A web troll is a person that deliberately posts provocatively (often in a disingenuous manner) on Internet forums in order to incite debate. It can actually become an art form. Normally, I would do a full disclosure here and describe how I used to be affiliated with the trolling equivalent of Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (the forum where we lurked has been disbanded), but I won’t — even in its death, anonymity is mandatory.

A regular denizen of the Wall St. Journal legal blog, Loyola 2L (he’s been nominated for the site’s lawyer of the year; he and other nominees pictured below), may be an example of a troll. The original poster is ostensibly a second year law student at Loyola who is upset with school administrators because he believes that they fraudulently entice 20somethings to build up huge amounts of student debt to attend what he believes is a lower tier law school which will provide them with no real opportunity to earn enough money to pay the debt off.

Loyola 2L has become something of an Internet celebrity. He has thousands of Google hits, accounts for the bulk of the talk on the Loyola Wikipedia discussion page and briefly had a Wikipedia entry. While many people dismiss him as a slacker (and suggest that if he spent his time studying instead of whining on blogs, he could finish at the top of his class and actually secure a high paying legal job), lately more of the discussion when he appears revolve around whether the new poster is the original Loyola 2L or an impostor. If deemed an impostor, discussion then goes to how effective the impostor is at capturing the L2L zeitgeist.