Bloggasm

I don’t frequent online message boards as much as I used to, but I know from experience that you’ll see some of the nastiest fights imaginable–especially in political threads– in little corners of the web frequented by trolls. There have been several instances where the rhetoric has grown so heated that people posted their home addresses to try to provoke the flamers into a physical, real-world fight. In one message board I read, a person had his membership at a science fiction convention revoked because he had threatened another attendee of the con.

To my knowledge, none of these real-world fights ended up happening. But recently, a man was sentenced for driving 1,300 miles in his car to burn down the trailer of another internet troll who had taunted him.

Though blogs have been covered thoroughly by the mainstream media, I’ve seen very few spotlights on online message boards. There are many that are frequented by thousands of people every day, and they’re likely a significant portion of online media. This is just one example of the potency of online flame wars, and how they have a tendency to escalate into outright chaos.