Encyclopedia Dramatica

Encyclopedia Dramatica became a "favourite target for critics, who accuse Anonymous of propagating hate,"[10] for allowing alleged members of the group to sometimes use the website as a platform. Through this association, Encyclopedia Dramatica received incidental coverage when actions by members of Anonymous led to the arrest of an alleged pedophile,[11] when they demonstrated against Scientology in London;[12][13] when a member of the group broke into the e-mail account of former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin,[14] and when a member of Anonymous claimed credit for an attack on the virtual Second Life headquarters of former presidential candidate John Edwards.[15][16] The convergence of Encyclopedia Dramatica with the anti-Scientology campaign of Project Chanology was noted by technology journalist Julian Dibbell.[17]

The celebration and archival of the "raids" organized on /b/ on Encyclopedia Dramatica, which acted as a "troll hall of fame" when used this way,[18] has been seen by some scholars, among them Liam Mitchell of Trent University, as acting as a way to assuage the guilt that trolls feel for harming their victims and being confronted with evidence of this harm. By celebrating on Encyclopedia Dramatica, and archiving that which would make an individual member guilty, trolls collectively engage in a type of mob mentality where the idea that "none of us is as cruel as all of us" minimizes the actions they take individually: "One cannot reason with a multitude, let alone appeal to its conscience. If any of its members are not susceptible to reason or conscience—the province of the ego ideal, and therefore of the divide that characterizes subjectivity—then the trolling will proceed."[19]