'Troll Malayalam'- The Facebook page that doesn't spare anyone or anything

'Troll Malayalam'- The Facebook page that doesn't spare anyone or anything
'Troll Malayalam'- The Facebook page that doesn't spare anyone or anything
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Haritha John | The News Minute | December 21, 2014 | 1.45 pm ISTAs the Kerala Blasters lost to Athletico Kolkata, Kerala football fans were literally in mourning over their home team’s loss. One Facebook page however, churned jokes and satire, made light of some wounded pride and even went to the extent of congratulating the winning Kolkata team. The joke needs to be subtle, so that even the mourning fan can laugh a little.The Facebook page in discussion, Troll Malayalam, with over one lakh followers, is a page that keenly follows key contemporary issues and satirizes them.Most recently, the Peshawar terrorism attacks shook the entire world when over 400 school children died from firing. Taking a satirical stance on such sensitive issues is quite very risky. Can someone satirically criticize Peshawar attacks? Unexpectedly, the answer is yes!“Just like Malala had pretended to die from a gunshot, now more than 100 children must be pretending to be dead from gunshots, right?,” a meme asked.This is what Troll Malayalam had to say about six ministers of the Oommen Chandy government who were reported to being probed by the Vigilance department.The creator of the page wishes to remain anonymous. Working as an assistant director for Tamil movies, he started the page in 2012. “I started the page Malayalam Trolls in 2012. Then the page had only few followers and creative satires were still not too popular on Facebook for Malayalis. But within one year the page got huge acceptance” says the page coordinator who spoke to The News Minute.Political satires were once the exclusive domain of writers, popular cartoonists and the occasional TV shows, but thanks to the internet and social media the common man has got the right to criticize according to their imagination. The FaceBook page that was initially putting up only posts made by the page’s creator soon started taking in contributions. “We get hundreds of contributions daily from different people, but we used to screen it thoroughly and take one or two that can really evoke laughter” he added. In fact satires have become so popular and with a constant need to be updated, the page now has six admin coordinators. Following the success of Malayalam trolls many other pages which provide satirical comments mushroomed.“Our success was in localization of globalised issues. People love to understand things with a laugh. And we believe that even if you laugh at something, the seriousness of the issue is never lost” says another Admin of the page.But where does one draw the line? The page does have some posts which are sexist and conform to stereotypes. But the page admin insists that they sift a lot to make sure that obscene posts do not get carried. "We scrutinize the contributed posts thoroughly that we don't include any obscenity. We do get a lot of obscene posts. The people who abuse through internet comments are psychopaths, but what we do is creativity,” says the page creator. The page’s creator may not have realized it, but Troll Malayalam has also played its game on The New Minute themselves, when it gave a politically comical touch to the heart-touching story about a tea shop couple from Kerala. Tweet Read : A tea shop owner couple who have visited 16 countries, dream destination left Read : Young at 96: Meet the nonagenarian doctor who still continues practice

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