The Troll Hunters

Internet hatred is a problem anywhere a significant part of life is lived online. But the problem is sharpened by Sweden's cultural and legal commitment to free expression. Sweden's liberal freedom-of-information laws offer easy access to personal information about nearly anyone, including people's personal identity numbers, their addresses, even their taxable income. That can make online harassment uniquely invasive. Yet the rich information ecosystem that empowers Internet trolls also makes Sweden a perfect stalking ground for those who want to expose them. A group of volunteer researchers called Researchgruppen, or Research Group, has pioneered a form of activist journalism based on following the crumbs of data anonymous Internet trolls leave behind and unmasking them. In its largest troll hunt, Research Group scraped the comments section of the right-wing online publication Avpixlat and obtained a huge database of its comments and user information. Starting with this data, members meticulously identified many of Avpixlat's most prolific commenters and then turned the names over to Expressen, one of Sweden's two major tabloids. Martin Fredriksson is a cofounder of Research Group and its de facto leader. Research Group challenges the traditional divide between activism and journalism: it is guided by the values of its members, many of whom come from leftist circles. Research Group is currently deep into researching its next project, which is based on a huge database belonging to Flashback, Sweden's largest general-interest forum.