What is a lolcow?
A lolcow is someone bullies provoke for laughs. Typically, a lolcow is someone with some sort of mental, physical, or developmental disability, which makes them an easy target. They are also often desperate for attention, which leads them to post online a lot. This is how the trolls and bullies find them. And when the trolls start paying attention, they love it at first—they think they have a lot of new friends and followers and are very popular. Then the trolls go in for the kill. The word itself seems innocent enough, a combination of "lol" and "cow"—someone who can be milked for laughs, basically. But the laughs are always mean-spirited and at the lolcow's expense. While some lolcows do manage to escape the online cycle of bullying and improve their lives, in most cases the experience doesn't turn out well for the targeted person—either online or in real life. Some people use lolcow in a more sanitized way to refer to a person or group they perceive to be acting like a lolcow, or engaging in ridiculous or embarrassing behavior. Even in a more sanitized context, the term isn't meant to be nice. For example, you might call your team a lolcow if they lost in a blowout to the worst team in the league.
Where "Lolcow" Originated
The term "lolcow" originated online sometime in 2006 or 2007. The earliest dated use of "lolcow" is an April 2007 entry in Urban Dictionary. Since users don't typically create entries on Urban Dictionary for words they just made up, it's a fair assumption that the word was used in various online circles before that entry was created. Urban Dictionary is often the first mainstream appearance of an online term that's already made the rounds on anonymous imageboards and forums. In December of 2007, an entry for "lolcow" was created on Encyclopedia Dramatica. That website operates a bit like a Wikipedia for trolls, which also supports the idea that the word was coined in some fringe online community, likely an anonymous forum or imageboard. Anonymous websites, including forums and imageboards, are popular places for trolls to gather and coordinate attacks against targets. Around the same time in 2007, users on the Something Awful forum started posting about and making fun of someone named Chris Chandler. Chandler is widely recognized as the first-ever lolcow. Josh Moon, who founded Kiwi Farms, was a member of Something Awful at that time and trolled Chandler extensively.
Lolcows were popularized on forums such as 4chan and Kiwi Farms. Regardless of where it came from, the whole lolcow concept took on a life of its own through imageboards and forms that are typically popular with trolls and the chronically online. These forums had a reputation for bullying that predated lolcows, although Kiwi Farms users likely instigated the trend of harassing and abusing lolcows—largely for entertainment. It's important to note that not all targets of coordinated trolling efforts are lolcows. You might think of lolcows as the targets of a very specific type of bullying that's not intended to make them go away so much as to make them post more and more. As social media grew, trolls gained more platforms they could use to follow and harass their targets.
TikTok has given new life to the lolcow phenomenon. Back in the 2010s, you had to actively follow a lolcow's account if you wanted to stay up to date on their antics. But thanks to TikTok's "For You" page, lolcows get much broader visibility now than they did when the term originated. This broader visibility raises some ethical questions about whether it's morally ok to engage with lolcow content. Some people claim to follow lolcows out of genuine concern for their health and safety, but they likely still get at least some entertainment out of it. It's totally possible that you're genuinely interested in the content that the lolcow posts, outside of whatever they're doing to feed the trolls. In that case, you might avoid watching or interacting with any content that seems exploitative. If you encounter a post and suspect the person might be a lolcow, make sure you're not interacting or engaging with that content in an exploitative way (such as by making encouraging comments).
Famous Lolcows
Chris Chan Christina Chandler, widely acknowledged to have been the first lolcow, was in many ways responsible for the creation of Kiwi Farms, the imageboard that would go on to create many more lolcows. Josh Moon, the creator of Kiwi Farms, originally created the website to chronicle Chandler's exploits. Moon and other Something Awful users would post every time Chandler posted and unleash a torrent of abuse and harassment in Chandler's direction. Harassment and abuse of Chandler eventually spilled over into the real world as well, with anonymous Kiwi Farms users targeting her parents, pastor, and others to get confidential information about Chandler that they could later use to harass her with. Chandler was ultimately arrested on incest charges after a video of her was posted on Kiwi Farms in which she admitted to having sex with her mother. In the eyes of many Kiwi Farms users, Chandler's disgusting and damaging behavior justified their treatment of her.
Liz Fong-Jones Less a lolcow herself, Fong-Jones nevertheless became a target of harassment from Kiwi Farms users as an openly trans game developer. Fed up with the dangerous abuse and stalking that lolcows and other Kiwi Farms targets face, she took action. After some initial success in 2022, Fong-Jones continues her efforts to get the Kiwi Farms website taken down completely and permanently. Because there are so many backups and supporters of the website, it often isn't down for long before it pops back up somewhere else on a different domain. Fong-Jones attempted to report the abuse and stalking to the NYPD and was told that if she just got offline and ignored it, it would go away. They didn't understand how an online threat could become an immediate one.
