9 ms·

Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions [pdf]

48 points by kevinburke 10y ago

syphilis2 10y ago
"trolling behavior in discussion communities, defined in the literature as behavior that falls outside acceptable bounds defined by those communities" Is this the definition you would use for "trolling behavior"? It's not what I was expecting, and greatly changes my understanding of what the study is looking at compared to the title.
- striking 10y ago
  > A troll has been defined in multiple ways in previous literature as a person who initially pretends to be a legitimate participant but later attempts to disrupt the community[26], as someone who “intentionally disrupts online communities”[77], or “takes pleasure in upsetting others” [47], or more broadly as a person engaging in “negatively marked online behavior” [37] or that “makes trouble” for a discussion forums’ stakeholders [9]. > In this paper, similar to the latter studies, we adopt a definition of trolling that includes flaming, griefing, swearing, or personal attacks, including behavior outside the acceptable bounds defined by several community guidelines for discussion forums [22, 25, 35]. You may have missed part of the relevant section there.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure what credence to give to "the literature" they cite. Just speaking for me personally, I was musing on it long ago [0] and I'd like to suggest three starting points: 1. Trolling always means the user is, in some way, not sincere or not honest in their interactions. 2. Trolling is always about triggering or goading victims into a reaction. 3. Trolling is not the same as humor, trolling can incorporate humor, but only in a "mean-spirited" way. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/p7u3k/troll_level_master/c3n98ia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/p7u3k/troll_level_ma...
  - insickness 10y ago
    #2 gets closest. South Park's latest season was a very insightful satire of Trump as the ultimate troll. Online trolls originally pushed Trump's candidacy as a way of antagonizing the virtue-signaling left. Of all the Republican candidates he was the most leftfield in the sense that he had no political experience and was also the least politically correct. He was brash and mean to the other candidates and seemed not to care if what he said came off as insensitive or even racist/sexist. Trump's success in the primaries triggered the left into over-reacting and running a campaign which contained far too much identity politics. Many felt the left was already overusing the racist/sexist card. Trump was easy bait to push them even further, exposing them and making them seemed like that's ALL they cared about.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Terr_ 10y ago
      > #2 gets closest. Well, those aren't alternatives, I'm saying that "trolling" requires all three. > Trump as the ultimate troll You want to bring politics into this? Ah well, I guess people can minus-click the thread. Whether Trump is a troll or not depends on whether he's telling the truth -- or thinks he is at the moment it comes out of his mouth. Personally, I don't think he's a troll, his internal dysfunction is on some other existential tier. > as a way of antagonizing the virtue-signaling left. Of all the Republican candidates he was the most leftfield I'm going to assume that "leftfield" is 100% sports-jargon and in no way a veiled back-reference to "the left" politically.
      - insickness 10y ago
        Leftfield meaning unconventional, perhaps more commonly said is 'out of left field.' > Whether Trump is a troll or not depends on whether he's telling the truth Does it, though? It could equally apply to someone who feigns ignorance of the truth. For example, someone starts talking about a topic. You're an expert in the topic but disagree with his assessment. You pretend not to be an expert and ask questions. He thinks he's helping you understand while in reality you are goading him into overstating his position and proving him wrong. There may be some deception as to your level of knowledge but the underlying argument isn't necessarily untrue.
- bigtunacan 10y ago
  Yeah; it is an interesting definition of trolling. By my own internalized definition of trolling, about 80% or more of reddit comments are trolling. By the definition in this literature virtually nothing on reddit is trolling.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  I always considered trolling to be an intentionally disruptive thing- posting things you may not even believe to get a rise out of people. Based on their definition, they risk lumping everyday assholery/immaturity/ignorance into it. Trolling is a lot more specific than "anything an ideally managed community would moderate out"; it's intentionally disturbing a person or community for various reasons (mostly sociopathic).
  - scotty79 10y ago
    I always understood that troll “takes pleasure in upsetting others”. Also there's a spectrum from being mildly jokingly annoying to acting out all of the possible horribleness.
alva 10y ago
