The whole notion of online trolling suggests to many that it's something that involves pranks and results in resigned smiles or, at worst, a lot of eye-rolling. But, as journalist Ginger Gorman explained to Ryan Tubridy, trolling is no laughing matter. And Ginger should know – as well as being a victim of trolls, she's spent five years talking to what she calls predatory trolls for her book, Troll Hunting. She gave Ryan her definition of what predator trolling is:

"This is where people – individuals or syndicates of trolls – are using digital devices to do real-life harm. So I'm talking about psychological harm, physical harm. And I think we need to be really clear about this, like, my book links predator trolling to murder, to terrorism, to domestic violence, to stalking, to incitement to suicide."

Ginger's exposure to trolls began in 2010 when she made a profile for the ABC in her native Australia of two men who were later convicted for paedophilia. And although she couldn't have known the men were involved in an international paedophile ring at the time, she was piled on by online trolls – led by a conservative US commentator – who blamed her for putting the men's child in harm's way. This man incited his followers on social media to shame Ginger.

"Because he had thousands of followers, I literally just started to get waves and waves of hatred, like, pouring into my social media accounts. And it just became absolutely terrifying because I had two little babies. And one of the tweets I got said, 'Your life is over'."

At that point Ginger realised that her own tweets revealed her location, so anyone could find her house on Google Maps. And then a photo of her family appeared on a fascist website.

"I just have this memory of lying in bed at about 11 o'clock at night in cold fear, listening to my little babies breathing in the next room and just thinking, 'Did I just put my kids' lives in danger because of my job as a journalist?' "

So, why would Ginger spend five years meeting and talking to very serious predator trolls? As well as trying to come to grips with the fear that the threats had brought into her life, Ginger wanted to try to understand why it is that these men – and they're almost always men – spend so much of their time attacking, bullying and spewing hate at people online. But her primary reason was the fact that victims of trolls are so unprotected.

"Cyber hate targets are alone. Nobody's doing anything to help them, so I just felt that I had no choice in the end."

When she started, Ginger told Ryan, she was very naive, as she just sat down with a major troll in a café with her tape recorder. She soon learned that a lot of trolls wanted to talk to her:

"They feel marginalised, they feel unheard. They are very angry young men, most of them. They're not exclusively men, but mostly they are angry men with kind of white supremacist, outright misogynistic tendencies."

Predator trolling is a culture and it took Ginger quite some time to come to grips with the nature of it. And although she spoke to many people involved in that culture who were more than willing to speak to her, she discovered that she was the exact sort of person that trolls tend to hate most of all:

"I'm everything they hate, right. They hate women, they hate journalists, they especially hate white women, they hate Jews, they hate people in mixed-race marriages, they hate people who are left-wing… I was their hate much, you know what I mean? Like, if it was a dating app, I was their perfect hate match."

Trolls come in all shapes and sizes, some trying to get people killed, some trying to hoodwink the media on a grand scale and some just interested in causing pain. What Ginger reckons they all have in common is that they're all quite sadistic. Trolling is correlated with what's called the Dark Tetrad of personality traits:

"It's Machiavellianism, psychopathy-narcissism and sadism. But sadism is the strongest link."

Trolls want to hurt people and they take pleasure in it. It's a depressing thought, but Ginger Gorman is a really compelling guest and you can hear her entire conversation with Ryan here.

Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout by Ginger Gorman is published by Hardie Grant Books.

Niall Ó Sioradáin