upside down. The cartoonish
literalism of the GIF—Trump bashing the press—attracted a flurry of
attention and outrage, and reporters quickly traced the work back to its
creator. It was then discovered that HanAssholeSolo was a regular
contributor to a pro-Trump section of Reddit known as The_Donald, and
that he had a history of posting racist and anti-Semitic content. In one
post, he had Photoshopped Stars of David onto Jewish CNN staffers. In
another, he had posted a photo of a burning Quran, with a caption that
read, “Just posting an image to offend Islam.” Islamophobia was a
regular theme. He seemed to delight in using the N-word. He was, it
seemed, a quintessential Internet troll. At first, HanAssholeSolo
celebrated his meme’s sudden fame. But last week, after a CNN reporter
discovered his real name and e-mailed him to ask for a comment, his
attitude abruptly changed, and he posted a long, forthright apology on
Reddit.

The apology is a fascinating document, in part because it is addressed
to his fellow Internet trolls. “My fellow redditors,” he wrote. “First
of all, I would like to apologize to the members of the reddit community
for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that
should never have happened.” The_Donald is a community of more than
forty thousand users that has become the beating heart of Trump’s online
grassroots army, producing a steady stream of bite-sized pro-Trump
propaganda tuned perfectly to go viral. Within this community, the
Internet is treated as a venue for bombastic Trumpian fantasy,
completely detached from the real world. Users see themselves as engaged
in a great “meme war” and call Trump their “God Emperor.” The derision
and scorn heaped on them by outsiders—Quartz has described The_Donald as “a cesspool for unabashed racism”—only seems to make them
stronger. Provoking strong reactions is seen as an end unto itself. HanAssholeSolo apparently subscribed to that philosophy until the moment that he felt public scrutiny coming down on him.

“I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist,
bigoted, and anti-semitic,” he wrote. “I am not the person that the
media portrays me to be in real life, I was trolling and posting things
to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the
hateful things I said in those posts.” As he told it, he had lost
himself in the thrill of virtual provocation: “As time went on it became
an addiction as to how far it could go with the posts that were made.”

It was tempting to write these words off as a lazy shirking of
responsibility. Surely, only a psychopath would think that using the
N-word or posting a photo of a burning Quran were harmless acts. Every
few months, it seems, there’s a new psychological study that shows a
connection between doing terrible things online and doing terrible
things in real life. (The Times’ Anna North recently
wrote about a study linking online trolling with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.)

Trolls often justify their offensive behavior by insisting that they are
simply doing it for “the lulz”—the laughs—and that they use offensive
language as sticks to jab into the soft spots in our culture. I used to
believe that such a detached approach was possible. The adherents of the
hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged from the same message
boards that would later feed into The_Donald, were fond of homophobic
and sexist language even as they supported political goals generally in
line with liberal values of equality and social justice. These days,
though, when I think of the lulz, I think of the notorious troll Andrew
(Weev) Auernheimer. In the early twenty-tens, Aurenheimer was hailed as
a geek hero for embarrassing technology companies such as A.T. & T. and
LiveJournal by exposing security vulnerabilities with a trollish
bravado. He also said a lot of racist and anti-Semitic things, but his
many liberal supporters wrote these off. He was just trolling, they
thought. Over time, however, his statements became more extreme. Today,
he is a very sincere neo-Nazi and a frequent contributor to the
white-supremacist blogosphere. After CNN announced that it had
discovered HanAssholeSolo’s identity (the network chose not to publish
his name), Auernnheimer called for a harassment campaign against CNN employees and staffers. “We are
going to track down your spouses,” he said. “We are going to track down your children.”

Over the past few years, this kind of troll radicalization has become
commonplace. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein, a writer for BuzzFeed, noticed a
burgeoning online political movement that wove together two strands of
the Internet’s message-board subculture. One strand comprised
“threatened white men”—racists and anti-feminists who spread their
extremist ideology online because it wasn’t acceptable anywhere else.
The other strand was made up of nihilistic Internet trolls, like
Auernheimer, who said that they were in it for the lulz. These
individuals were prodigious creators of memes and online culture that
often succeeded in crossing over into the mainstream. The new hybrid
movement, which Bernstein called the Chanterculture,
after the notorious message board 4chan, redirected this anarchic
collective creativity toward political ends. It combined “age-old racist
and sexist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and technology,”
Bernstein wrote. Eventually, Chanterculture helped create the conditions
for the rise of the alt-right.

I have little doubt that, on some level, HanAssholeSolo genuinely viewed
his online actions as detached from reality. The use of pseudonyms is an
important feature of the Chanterculture, and while the users themselves
often make appeals to safety or privacy, the effect of all these
pseudonyms is to create the illusion of the Internet as a place where we
can be something other than ourselves. On the wide-open plains of the
Internet, the Chanterculture argues, offensive speech is not a problem,
because one can simply turn off the computer or visit another Web site.
This idea feeds directly into the ideology of the alt-right, whose
adherents see online outrage sparked by words, which they believe are
little more than characters on a screen, as proof that the real goal of
“social-justice warriors” is to silence them.

For HanAssholeSolo, though, his GIF episode showed him what most of us
instinctively know—that our online lives are intricately woven into our
real ones, and that freedom of speech is not an excuse for a lack of
empathy, even “behind a keyboard.” This was “an extreme wake up call,”
he wrote in his apology. “To people who troll on the Internet for fun,
consider your words and actions conveyed in your message and who it
might upset or anger. Put yourself in their shoes before you post it.”

Not long after it was posted, HanAssholeSolo’s apology was erased from
Reddit, along with the rest of his posts, but it lives on preserved as a
screenshot on
the Internet-culture database Know Your Meme. One would like to imagine
that other trolls might read it and quit their idiotic hobby. Of course,
this is hopelessly naïve. The trolls have gone pro.