concern troll
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.68 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Someone who posts to an Internet forum or newsgroup, claiming to share its goals while deliberately working against those goals, typically, by claiming "concern" about group plans to engage in productive activity, urging members instead to attempt some activity that would damage the group's credibility, or alternatively to abandon group projects entirely.
Example Sentences
- "Contrarians aren't "champions of the scientific method," as Pearce posits. They might more accurately be described as ‘concern trolls’, feigning concern at every little climate uncertainty or issue they can use to manufacture doubt and delay the action necessary to solve the climate problem."
- "Various concern trolls repeatedly explained why #GamerGate needed a leader and how #GamerGate would never accomplish anything or be respected without a leader, concerns that were generally blown off with multiple GamerGaters declaring that they were the leader of #GamerGate or denouncing the concern troll as a shill, which is GG parlance for an individual who is not to be trusted."
- "I think I agree with just about all the substance of David Brooks' concern trolling about the GOP (see, e.g., my final American Prospect column which made some similar points), but this minor aside strikes me as wrongheaded in an interesting way:[…]"
- "Foremost among the critical governments were the expansionist northern Italian kingdom of Piedmont, which had territorial designs on the papal domains, and Piedmont's ally Great Britain, whose policy was to concern-troll for alleged papal misgovernment in order to delegitimize Pius's rule."