Certain communities are extremely sensitive to disruption through trolling, especially if the group inherently places high importance on highlighting differences between members and in-groups. "Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is child's play. Trolling is an exceptionally powerful weapon if targeted communities have a particular outlook. It has been a full on blitzkrieg the last 12 months and until fundamental issues are addressed by targeted groups, they will be vulnerable. An interesting area of research would be the relationship between individual trolls, collective trolls and emergent behaviour of these. edit: A group defined by division, will divide and die.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  You'll find that political, religious, and any other extreme group is an easy target, in direct proportion to their sincerity. It's not like it's hard to target Alex Jones' followers... Lady Gaga did it without even trying. Any group of passionate people is usually easy to get a rise out of.
  - alva 10y ago
    The opposite! The aim isn't to get a rise out of them, it is to split them. Lighting the spark that causes significant in-fighting means they do all the work for you. The environment in some of these vulnerable groups make this simple. Divide them into a couple of sections based on ideological disagreements and it comes crashing down quickly and hard. Religious and many political groups are easy to get a rise out of, but their commitment to a common goal is greater than internal power struggles. It is much harder to split these groups when their common aim is so clear and hard felt. When groups with a strong common aim and a sense of unity are attacked by the out-group, they get stronger in their resolve.
    - breatheoften 10y ago
      I don't think this is at all the mechanism at work. It's much more accurate to think of trollers as spammers -- and the effect they can have on discourse is almost akin to violence as they attack the means by which the mediums they troll could otherwise support meaningful communication. You suppose that variations in response to trolling from Religious communities vs liberal communities has some fundamental relationship to the intrinsic properties of those communities. In reality, I think trolling is a weapon and the difference you see in how these communities respond reflects the difference in the amount of ammunition spent on trolling those communities vs the size and efficacy of any agenda that tried to counter the influence of trolls.
CM30 10y ago
Some interesting points here: > Though political issues in the US may appear polarizing, the politics section has one of the lowest rates of post flagging, similar to tech. That's baffling. Though if I had to give a possible explanatation, maybe it's because people expect worse in a political debate? Maybe being a troll has become normalised in political discussions? Hence less people would flag comments considered trolling elsewhere? Honestly, I don't know. > paired t-test reveals a small, but significant increase in negative behavior between 11 pm and 5 am Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world? For example, a European troll might like to stay up late to get into fights with American users. Or vice versa. > Figures suggest that negative behavior can persist in and permeate a community when left unchecked This is a fairly well known point as far as community management goes, but yeah. The more a site allows trolling (or flame wars, or spammy content, or anything else), the more it spreads on the site. This is also why webmaster forums crash and burn so quickly on a quality level. Because once one user gets away with posting meaningless fluff, you suddenly start to see more and more spammers and one line posters appearing. Just some thoughts here.
- ivl 10y ago
  I think tech happens to avoid trolls because trolling tech really only happens when someone who's a little clueless asks a dumb question. How many "How do I do (x)?" questions get a "rm -rf /" as the response? Politics is probably because people take serious positions that may as well be trolling.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  >Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world? I think it's because people who don't have better things to do with their time tend to be up more often at those times. Conversely, people with a professional 9-5 job are less likely to troll and less likely to be up at 2am.
  - 10y ago
ifdefdebug 10y ago
"opinion of this so-called judge", "The judge opens up our country to potential terrorists", "a judge would put our country in such peril" This is trolling a judge at the highest level.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  I don't think a sincere, ad hominem attack constitutes trolling at all. Trolling involves some level of indirection, where the target is being manipulated by taking a message as sincere when it's not.
BoudewijnE 10y ago
I think the troll we see mostly on the web is a derivation of thinking against believe. Isn't that what most trolls have in common? targeting a group that can be defined by a pattern of thinking. Altough a real troll to me is more like a clever joke, where u can point something out by tricking him into a slightly different point of view if your lucky!
ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
It doesn't inspire much confidence in the study when it doesn't even acknowledge the pervasive issue of astroturfing online.
- lutusp 10y ago
  However important it is, it's a separate issue and -- because most online comments are anonymous -- much harder to study.
samirillian 10y ago