Amberlynn Reid This internet personality got her start on YouTube, which is also where the trolls discovered her content and turned her into a lolcow. As of 2024, Reid is still active on YouTube and other social media platforms, including TikTok. She is also still relentlessly trolled. Reid's critics argue that she brings all of this on herself because she cares more about getting attention from followers than she does about losing weight, which is the stated purpose of her YouTube channel and social media presence. Reid's case can also be a little harder to unravel because she posted a video in which she basically admitted that she trolled her YouTube followers to get more engagement and more money.
Joshua Block As WorldofTShirts on TikTok, Block has started down a very similar lolcow journey to Reid's. Where Reid ate herself to morbid obesity for her followers, Block is drinking himself to death. Before he started on the drinking binge, Block posted perfectly wholesome content about New York City, where he lived.
Marcela Huerta Huerta was the community manager of a game studio that released a game that featured a non-binary protagonist. Kiwi Farms trolls are notoriously transphobic, so the game (and anyone associated with it) quickly became a lolcow for them. Trolls chronicled Huerta's every action on Kiwi Farms forums—she wisely opted not to engage with any of it. After this experience, which began in 2020, Huerta has continued to speak out against the very real and very dangerous threats that are being made to people online. Huerta notes that local police often aren't equipped to respond appropriately to online threats and don't even know how to get the information necessary to respond. Law enforcement officers often misunderstand the issue, believing that targets can simply turn off their computers, go offline, or block the accounts. This misunderstanding also puts the onus on the victim of the behavior.
Daniel Larson Of all the lolcows, Larson might be the one most people would have the hardest time defending. There's an entire wiki dedicated just to him, as well as a documentary that lasts over 3 hours, but if you don't have time for all of that, here's the TL;DR: Larson is a delusional person who makes grandiose claims and can easily be talked into believing things. Larson can also easily be triggered into having meltdowns. When he posts these public incidents on TikTok, it encourages trolls to find ways to trigger even bigger and more explosive meltdowns. Larson is currently facing up to 65 years in federal prison for making terroristic threats.
Controversy
Trolls bully some lolcows into seriously harming or even killing themselves. Even though some people might try to argue that their teasing of a lolcow is all in good fun, most trolls actually get off on a lolcow's pain, humiliation, and embarrassment. The specific things they enjoy depend on the particular vulnerabilities of each lolcow, but they almost certainly end in suffering for the lolcow (and often for their friends and family as well). For example, one common tactic is to follow someone who posts online about their suicidal ideations and encourage them to make their thoughts reality. If a lolcow indicates a willingness to make a fool out of themselves in public, trolls will encourage them to do increasingly ridiculous things—many of which could ultimately end up with the lolcow injured or arrested, if not dead.
Some people believe lolcows are harmless fun. They might point out that following a lolcow is no different than hate-watching a reality TV show and making fun of the people on it. Those who defend the humor of lolcows might argue that these people are still making the choice to do these things—nobody's putting a gun to their head and forcing them to do it. For defenders of lolcows, this is what makes lolcows funny—the fact that they're so desperate for attention that they'll do literally anything their followers ask. Being that desperate for attention is, in their view, worthy of mockery.
Most lolcows have mental disabilities that make them easy to exploit. Defenders of lolcow humor rely on lolcows making a rational decision to do ridiculous or embarrassing things for attention, but for many lolcows that's not the case. Because of emotional or developmental disabilities, they might be incapable of making that decision in a rational way. They also might not understand that it's even a decision they need to make—they might earnestly believe that they're popular online and that people are admiring them and cheering them on.
Lolcows often don't know that their audience is trolling them. The trolling starts with clever comments that can be read either as a compliment or an insult. Since the target is desperate for approval and attention, they readily read it as a compliment and are encouraged to keep posting more. As they post more frequently and interact with the trolls more often, the trolls start getting them to do progressively more ridiculous and harmful things. Quite often, the trolls keep up the friendly ruse when communicating directly with the lolcow. They do talk and joke about it in the forums though, which is where the real cruelty comes out. Since these are public forums, it's only a matter of time before the lolcow discovers that there's a whole forum dedicated to trolling them. But since these forums are anonymous, they'll never know for sure which of their followers are trolls. Defenders of lolcow humor like to say that the lolcows themselves are in on the joke—that they know they're being trolled, but they just enjoy the attention that much and know that being a victim of trolling will earn them sympathy from others.
No one deserves to be treated the way lolcows are treated. Ultimately, people who are entertained by lolcows will try to tell you that each one of them deserves it for whatever reason. They might even point to truly heinous things that a lolcow has done to try to convince you that this person is somehow less deserving of kindness than others. But the truth is that lolcows are real people and deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. Some trolls who go after lolcows see themselves as crusaders who are only going after people who violate the social order in some profound or disgusting way. If someone is posting content you don't like for whatever reason, all you have to do is scroll past it. There's no need to harass the person. You can even block their account if you want and then you'll never see it again.
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