Title Video Credit: Adobe Stock.

Trigger warning: this page contains references to cyberbullying, pedophilia, vulgar language and suicide

Nate was lounging in front of his house with his friend when he spotted someone walking by that he recognized. The man in the camouflage hoodie with the hiking backpack is Daniel Larson, a social media celebrity whom the two of them had learned about while attending high school. Now, a few years later, here he was right in front of their college bachelor pad in Boulder, Colorado.  

Nate, an undergraduate at CU Boulder, decided to approach him to say hello and offer him a meal at the nearby Waffle Lab, knowing that Larson was neurodivergent and experiencing homelessness. 

The decision would nearly ruin his life. Associating with Larson, who has not responded to requests for comment,  would cause him to become the target of ruthless internet “trolls” who follow Larson online and regularly harass him, something that he was not aware of.

Liz Fong-Jones is an engineer and activist who has been the target of trolling herself and has since dedicated substantial time and resources to fighting against it. In the process, she has become quite familiar with their methods and why they tend to target people like Larson.

“It is a set of people who, I don't know whether they sincerely believe it or whether they're role-playing at it,” said Fong-Jones.  “But there [is a] set of people who think that they are exposing wrongdoing … and therefore they can justify doing what they do.”

But such digital vigilantism could interfere with an actual criminal investigation in some cases, Fong-Jones notes.

Allegations against Larson are not the only reason he is targeted, however. His mental state and lack of resources or a support system to defend himself make him a tempting candidate for harassment.

“They pick on vulnerable targets,” said Fong-Jones. “They pick on people that no one is willing to advocate for.”

 Regardless of each follower’s stance on and reason for trolling Larson, Fong-Jones notes a commonality.

“It is all entertainment to them,” she said. “[Trolling] is how they pass their time. It’s how they get their rocks off.”

Sharing so much of his life online seems to have twisted Larson’s life into a darker take on “The Truman Show.”

Followers of Larson, as well as followers of other lolcows, are extremely dedicated. He has followers on a variety of platforms, including a popular subreddit that is frequently updated in addition to an entire wiki dedicated to archiving and recording his exploits where all of the “lore” is documented, allowing followers to stay up to date with Larson’s exploits. 

However, casual viewers like Nate who are unfamiliar with lolcow culture also exist since videos from or about lolcows will often go viral, exposing thousands of new individuals to the content.

The week of Sept. 11, Larson, who hails from the Denver area, was convinced to come to the University of Colorado Boulder by an unknown troll who had told him he was being admitted as a student and had received a full-ride scholarship. Nate would meet Larson soon after he arrived in Boulder, and there would be several social media posts documenting their short time together. Nate wouldn’t be the only one to recognize Larson and attempt to befriend him. 

“Once we got him food everyone started to notice that he was there,” said Nate. “People just started to congregate around us. They were like, ‘Oh my God, no way, it's actually him.’” 

Nate claims that Larson would go back to the bar to join those who recognized him there after leaving the fraternity house and that it was those students who were drinking with him and encouraging him to hit on women.

Larson spent the rest of the week being paraded around campus by students, attending parties, and even going on a fake “dorm tour.” His week on campus culminated in his arrest on Sept. 16, a Saturday in which the university hosted a game at home against longtime rival Colorado State, after he had been convinced by a troll posing as  CU's head coach, Deion Sanders, that he would be singing the national anthem. Of course, this was not true. 

A physical altercation between Larson and security ensued, and Larson was arrested He was charged with third-degree assault and then released a few days later. On Nov. 30,  he pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree assault in court. He was given a 12-month probation, 48 hours of community service, an order to take anger management classes, and a fine. The judge also instructed him to stay away from Folsom Field.

“I didn’t want to hurt anyone or cause any major issues,” Larson said to the judge. 

During the hearing, Larson still seemed to be under the impression that he was supposed to be at the football game and asked if he would be allowed to apply to the university in the future, which the judge said would be allowed.

