Carle Jasmin (Image : Facebook account of Brenda Lopez)

Do you know about trolling? Trolling is the art of provoking someone on the Internet and watching others get angry. The troll does not always debate in order to move an idea forward: they often seek to provoke, ridicule, exaggerate or push their interlocutor to the breaking point.

The phenomenon is particularly visible on social media, where an intentionally outrageous post can receive hundreds of reactions within minutes. The more users become outraged, the more the troll generally considers that they have succeeded. Anger then becomes their fuel and the algorithm, their best ally.

Trolling can take several forms: deliberately spreading false information, insulting comments, political provocations, personal attacks or claims so absurd that they appear to have been designed solely to trigger a reaction. Some trolls even use a well-known strategy: seriously claiming something they know to be false, then accusing those who challenge them of lacking a sense of humor.

The problem is that the line between trolling, disinformation and simple bad faith can sometimes be very thin. Repeated provocation can quickly contaminate a normal conversation, divert attention from the original subject and give disproportionate visibility to the person who shouts the loudest.

In the present case, we are dealing with a person who presents herself under the name Brenda Lopez, an identity that remains impossible to verify since her Facebook profile is locked. What is much easier to verify, however, are the numerous homophobic signals left on LGBTQ+ groups, including Les P’tits LGBT, as well as the repeated provocations targeting members of these communities with hateful statements and images directed against us.

And this is how trolling works: take a real piece of information, deliberately remove part of its context, add a small dose of provocation and, above all, finish with a triumphant “Good news!” During the night, our Internet user published a new claim stating that Toyota was stopping its sponsorship of LGBTQ+ events in order to redirect those budgets toward innovation and education. Presented in this way, the news could obviously seem encouraging to those who want to see any commitment to LGBTQ+ people disappear.

Except that there was a small problem: the information, dating from 2024, was presented without several essential elements needed to understand it. Toyota was not announcing the abandonment of its internal “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies and was not ending its commitments to LGBTQ+ people. Rather, it concerned the redirection of certain external budgets toward new internal programs.

In other words, all that was needed was to read the information in full rather than select the few words needed to manufacture the desired message.

This is precisely where trolling becomes more than simple provocation. It transforms real information into a tool of disinformation through omission. The goal is no longer to inform, but to provoke a reaction, stir up outrage or reinforce an audience that is already convinced.

And when the target is an LGBTQ+ community and the same tactics are repeated in its own discussion spaces, this is no longer simply a matter of differing opinions. It is a perfectly predictable strategy of provocation: throw out the bait, wait for the reactions and then feed on the anger that has been provoked.

Four days ago, still with the apparent goal of stirring up hatred toward people in LGBTQ+ communities, she published a second message about an alleged father of an 11-year-old boy who supposedly caught an 18-year-old having a sexual relationship with his son. She went so far as to claim that the father had beaten him almost to death, without, however, having been charged by the courts, and accompanied the whole thing with the statement: “Always these fucking homosexuals, bravo to this dad.”

A post that obviously provoked numerous reactions of outrage from members of the Facebook group in question.

The images posted on her page are equally revealing. In the main image at the top of her page, she shows one person kicking another person, the latter being depicted in LGBTQ+ colors. Her profile picture, meanwhile, shows parents with children under an umbrella, trying to protect themselves from LGBTQ+-colored rain.

And when she responds to questions from group members asking her why she posts this kind of content, she notably replies: “xxx, because you are nothing but a bunch of assholes,” accompanied by a middle finger, etc.

This person is the perfect example of the use of social media, under the cover of anonymity, to stir up hatred against certain elements of society, a situation that Facebook, in this particular case, unfortunately allows to pass. In such situations, it is important not to react, to report the post or posts to the group administrators and also report them to Facebook in the section dedicated to hate messages.

At best, her account will be closed. At worst, nothing will happen.

And good news: even before I had finished writing this article, the hateful message posted in the Les P’tits LGBT group had been removed, either by the group administrators or by Facebook following our report.

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