Huh, interesting to see a lot of people here coming out as apparently pro-troll. Or at least troll-neutral. There are a lot of problems with certain modes of discourse in the US, but is anyone here willing to argue that trolling has possibly positive transformative benefits, similar to political satire? If so, I'd like to see that argument made coherently, as I have yet to hear it. If not, then any "victim-blaming" really should be called out as at least a red herring. IMHO, "political correctness" is not the problem, it is a symptom. Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities.
- lutusp 10y ago
  > Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities. Easy to flag as a problem in a world with so much blatant inequality. But a system designed to erase inequality would only have the effect of amplifying small differences, and most people would seek victim status -- just as they do now.
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  Trolling absolutely can be a form of satire, and has existed far longer than the internet. While there are trolls who do it simply to spark anger or get attention, some do it to point out the absurdity of an argument. > IMHO, "political correctness" is not the problem, it is a symptom. The problem is that society is becoming increasingly stratified, and large swaths of it don't accept differences of opinion. > Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities. I'd say it's the opposite. If anything, it points out the deep hypocrisy among certain groups to accept different opinions. When I think of trolls that exist outside the internet, I think of something like Charlie Hebdo, which satirizes a subject in a rather extreme way that's meant to provoke. Or a public figure like Milo Yiannopolous, or even Kanye West.
  - samirillian 10y ago
    > The problem is that society is becoming increasingly stratified, and large swaths of it don't accept differences of opinion This sentence started so well! This fixation on opinion is really strange to me. There are real, "stratified" power differentials in our country that have nothing to do with opinions. Radical Islam was not created by people talking nice about their Syrian neighbors. But plenty of people have been killed by nutty trolls inciting nuttier Muslims to violence. IMO stratification of opinion is always well downstream of the stratification of something more elemental: ethnicity, sex, mode of production, etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I would argue that not just anyone can be a troll. Or at least, an effective one. As disgusting as the words sound, there is an art to hurting people, and most trolls are downright comic.
- ythn 10y ago
  I wouldn't say that hurting people is always the objective of trolls. For example, I enjoy trolling as a flat-earther from time to time. Do I really believe the earth is flat? No, but it's fun trying to defend something absurd just for the sake of honing debate skills. Sometimes I can find logical fallacies in round-earther arguments and leverage them, which is immensely satisfying.
ouid 10y ago
The forum they used as a source of data was a media outlet during a presidential election. What, precisely, is the community that they are imagining the comments section consists of? It is by definition contentious. Furthermore, antisocial behavior cannot possibly be defined as something you do as a group. It's in the name! Political vitriol is a team sport. Trollish behavior is also mutually exclusive with anger, for the simple reason that we already have a pretty good understanding for the cause of peoples behavior when they are angry. Anger. The fact that discussions degenerate when people are angry is, presumably, WHY the study looks to explain trollish behavior. My understanding of the methodology, when you leave out the CNN data, was as follows (Please correct me if I'm wrong, because my opinion is scathing). First they garnered a set of participants with no overarching demographic, presumably to ensure that the results were as broadly applicable as possible, but I think failing to remember that online communities tend to be much more homogenous. They then found a political article on reddit and seeded a new comment section for some with some reddit comments on the original article. They made 32 copies of this comment section, randomized the order of the comments and assigned 20 people to each. Before they were allowed to comment, they were given a quiz designed to manipulate their mood by asking hard or easy questions, and then lying about how well they did relative to the median. They then justified the use of this particular piece of psychological warfare as having an effect which correlated with positive and negative moods, which are then interpreted as the causal element in the behavior that follows. Immediately before commenting, the users are instructed that they are "testing a new voting system", which is just, excuse my language, the shittiest instruction I have ever seen participants given in a study. Then they measured something other than the stated definition of trolling, and declared their results to be significant. I won't comment on the stated definition of trolling except to say that a strong case can be made that these stanford/cornell researchers participated in behavior which was both dishonest and disruptive, with the effect of pissing at least me off. Does that not qualify?
microDude 10y ago
The best interpretation of a troll was actually on "South Park: Season 20, Episode 10" Trevor's Axiom: https://vimeo.com/194900488 https://vimeo.com/194900488

