Troll Hunter: The Commenter’s Worst Nightmare

I’m wildly shocked that America didn’t come up with this idea first—especially since our internet trolls are globally unparalleled. Check out the trailer below for the Swedish show Troll Hunter (Trolljägarna), in which finger-pointing journalist Robert Aschberg and his team of tech-savvy bulldogs track down the country’s meanest, most despicable anonymous internet trolls and force them to admit to their crimes on national TV. From what I’ve read about the series, it’s kind of like To Catch a (Internet) Predator, in which the team goes after the worst of the worst on the web. From MIT Technology Review:

The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness: näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its second season.

You probably don’t speak Swedish, but this commercial for Troll Hunter will give you a good taste for the tone of the series.