While many students, and presumably nonstudents, were involved in this incident, Nate would be the only one to face any consequences despite his limited involvement with Larson. He made the mistake of posting his fraternity’s name in a TikTok featuring Larson, which would lead Larson’s followers to assume that they were with him for the whole incident, and were possibly even the ones who lured him to campus in the first place. 

What the heck is a lolcow?

So how did things get this way? When did the internet become so cruel? In many ways, this is how it has always been. The anonymity that online forums offer allows individuals to say and do heinous things without facing the social consequences they would in real life, so it would make sense that trolling would emerge rather quickly. Trolling has become so commonplace that it has an entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, defined as “a person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content.”

Whitney Phillips is the assistant professor of Digital Platforms and Ethics at the University of Oregon and the author of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture." She notes that trolling can be done for various reasons, ranging from harmless to straight-up malicious. 

“These days, when people use the term troll, some people will describe themselves as a troll but in my experience, it's more common now for people to accuse others of trolling,” said Phillips. “And that can mean all kinds of things. That's one of the reasons that trolling is a tricky word to use.”

Trolling has been used for everything from harmless pranks to attempts to influence the US presidential elections. Online trolling seems to be a sort of tool that can be used to achieve a vast variety of purposes or support any given cause on a large or small scale. Lolcow culture is just one of many reasons people engage in trolling.

As the modern internet emerged in the early 2000s, so did lolcow culture, with the earliest uses of the term taking place around 2007. Lolcow culture would begin to take off the same year when trolls would latch onto an individual named Chris Chandler, known online as Chris-Chan, who had begun posting video game fan-comics featuring the character “Sonichu,” a combination of popular characters Sonic and Pikachu.

Much like Larson, Chandler, who is also neurodivergent, posted online constantly and was easily manipulated by trolls. The harassment of Chandler would serve as an early example of a lolcow going viral as well as the framework by which trolls use to harass new targets.  Chandler’s story would be meticulously documented by followers over the years, so much so that there exists an 80-part podcast and docuseries called “Chris-Chan: A Comprehensive History.”

In August 2021, Chandler lost the support of sympathizers when she was arrested for incest after sexually abusing her elderly mother, who struggled with dementia. Chandler was released in early 2023 after spending time in both jail and a mental health facility. She has only recently begun posting online again.

Much like the dairy cows from which they get their name, lolcows will eventually begin to yield less and less satisfying content, causing trolls to look for their next target. This is a large part of why the CWCki Forum, created to discuss Chandler, would rebrand to Kiwi Farms and become a hub for trolls of all kinds. Lolcow.farm is another website that caters to trolls looking to discuss these individuals. Apps like Discord, as well as websites like Reddit or 4chan, and even mainstream social media platforms all have communities dedicated to lolcows as well. TikTok has been an especially fruitful source of content for trolls that follow lolcows in recent years, with many new individuals becoming targets due to their content on the platform.

The world of trolling appeals to a variety of individuals with various motivations. but Fong-Jones notes that many of them are young and impressionable.

“They’re bored young kids,” she said. “Bored young kids who are being inoculated with this vile, sadistic culture.”

The culture that took root over 15 years ago continues to thrive as kids become followers and then trolls themselves, taking the lead from those who came before them and never outgrew it.

“The reality is that there are these people who are you know, 30,40, 50 years old who have kind of made it their life's mission to do this,” said Fong-Jones. “They’re indoctrinating these people into, what I think is fairly described as a cult, right?”

Screenshots of posts from r/daniellarson, a Reddit page dedicated to discussing Larson

Virtual Forums, Actual People

The real-world ramifications of trolling can be drastic, and can quite literally ruin or even end lives. For Nate, the real-world consequences of poking the hornet’s nest of the Larson subreddit would manifest themselves quickly. Within days, they knew everything about not only him but his family as well. 