48 points by kevinburke 10y ago

"trolling behavior in discussion communities, defined in the literature as behavior that falls outside acceptable bounds defined by those communities" Is this the definition you would use for "trolling behavior"? It's not what I was expecting, and greatly changes my understanding of what the study is looking at compared to the title.

striking 10y ago
> A troll has been defined in multiple ways in previous literature as a person who initially pretends to be a legitimate participant but later attempts to disrupt the community[26], as someone who “intentionally disrupts online communities”[77], or “takes pleasure in upsetting others” [47], or more broadly as a person engaging in “negatively marked online behavior” [37] or that “makes trouble” for a discussion forums’ stakeholders [9]. > In this paper, similar to the latter studies, we adopt a definition of trolling that includes flaming, griefing, swearing, or personal attacks, including behavior outside the acceptable bounds defined by several community guidelines for discussion forums [22, 25, 35]. You may have missed part of the relevant section there.
Terr_ 10y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure what credence to give to "the literature" they cite. Just speaking for me personally, I was musing on it long ago [0] and I'd like to suggest three starting points: 1. Trolling always means the user is, in some way, not sincere or not honest in their interactions. 2. Trolling is always about triggering or goading victims into a reaction. 3. Trolling is not the same as humor, trolling can incorporate humor, but only in a "mean-spirited" way. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/p7u3k/troll_level_master/c3n98ia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/p7u3k/troll_level_ma...
- insickness 10y ago
  #2 gets closest. South Park's latest season was a very insightful satire of Trump as the ultimate troll. Online trolls originally pushed Trump's candidacy as a way of antagonizing the virtue-signaling left. Of all the Republican candidates he was the most leftfield in the sense that he had no political experience and was also the least politically correct. He was brash and mean to the other candidates and seemed not to care if what he said came off as insensitive or even racist/sexist. Trump's success in the primaries triggered the left into over-reacting and running a campaign which contained far too much identity politics. Many felt the left was already overusing the racist/sexist card. Trump was easy bait to push them even further, exposing them and making them seemed like that's ALL they cared about.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    > #2 gets closest. Well, those aren't alternatives, I'm saying that "trolling" requires all three. > Trump as the ultimate troll You want to bring politics into this? Ah well, I guess people can minus-click the thread. Whether Trump is a troll or not depends on whether he's telling the truth -- or thinks he is at the moment it comes out of his mouth. Personally, I don't think he's a troll, his internal dysfunction is on some other existential tier. > as a way of antagonizing the virtue-signaling left. Of all the Republican candidates he was the most leftfield I'm going to assume that "leftfield" is 100% sports-jargon and in no way a veiled back-reference to "the left" politically.
    - insickness 10y ago
      Leftfield meaning unconventional, perhaps more commonly said is 'out of left field.' > Whether Trump is a troll or not depends on whether he's telling the truth Does it, though? It could equally apply to someone who feigns ignorance of the truth. For example, someone starts talking about a topic. You're an expert in the topic but disagree with his assessment. You pretend not to be an expert and ask questions. He thinks he's helping you understand while in reality you are goading him into overstating his position and proving him wrong. There may be some deception as to your level of knowledge but the underlying argument isn't necessarily untrue.
bigtunacan 10y ago
Yeah; it is an interesting definition of trolling. By my own internalized definition of trolling, about 80% or more of reddit comments are trolling. By the definition in this literature virtually nothing on reddit is trolling.
mwfunk 10y ago
I always considered trolling to be an intentionally disruptive thing- posting things you may not even believe to get a rise out of people. Based on their definition, they risk lumping everyday assholery/immaturity/ignorance into it. Trolling is a lot more specific than "anything an ideally managed community would moderate out"; it's intentionally disturbing a person or community for various reasons (mostly sociopathic).
- scotty79 10y ago
  I always understood that troll “takes pleasure in upsetting others”. Also there's a spectrum from being mildly jokingly annoying to acting out all of the possible horribleness.

alva 10y ago

Certain communities are extremely sensitive to disruption through trolling, especially if the group inherently places high importance on highlighting differences between members and in-groups. "Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is child's play. Trolling is an exceptionally powerful weapon if targeted communities have a particular outlook. It has been a full on blitzkrieg the last 12 months and until fundamental issues are addressed by targeted groups, they will be vulnerable. An interesting area of research would be the relationship between individual trolls, collective trolls and emergent behaviour of these. edit: A group defined by division, will divide and die.

