Every day Lucie Bittalová mocks neo-Nazis and racists on Facebook. In summer, she tricked a well-known crook and organizer of anti-Roma demonstrations. However, the young lady sitting at the computer seems kind and rather shy. Few would have guessed that she is already twenty seven.
The student of English studies at the Faculty of Arts engages in the so called “trolling" on social media. This, however, does not mean that she subverts on-line discussions by insulting or unrelated posts, which was the original meaning of the word. Lucie, along with other activists, fights against racism and hatred.
"For me, trolling is associated with doing something positive. It is a tool I use to push through a specific thought or to point out a specific issue," says Lucie. The young activist is mostly trolling on Facebook where she publishes posts or comments, often sarcastically ridiculing manifestations of racism and hatred.
She found her initial inspiration a year and a half ago, when people from the movement Žít Brno started making fun of a demonstration organized by neo-Nazis in Brno. Lucie liked the idea and spontaneously joined the Brno activist group. "They taught me how to be funny on the Internet," says Lucie today.
The highlight of her trolling career was when in summer 2014, she managed to dupe the organizer of an anti-Roma demonstration Lukáš Kohout. She promised to this well-known confidence trickster that she would provide sound-engineering to his event which she did not. “It was probably as far as I could go in trolling," says the student and adds that now she is trying to find a way to implement Internet trolling into real life.
However, she does not have much time for her private fight against racism. Thanks to her on-line activities, her current colleague from the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic noticed her during spring 2014 and offered her a job of his assistant for coordinating a media campaign against racism. “We run a website where we disprove disinformation about certain groups of people, for example about the Roma people," explains Lucie. She is the one responsible for social media and communication with people who write articles to support the campaign or who place general inquiries.
She sees her career somewhere else than in translating or interpreting, nevertheless, she believes that studying English was of benefit to her. She mastered a foreign language and had a chance to go on Erasmus to Berlin and it was at the faculty that she first became interested in the fight against racism and hatred. "The lecturer Jeffrey Vanderziel teaches about the struggle of African Americans for civil rights as well as other similar interesting subjects that inspired me to start thinking about human rights," says Lucie.
Although she is now a self-proclaimed Prague-based cafe-lounger, every now and then she still comes to Brno. Besides her studies, her motivation is the project HateFree Stage. Within this platform she, together with her friends and in cooperation with the Feste theater, tries to find an entertaining way to bring attention to the topic of human rights. They use various performance schemes: from trolling readings, over stand-up shows to talk-shows. All of these take place at Kabinet múz.
Lucie has no doubts about the importance of her activities. "It is for sure a good thing that the topic is made more popular. But if it can possibly deter someone from going to a demonstration, that's hard to say," she adds. Also for this reason, Lucie considers one day finding more like-minded people with whom she could establish an organization which would, for example, help neo-Nazis to break away from a radical group. In this way, her fight for human rights would have even more impact.