Previously, I've been following /pol/ on 4chan for some years. What have impressed me is not the content itself, but its organization, the social structure, the creation of memes, the evolution of fringe political/identity movement that is unimaginable before the Internet. To understand its associated problem with it, it's crucial to establish a solid understanding of the underlying mechanism, the underlying social and economic factors that contribute to the problem of trolling.

This is why I'm quite disappointed about the mainstream media. For example, what are the social and cultural basis of Gamergate/Dark Enlightenment/incel movement? If you can't understand the underlying social basis and mechanism, and just blindly discredit them it as "far-right troll campaign", then it is parts of the problem, not the solution.

I've said repeatedly online - this kind of cultural issue is NOT about "the liberal media", "antifa", "SJWs", "trolls", "incels", "alt-right", "fake news", or "Donald Trump", these are just the "first-order" effect - what most people have easily observed. But the underlying issue - how Internet works to produce these ideas, the larger social problems behind them, can only be understood by looking at it from a higher perspective, as a postmodern phenomena, and to study it faithfully and carefully by the best sociologists and psychologists, and by the people who understand these online community and technology, and can analyze it in a neural way, just tell us how the system works, without preexisting bias or political stance. So we can finally have some ideas to solve it. Unfortunately, the number of people who are doing academic studies on these subjects, is almost nonexistent.

Personally, I'm only aware of the following people who are studying it.

o Book: Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, by Cole Stryker. This is probably the earliest and the most well-known one. However, its ~2007 narrative of 4chan and its politics is out-of-date, but it still covers how an online platform can popularize a radical social movement.

o Book: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press. This book explores history of trolling, and studies it from a cultural and social perspective, and identifies some of the underlying mechanisms.

o Talk: The dark side of free software communities, by Morgan Gangwere, at LibrePlanet 2018. The talker discovers the fringe tech culture on the wild Internet, on 4chan/8chan, characterized by hatred - where RMS was the official mascot, and quite a few people (possibly basement dwellers) who believes the Internet is controlled by the evil monopolists/Freemason/Jewish/capitalist conspiracy, free software is not an exception but it's still a powerful tool against their rule, and how SJW is undermining it. Unfortunately, the talker's research focused on building a good community, not a detailed study of fringe tech culture.

o Book: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right, by Angela Nagle, focuses on the history of the current cultural war online. I haven't read the book yet, so I'm not sure what is the perspective of book.

It seriously deserves more complete study from more people, I'm more interested in an ethnography-based approach. However, I don't have any background knowledge on sociology to make any insightful commentary on it... Seriously, reading /pol/ has almost made me wanted to change my major from software engineering to sociology, just to study it and trying to understand how the counter-cultural fringe politics works online, however, it's an unlikely career for me to pursuit.