Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions

By Claire Hardaker. 2010

539 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Whilst computer-mediated communication (CMC) can benefit users by providing quick and easy communication between those separated by time and space, it can also provide varying degrees of anonymity that may encourage a sense of impunity and freedom from being held accountable for inappropriate online behaviour. As such, CMC is a fertile ground for studying impoliteness, whether it occurs in response to perceived threat (flaming), or as an end in its own right (trolling). Currently, first and second-order definitions of terms such as im/politeness (Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Bousfield, Impoliteness in interaction, John Benjamins, 2008; Culpeper, Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008; Terkourafi, Towards a unified theory of politeness, impoliteness, and rudeness, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), in-civility (Lakoff, Civility and its discontents: Or, getting in your face, John Benjamins, 2005), rudeness (Beebe, Polite fictions: Instrumental rudeness as pragmatic competence, Georgetown University Press, 1995, Kienpointner, Functions of Language 4: 251–287, 1997, Kienpointner, Journal of Politeness Research 4: 243–265, 2008), and etiquette (Coulmas, Linguistic etiquette in Japanese society, Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), are subject to much discussion and debate, yet the CMC phenomenon of trolling is not adequately captured by any of these terms. Following Bousfield (in press), Culpeper (Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence, Cambridge University Press, 2010) and others, this paper suggests that a definition of trolling should be informed first and foremost by user discussions. Taking examples from a 172-million-word, asynchronous CMC corpus, four interrelated conditions of aggression, deception, disruption, and success are discussed. Finally, a working definition of trolling is presented.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5404977ea309c2260aea8f25e1e2fc2e974077a0

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Troll Detection (2020, background): “A troll has been defined as an individual who displays a negative online behaviour [8], or as a user who initially pretends to be a legitimate participant, but later attempts to disrupt the community, not in a blatant way, but aiming to attract the maximum number of responses from the other comm”
Hate Me, Hate Me Not: Hate Speech Detection on Facebook (2017, background): “Work in [21] characterises the attacker and it provides a definition of trolls, i.”
Living in an age of online incivility: examining the conditional indirect effects of online discussion on political flaming (2014, background): “Research on the use of aggressive language in an online context (otherwise known as flaming) has focused on situational or individual-level factors that predict flaming (Dodge & Coie, 1987; Hardaker, 2010; Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984).”
Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities (2015, background): “While some work has tried to experimentally establish causal links, for example, between personality type and trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhus 2014), most research reports qualitative studies that focus on characterizing antisocial behavior (Donath 1999; Hardaker 2010), often by studying the”
Benchmarking Aggression Identification in Social Media (2018, background): “In addition to these, there have been some pragmatic studies on behaviour like trolling (Hardaker, 2010; Hardaker, 2013).”
Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web (2018, background): “Instances of one online community harassing, “brigading”, or “trolling” another will inevitably occur [23, 28, 51], but how can communities defend against these attacks?”
Trolls just want to have fun (2014, background): “Existing literatures are scattered and multidisciplinary in nature (Hardaker, 2010; Herring, JobSluder, & Scheckler, 2002; McCosker, in press; Shachaf & Hara, 2010).”
Social media? It's serious! Understanding the dark side of social media (2018, background): “For example, there have been an increasing number of reports and research attention into concerns such as cyberbullying (O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011), trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014; Hardaker, 2010), privacy invasions (Pai & Arnott, 2013), fake news (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Europ”
Racism on the Internet: Conceptualization and Recommendations for Research (2018, background): “…has been considered a major determinant of online disinhibition that may enable people to engage in racist expressions because they perceive little risk of being held responsible for their actions (Path a; Hardaker, 2010; Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & McGuire, 1986; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986).”
Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems (2022, background): “Anti-social behaviors such as trolling [26, 38], hate speech [15], inflammatory comments [12], and other “undesirable” behaviors [9, 10, 14, 55, 72] can (and will) arise as well, causing designs to not only become ineffective [45], but also harmful both to the individuals [2, 77] and collectives [13”
Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy (2017, background): “Trolling is the deliberate provocation of others using deception and harmful behaviour on the Internet which often results in conflict, highly emotional reactions, and disruption of communication in order to advance the troll's own amusement (Hardaker, 2010).”