M_Grey 10y ago
You'll find that political, religious, and any other extreme group is an easy target, in direct proportion to their sincerity. It's not like it's hard to target Alex Jones' followers... Lady Gaga did it without even trying. Any group of passionate people is usually easy to get a rise out of.
- alva 10y ago
  The opposite! The aim isn't to get a rise out of them, it is to split them. Lighting the spark that causes significant in-fighting means they do all the work for you. The environment in some of these vulnerable groups make this simple. Divide them into a couple of sections based on ideological disagreements and it comes crashing down quickly and hard. Religious and many political groups are easy to get a rise out of, but their commitment to a common goal is greater than internal power struggles. It is much harder to split these groups when their common aim is so clear and hard felt. When groups with a strong common aim and a sense of unity are attacked by the out-group, they get stronger in their resolve.
  - breatheoften 10y ago
    I don't think this is at all the mechanism at work. It's much more accurate to think of trollers as spammers -- and the effect they can have on discourse is almost akin to violence as they attack the means by which the mediums they troll could otherwise support meaningful communication. You suppose that variations in response to trolling from Religious communities vs liberal communities has some fundamental relationship to the intrinsic properties of those communities. In reality, I think trolling is a weapon and the difference you see in how these communities respond reflects the difference in the amount of ammunition spent on trolling those communities vs the size and efficacy of any agenda that tried to counter the influence of trolls.

CM30 10y ago

Some interesting points here: > Though political issues in the US may appear polarizing, the politics section has one of the lowest rates of post flagging, similar to tech. That's baffling. Though if I had to give a possible explanatation, maybe it's because people expect worse in a political debate? Maybe being a troll has become normalised in political discussions? Hence less people would flag comments considered trolling elsewhere? Honestly, I don't know. > paired t-test reveals a small, but significant increase in negative behavior between 11 pm and 5 am Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world? For example, a European troll might like to stay up late to get into fights with American users. Or vice versa. > Figures suggest that negative behavior can persist in and permeate a community when left unchecked This is a fairly well known point as far as community management goes, but yeah. The more a site allows trolling (or flame wars, or spammy content, or anything else), the more it spreads on the site. This is also why webmaster forums crash and burn so quickly on a quality level. Because once one user gets away with posting meaningless fluff, you suddenly start to see more and more spammers and one line posters appearing. Just some thoughts here.

ivl 10y ago
I think tech happens to avoid trolls because trolling tech really only happens when someone who's a little clueless asks a dumb question. How many "How do I do (x)?" questions get a "rm -rf /" as the response? Politics is probably because people take serious positions that may as well be trolling.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
>Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world? I think it's because people who don't have better things to do with their time tend to be up more often at those times. Conversely, people with a professional 9-5 job are less likely to troll and less likely to be up at 2am.
- 10y ago

ifdefdebug 10y ago

"opinion of this so-called judge", "The judge opens up our country to potential terrorists", "a judge would put our country in such peril" This is trolling a judge at the highest level.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
I don't think a sincere, ad hominem attack constitutes trolling at all. Trolling involves some level of indirection, where the target is being manipulated by taking a message as sincere when it's not.

BoudewijnE 10y ago

I think the troll we see mostly on the web is a derivation of thinking against believe. Isn't that what most trolls have in common? targeting a group that can be defined by a pattern of thinking. Altough a real troll to me is more like a clever joke, where u can point something out by tricking him into a slightly different point of view if your lucky!

