Back in 2008, when Orkut was in vogue, Roshan Thomas and his friends started a group called International Chalu Union. Popular among Malayalis as ICU, it was then a place for friends to share chalu (meaning lowbrow) jokes. In 2011, when Orkut lost its appeal, ICU too became inactive. And those who were taking care of the group too had left college by then, seeking newer pastures.
The following year Roshan restarted the same concept on Facebook, first as an open group and later as a page. To his surprise, within a year, the page became viral on Facebook and grew to be the leading troll page in Malayalam. Even celebrities, started sharing its jokes. The page now has a virtual administration team and has more than 90000 contributors from every nook and corner of the world. “The growth was quick and I hardly expected this to happen. In Orkut, we used to write down jokes on a wall. No images were used. While on Facebook, creative ideas using movie and other screen shots started popping up and that made ICU popular. On Facebook, images have a greater reach than words. In fact, people started volunteering to do work for us,” says Roshan adding that credit of ICU’s popularity goes to all its contributors who come up with rare screen shots for each news development.
The ride has not been easy for the team. They had to face many challenges such as the fake logo theft complaint and other threats. Recently, exploiting the popularity of the page, some political parties came up with fake pages to tease the opposition candidate. “The logo theft was a fake complaint filed by a Canada based cartoon company. They had sent us a notice for using one of their copyrighted images in our one post. We removed that image. But, then they sought penalty and we denied. That triggered them to take action. Later, we sorted out everything by sending our details to Facebook. And we are in no way connected with the fake pages of ICU started by political parties and the controversial post on Rahul Gandhi created by the pro-BJP page. They have actually misused our post by covering up the caption we had given,” says Roshan.
Along with ICU, other popular troll pages such as Troll Malayalam and Troll Mollywood emphasise the emerging troll culture. Their criticism on everything through humour has a great influence on society. Sarath Menon, an ex-NRI who started Troll Malayalam says that a Malayali finds humour in everything. “That ignited in me the idea of starting Troll Malayalam in 2011. But, response was poor then. By 2013, it became popular and people started sending us posts. It is very difficult to make Malayalis laugh. Their humour sense is high and so our job is difficult,” says Sarath. The team has 70000 contributors and they plan to do something more creative in future. They have already done a short film.
If these two pages were made to make people laugh, Troll Mollywood by a group of college students was started as a platform for giving genuine feedback about Malayalam cinema. The page was started by Vinesh. Renish, a member says, “Nowadays, reviews we read in media are not fair. That is what made us think of starting this page. Humour comes second in our page. There are seven members in our admin panel.”
It is commonly believed that online troll pages do not monitor their content. But, these three deny that, saying that there are gatekeepers in their pages. Roshan says, “Our admins always monitor the content. We never give politically incorrect jokes. Each post is first shared in our group. Only posts that get maximum popularity are shared in the page.” Will troll pages survive in the long run? “Yes, if tapped properly. We can sell it like news,” says Sarath. “But, we must learn to take trolls in their real sense. Celebrities are taking it in the right spirit. But, their fans are not. That should change,” adds Renish.
