Let’s say there’s a troll who has been banned from many different websites for Nazi apologia and other malicious actions. Troll is known to impersonate the people who called them out by stealing their exact aliases to sign up on other sites, with dozens of examples of this. This Troll says and does malicious things while operating under the guise of civility.

Troll sends themself anonymous asks to their Tumblr “drama” blog to feign engagement, with the “anonymous asker” (Troll) pretending to be a concerned person, saying “I personally know [Insert random person who just happens to have the same username as someone who exposed Troll] and I am very sad to see [Insert person who exposed Troll] is impersonating my friend, [Insert random person who just happens to have the same username as someone who exposed Troll]”.

When Troll links to the “impersonated” person’s account, the random person is always a blank account with no activity and is not even following Troll’s account. There’s no evidence that Troll is or was friends with the linked person. What Troll is doing is searching for blank accounts, some are over a decade old, that just coincidentally happen to have the same username as one of their exposers, as a type of “ha, see, you impersonate people too you hypocrite, your credibility is bust” gotcha. Which completely ignores the context that Troll only steals the aliases of people who exposed them, a very consistent pattern and nothing at all like two people coincidentally sharing the same username.

Would what Troll is doing be considered a form of concern-trolling? Or is this another type of manipulation/trolling that I’m not aware of? Troll often spams links to their blog as a way of trying to manipulate people unaware of their history into believing Troll is a “targeted individual” and the people exposing Troll for defending Nazis (among other things) are bad people.