How Emeka Ugwuonye’s experience redefined the meaning of trolling.

Trolls on social media are people who deliberately provoke others online by saying inflammatory and offensive things. They promote hate speech, attack an opponent’s character and say things to appeal to people’s feelings rather than their intellect.

Many did not realize how trolls work until they find themselves as their target. Trolls act in concert when there is a concerted effort, which is defined as:

“contrived or arranged by agreement; planned or devised together: a concerted effort. done or performed together or in cooperation: a concerted attack”.

They also act on conscious parallelism basis, when there is a coordinated or identical action or behavior that occur among people without any specific agreement among them. It is a conscious behavior with specific intent because each actor expects the support of others with joint intent to achieve the same result.

Those who harass or bully on social media, otherwise called trolls, either act in concert or on the conscious parallelism basis. Emeka Ugwuonye is an incredible case study.

When he set up the group, DPA, he attracted many followers who saw DPA as a mecca for social media advocacy and activism. People joined in their thousands. At the same time DPA’s success provoked envy and hatred. It was easy to join, but difficult to stay. Determined, for instance, not to allow the DPA platform to be used to spread the wrong message, DPA has a practice of removing people who could not keep to its high standards of civility and its values. DPA removed over 20,000 members.

If the admission process were strict enough most of those removed would not have been admitted into DPA forum. The people removed from DPA felt the bitter pain of exclusion, and these were people already experienced in social media activism while in DPA.

It was easy for trolls to be recruited from the list of those removed. Though relatively small compared with DPA members, those removed became trolls against Emeka Ugwuonye and DPA. They spread so many false rumors targeting those who lack analytic minds to question what they read.

Today, if you want to generate traffic to your post, find a way to mention Emeka Ugwuonye on your post. Two days ago, one lady started a post on Emeka Ugwuonye. We didn’t know her mind, but mentioning Emeka Ugwuonye’s name has been her best way of getting most 200 comments to her post. In this case, this woman is not really against Ugwuonye. In fact, she was trying to be balanced in her story. So, she started off by saying: “Apart from the obvious accusations that Emeka Ugwuonye is greedy and a womanizer, he is not a bad person”. She went on to say that Emeka Ugwuonye “was banned from practicing law in the United States”.

She was contacted inbox by one of us. We asked her what was obvious about Emeka Ugwuonye being greedy and a womanizer. She had no answer. We asked her to name two women that she knew to have been dated by Emeka Ugwuonye. (We assumed that to be a womanizer, a man must have been associated with at least two women). Can you believe that this lady could not even mention any single woman that had been romantically associated with Emeka Ugwuonye? Next she was asked to identify who banned Emeka Ugwuonye from practicing law anywhere in the world. She couldn’t. Knowing that she might be referring to the false letter from the clerk of the Nigerian Supreme Court, which has no legal effect. When we reminded her of that she had no response. Also, she cannot point to any single act of greed by Emeka Ugwuonye, who has sacrificed all he had for others.

This is the effect of internet or social media trolling. That is how it works. Emeka Ugwuonye has been the worst victim, apart from the Presidents of some countries. Trolls mention his name and they increase traffic to their posts. In the case of the lady referred to above,  her post attracted comments from many trolls, people who never met or interacted with Emeka Ugwuonye but who would tell stories of what they said or did with Emeka.

We all need to learn from the Emeka Ugwuonye’s experience when it comes to trolling.