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago

It doesn't inspire much confidence in the study when it doesn't even acknowledge the pervasive issue of astroturfing online.

lutusp 10y ago
However important it is, it's a separate issue and -- because most online comments are anonymous -- much harder to study.

samirillian 10y ago

Huh, interesting to see a lot of people here coming out as apparently pro-troll. Or at least troll-neutral. There are a lot of problems with certain modes of discourse in the US, but is anyone here willing to argue that trolling has possibly positive transformative benefits, similar to political satire? If so, I'd like to see that argument made coherently, as I have yet to hear it. If not, then any "victim-blaming" really should be called out as at least a red herring. IMHO, "political correctness" is not the problem, it is a symptom. Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities.

lutusp 10y ago
> Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities. Easy to flag as a problem in a world with so much blatant inequality. But a system designed to erase inequality would only have the effect of amplifying small differences, and most people would seek victim status -- just as they do now.
Mikeb85 10y ago
Trolling absolutely can be a form of satire, and has existed far longer than the internet. While there are trolls who do it simply to spark anger or get attention, some do it to point out the absurdity of an argument. > IMHO, "political correctness" is not the problem, it is a symptom. The problem is that society is becoming increasingly stratified, and large swaths of it don't accept differences of opinion. > Trolling, to me, just aggravates the actual problem: deep socioeconomic/racial/sexual inequities. I'd say it's the opposite. If anything, it points out the deep hypocrisy among certain groups to accept different opinions. When I think of trolls that exist outside the internet, I think of something like Charlie Hebdo, which satirizes a subject in a rather extreme way that's meant to provoke. Or a public figure like Milo Yiannopolous, or even Kanye West.
- samirillian 10y ago
  > The problem is that society is becoming increasingly stratified, and large swaths of it don't accept differences of opinion This sentence started so well! This fixation on opinion is really strange to me. There are real, "stratified" power differentials in our country that have nothing to do with opinions. Radical Islam was not created by people talking nice about their Syrian neighbors. But plenty of people have been killed by nutty trolls inciting nuttier Muslims to violence. IMO stratification of opinion is always well downstream of the stratification of something more elemental: ethnicity, sex, mode of production, etc.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I would argue that not just anyone can be a troll. Or at least, an effective one. As disgusting as the words sound, there is an art to hurting people, and most trolls are downright comic.

ythn 10y ago
I wouldn't say that hurting people is always the objective of trolls. For example, I enjoy trolling as a flat-earther from time to time. Do I really believe the earth is flat? No, but it's fun trying to defend something absurd just for the sake of honing debate skills. Sometimes I can find logical fallacies in round-earther arguments and leverage them, which is immensely satisfying.

ouid 10y ago

The forum they used as a source of data was a media outlet during a presidential election. What, precisely, is the community that they are imagining the comments section consists of? It is by definition contentious. Furthermore, antisocial behavior cannot possibly be defined as something you do as a group. It's in the name! Political vitriol is a team sport. Trollish behavior is also mutually exclusive with anger, for the simple reason that we already have a pretty good understanding for the cause of peoples behavior when they are angry. Anger. The fact that discussions degenerate when people are angry is, presumably, WHY the study looks to explain trollish behavior. My understanding of the methodology, when you leave out the CNN data, was as follows (Please correct me if I'm wrong, because my opinion is scathing). First they garnered a set of participants with no overarching demographic, presumably to ensure that the results were as broadly applicable as possible, but I think failing to remember that online communities tend to be much more homogenous. They then found a political article on reddit and seeded a new comment section for some with some reddit comments on the original article. They made 32 copies of this comment section, randomized the order of the comments and assigned 20 people to each. Before they were allowed to comment, they were given a quiz designed to manipulate their mood by asking hard or easy questions, and then lying about how well they did relative to the median. They then justified the use of this particular piece of psychological warfare as having an effect which correlated with positive and negative moods, which are then interpreted as the causal element in the behavior that follows. Immediately before commenting, the users are instructed that they are "testing a new voting system", which is just, excuse my language, the shittiest instruction I have ever seen participants given in a study. Then they measured something other than the stated definition of trolling, and declared their results to be significant. I won't comment on the stated definition of trolling except to say that a strong case can be made that these stanford/cornell researchers participated in behavior which was both dishonest and disruptive, with the effect of pissing at least me off. Does that not qualify?

microDude 10y ago

The best interpretation of a troll was actually on "South Park: Season 20, Episode 10" Trevor's Axiom: https://vimeo.com/194900488 https://vimeo.com/194900488