While Michael Bay movies have great special effects, it's the scripts that really elevate them above other films.

Have you rage-quit this post yet? Do you see what I did there? I made a statement that you probably consider to be controversial and inflammatory. One that was engineered to get a specific reaction from you. Let's try again:

The Xbox One is a really underpowered console. It can't even do 4k gaming.

Ooh! Feel the burn! Of course you know that neither of these statements are supposed to be true. However, they don't attack anybody in particular. They're not harassing or bullying anybody.

This sort of behaviour, when you see it discussion forums or social media, is called trolling. The word comes from “trawling”, as in “trawling for a reaction”, and it has been around since the early 1990s.

Mainstream media has just learned about this word in the past couple of years, but they continue to misuse it when running stories about bullying or harassment online. When someone threatens violence against another person on Twitter or Facebook, that’s not “trolling”: That’s abuse, plain and simple.

I hope writers and editors from the mainstream media read this post and begin to understand that trolling, while annoying and frustrating, is not the same as bullying, harassing or abusing other people online. The former is just something that jerks do to get a rise out of people. The latter is much, much more serious.