If Time Magazine had asked my opinion about their Person of the Year (and they didn’t), I would have told them: The Trolls. If you’ve been on the Internet at all this year, you probably know that an Internet troll is a person who promotes discord by purposefully posting inflammatory comments or content. Veracity is of no import to the troll.

It’s been quite a year for the bullying gremlins. Maybe it was even prophetic that the Warner Bros. film Gremlins, about benevolent little creatures morphing into evil beings, and multiplying, was released in 1984. While the Internet is not quite Big Brother (yet!), it is a Habermasian public sphere and a powerful, if virtual, institution. (Orwell is probably turning over in his grave in Oxfordshire.)

It’s not as if 2016 gave birth to the troll. Trolls were spotlighted in 2014 with Jessika Aro’s expose of Russian troll farms, and the release the following year of Jon Ronson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. But this year they sprouted and proliferated, passed a tipping point, and ran rampant across the Web.

In Hollywood, Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones was targeted. Just last week they came after Amy Schumer, who was in talks to play Barbie. At The New York Times, Washington deputy editor Jonathan Weisman left Twitter after anti-Semitic trolls took to bashing him. (The upshot: a pro-social trend to flood the Internet using the parenthetical “echoes,” previously used by anti-Semites to denote Jews.) In the sporting world, they came when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem. They also came during the Summer Olympics, when Simone Biles was catapulted into a sea of trolls.

Meanwhile, they came to the Ivory Tower, when Amy Cuddy (whose TED talk on power posing has over 35 million views) published her book Presence and served as the target of academic trolls attacking her work. In Silicon Valley, the sale of Twitter was canceled by Salesforce specifically because the trolls spun out of control. And even across the pond, the royal family was not immune. Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s American girlfriend, fell prey to the trolls (even as Harry’s brother, H.R.H. Prince William leads a Kensington Palace task force to address bullying among young people).

And then, of course, there were the gremlins of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The political trolls and bots overpopulated the Internet, feeding on negativity, disseminating disinformation, and becoming more vitriolic as November 8 approached. The effects, from which we are still reeling, have changed our country profoundly.

The political ramifications of this trend could be seen elsewhere, too: in the United Kingdom, as fallout to its referendum on Brexit; in the peace negotiations between Colombia and the FARC; and, currently, in France’s presidential election. Yes, there is still such a thing as an old-fashioned, textbook difference of opinion. But in 2016 trolling became perversely de riguer.

It’s natural to turn to psychology to sort this out. In 2003, the year after Second Life launched (remember that online platform?!), psychologist John Suler published his work on the psychological phenomena, the Online Disinhibition Effect. He posited that online behavior could create dissociations and distancing from one’s regular personality—encouraged by the invisibility of the Internet. The result has been that online experiences (such as Second Life), all kinds of gaming, and now social media, have cultivated new social norms that not only support but encourage people to develop different personas—a bit like a year-round Halloween.

A 2014 study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences yielded harsh conclusions about key personality facets of trolls: “Cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism . . . Trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, [and] Machiavellianism.” Quite a trifecta! There’s no denying that deep-seeded hatred and frustration fuels many individuals inclined to trolling behavior.

Sadly, as we near the end of the year, we see the long shadow of trolling as it impacts the lives of private individuals too. Especially young people. The most horrific consequence: so-called bullycide, such as this past week’s tragic death of Brandy Vela who reportedly took her own life in front of her family after being bullied and trolled about her weight. So incidents have not abated. (It was less than four months ago that I wrote about the bullycide of Danny Fitzpatrick—and there have been many more. Too many more.)

So what are we to do? Over the past few months, new trolling policy announcements have been issued by social-media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Jigsaw (formerly known as Google Ideas) introduced its Conversation A.I.—designed to essentially troll the trolls by flagging online abuse and harassment.

We can also consider another approach. Rather than trying to clean up our messes ex post facto, we can consider engendering empathic responses and creating environments in social media that, from their initial designs, foster support, compassion, and community. Bake empathy into the cake rather than frosting it later.

Video: Monica Lewinsky: #BeStrong