Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
This addresses the issue of antisocial behavior in online communities for platform designers and moderators, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work on trolling triggers.
The study tackled the problem of trolling behavior in online discussions by showing that ordinary people can engage in trolling, not just a vocal minority, with negative mood and exposure to prior trolling doubling the probability of trolling in experiments.
In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.