Not only was he reported to the school and his fraternity, but trolls also found the phone numbers of his father and his sister. The trolls told his family members that he had been providing Larson with alcohol and encouraging him to sexually assault women, both of which were untrue accusations. 

“Obviously like my dad believed it because, you know, who would lie about something like that?” he added. “So this became like a whole ordeal with my family thinking like I actually did all this and I was gonna get kicked out of school.”

Besides a brief suspension from his fraternity, while an investigation was conducted and no evidence of wrongdoing was found, Nate would emerge from the experience relatively unscathed. Many victims of trolling are unable to say the same.

“Nothing significant happened at all,” he said. “Besides the mental effects it had on me. It's definitely made me struggle in school a little bit and has kept me up at night.”

For Larson, however, the repercussions from his week in Boulder are very real and the students and other individuals responsible will likely go unnamed and unpunished while the trolls continue to harass Larson as long as he uses the internet.

Even worse is the fact that this is far from an isolated incident. Lolcows, much like Larson, tend to be from marginalized groups, and the troll’s behavior towards them is often deeply rooted in hate, with ableism, racism, and transphobia running rampant in forums about them. 

“You've got people who are crusading for a cause,” said Fong-Jones. “You've got the people who are like ‘the trans cult must be eliminated.’”

Kiwi Farms is by far the most infamous of all the platforms that these trolls congregate on. While it is not the main platform that Larson’s followers use, he is discussed there.

Harassment from its users has been linked to multiple suicides, has ruined multiple lives, and serves as a platform for transphobic individuals looking to attack trans people.

“A majority of the people that Kiwi farms go after are transgender, but not all,” said Fong-Jones. “And I think [Larson]  is a rare exception, which I think is interesting. They also go after people who are autistic, neurodivergent or otherwise mentally ill but like, and in most cases, both [that as well as being trans], but sometimes it's one or the other.”

Fong-Jones has assembled a team of activists, and they are now doing whatever they can to take a stand against the forum.

Looking for Solutions

In a world where social media is a large part of everyday life, and where free speech is encouraged and anonymity is possible to a certain extent, trolling is inevitable with the environment social media has created. People are going to say what they want to say online, and are unlikely to be convinced to stop.

“If you're a person who's motivated to do harm, because it's either entertaining or because you have a political reason for doing so, having someone say ‘No, that's not nice’ does nothing because the person's like, ‘Right, and I have made a cost-benefit analysis. And I have chosen to engage in these behaviors.’” said Phillips.

With better moderation, trolling wouldn’t be as severe on mainstream, however, it takes a significant amount of resources to moderate accurately and effectively, and users become subject to the biases of moderators. Especially since moderators are often trolls themselves as members of these online communities. Banned users can also make new accounts and continue the problematic behavior.

“It would be great if there was a solution to like, prevent this from happening,” said Nate. “But it's just such a minimal thing, you know? Like what can you really do to help me out in this case? Report everyone on Reddit to the police? There’s not much. That's what makes it kind of hard in my eyes.”

Due to a lack of straightforward solutions, it will likely take a substantial amount of time, effort, and money to produce lasting change.

“It takes a lot of resources to de-platform a hate site,” noted Fong-Jones.

For Fong-Jones, her faith lies in the legal system. She's using her residency status in Australia, where one of the companies Kiwi Farms uses to provide services is based, to sue under Australia’s defamation laws. If her lawsuit is successful, the website could be in real trouble and face significant monetary damages.

“I don’t regret [what I did],” said Nate. “But I do regret putting my name out there on Reddit.”

In addition to a need for online spaces to make adjustments to prevent trolling, there also exists a need to provide resources for individuals like Larson for the well-being of them, and those around them.

Larson’s disability makes him an easy target, and unfortunately an impressionable one as well, and he will likely continue to fan the flames in which he stands unless there is some form of intervention. 

“I wish they would stop doing what they're doing,” said Fong-Jones. “But it's clear that they are going to keep on doing it until they are not able to anymore.”