Had a great time this week on social media at the expense of social media trolls.

“While an individual troll’s behavior may be held as basically harmless, organized trolling, however, is altogether politically dangerous.

After a long break from reading comments posted under stories put out by mainstream media outlets, often nonsensical than enlightening, I pleasantly read again these posts as there was evident change.

It seems my friends and, more importantly, ordinary citizens whose Facebook profiles I diligently checked to see if they were indeed real people were again commenting, dishing out opinions on stories or articles.

After observing and reading for a few more days, it dawned on me that here was a social media trend worth commenting on: people weren’t staying silent anymore and were coming out of tightly closed shells they had created to defend themselves against trolls!

And the surprising thing was that these citizens were not only engaging but also taking down obvious trolls, contradicting their asinine comments or sneering at them with obvious delight even if they were insulted or threatened. They were trolling the trolls.

It also certainly did look that trolls were getting their asses kicked in a game they had hijacked and which they boasted had mastered.

With ordinary citizens starting to reclaim hijacked social media spaces, it as if hostages inside a bus who were at first cowering in fear of the hijackers have now taken it upon themselves to do something and were now pushing out one hijacker at a time from the hijacked bus!

At this point, it must also be noted that the circumstances inside the bus or of the social media spaces have drastically changed, too. If previously, social media spaces had a Wild West-feel of unbridled comments and threats, controls are in place.

Take the comments on the social media posts of mainstream media. Previously most of the comments, no matter how hurtful or threatening, were left as they were originally posted. These weren’t edited as media outlets were mistakenly convinced these fell under the ambit of “freedom of expression.”

But media has changed and nowadays media’s social media accounts actively filter and take down troll posts, judging them as “irrelevant,” a euphemism for media’s assertive power to bar anyone abusive or harmful.

Facebook, the social media platform of choice by the majority of the country’s 71 million users, is also refusing to be an indifferent party to the troll’s game. Facebook this year kicked out blatant propaganda pages from its platform, depriving trolls of arranged and handy “weapons.”

Trolls, of course, are still much around, still sporting anonymous identities, still spewing abusive comments which somehow managed to escape media’s filters and they still do manage to get the goats of ordinary citizens.

In the meantime, for those who haven’t a clear idea on how to spot a troll, one dead giveaway is the troll’s habitual use of “LOL,” the shortcut for “laughing out loud.” A troll cannot seem to dispense with “LOL” every time he or she makes an uncalled for comment.

Why? The troll, according to most studies of their behavior, really believe that what they do is all for fun and that people shouldn’t take them seriously or their views on political or social issues.

In fact, studies say what trolls practice is a form of “latrinalia,” a term in popular culture for the aggressive and vicious writing often found on the walls of dirty, unkempt public toilets.

Here, there are no clues on who wrote on the wall nor to whom they are pissed at, whether against a person or society itself.

Take that toilet behavior and amplify that on the Internet where the same conditions of anonymity fueling fewer inhibitions exist. One study says “the Internet is now commonly blamed for liberating previously repressed aggression.”

Below-the-line comments are also seen by political theorists as a byword for emotional viciousness, seen not as a byproduct of the media content on which it feeds, but as the dark side of “online democratization.”

And this “dark side” encourages a climate, the argument goes, where political discourse is shaped by appeals to sentiment, not facts. Trolling can then be seen as just one more way to sabotage the political discourse.

Anyway, while an individual troll’s behavior may be held as basically harmless, organized trolling, however, is altogether politically dangerous.

In this country, investigative reports indicate trolls have been organized and turned into political weapons, possibly even with Russian help. Handsomely paid, trolls now have explicit political affiliations that it is hard to assume they’re doing it all for fun.

And what is the mission of these organized trolls on social media? One and only one mission: to fuel the outrage of large masses of people against any sector in society their masters want to either control or demolish.

“Don’t feed the trolls” was often the first line of defense in the powerful heyday of organized trolls. It was an unfortunate development as it led to the so-called “echo chamber” where citizens, instead of engaging with other people of dissimilar views for the betterment of society, imprisoned themselves together with other people with prejudices similar as their own.

But now that the tide seems to be turning against the trolls and there are hopes social media spaces are again safe for airing opposing views without physical or emotional risks, it is time then to encourage more well-meaning citizens to re-occupy social media.