A Personal Experience with a Troll

     Now the story I have to tell, isn't one that began with me. I have a friend, Liya, who has a twitter account and is very active on it. Throughout having her account, she would acquire more and more followers who fell into two categories of people: those looking to find a genuine friendship and those who were only there to use her for retweets and likes. She is a very accepting person and is open to making new friends with someone if they're as genuine as she is. The only time she has a problem with someone online is if they're blatantly ignoring someones wishes that they've stated before. In this case, she had mentioned many times that she hates when people only direct message her to promote their own tweets.
     In this situation, the troll, Jade, had talked to Liya on occasion but they had never grown to be close friends, which seems unfortunate, but is a good thing in the long run. After a while of not talking, Jade sends Liya her tweet in hopes she'll retweet it and Liya decides she's had enough of this and decides to say something. From this point on, Jade began calling Liya "toxic" and telling her friends lies about what had been said to her about the situation. The events were then explained to me and I got involved, asking Jade to leave Liya alone. Her response to that was a barrage of messages to myself and Liya, all with different emotions coming through them. Some were compliments towards me (which she thought would help for whatever reason) and others were messages from her friends making Jade to be the victim and calling Liya a bad person.
     While it's nothing close to the harassment faced by Lindy West and many other people in media today, it can take different tolls on people based on their mental state at the time. Now this didn't scar us in the slightest but it did get a reaction from us and Jade could have been doing it just for that reason, making her a typical troll. I do understand that by getting involved, I signed myself up for random messages from another one of her many accounts after I had blocked them one by one. Finally after around 2 days, she gave up and retreated to her trolling corner and Liya and I had won the war against our troll.