
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions [pdf] - kevinburke
https://files.clr3.com/papers/2017_anyone.pdf
======
alva
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.

~~~
hubert123
> "Modern left" leaning groups are so easy to disrupt and destroy it is
> child's play.

that is not my experience at all, modern left leaning groups instantly ban
people with even slightly different opinions.

~~~
sugarpile
Nah, that's amateur hour.

They're easy to disrupt because if you throw out a piece of fake or mostly
fake information that accedes to some viewpoint they hold holy they'll throw
themselves into a rabid fury without much thought.

For an example just look at the 0-60 leg humping of lyft they did last week
because of that selectively true uber story. All that despite Icahn and Thiel
each having 9 (?) figures invested in lyft. L to the ol.

~~~
CM30
Or for another example, look at this story and how the folks against GamerGate
responded to it:

[https://medium.com/@mombot/zachattack-how-i-tricked-anti-
har...](https://medium.com/@mombot/zachattack-how-i-tricked-anti-harassment-
advocates-into-doxing-me-4d9f055e2738#.gsld186qa)

All it took was a bit of fake evidence and a story these people wanted to
believe (that someone they disliked 'wasn't a minority'), and suddenly you had
a whole bunch of people looking like idiots and making fools of themselves.

So easy to then ramp this up to focus on someone in the activist's/extremists'
own community and hey, the whole group is now up in flames over a fabricated
story.

~~~
breatheoften
I'm not familiar with GamerGate. Can you explain this story?

From reading the article I make some inferences and try to explain what I
understood -- I explain below just to illustrate what I understand coming from
a place of zero information on the topic -- please clarify and correct my
understanding as presented.

GamerGate is a movement of some kind (I actually have no idea what they
support) that began deploying an attack called 'doxing' (which I understand
involves publicly disclosing the identity behind social media personas in
order that real life attacks/intimidation can be conducted against the actual
humans) against people they are against.

Anti-GamerGate is a movement with the agenda to 'dox the GamerGate doxxers'.
The above article claims to be an account of how two individuals worked
together to convince anti-GamerGaters to dox a fake identity and in the
process uncovered the identity of the anti-GamerGaters and proceeded to 'dox'
them with that information.

What I'm failing to undestand is how exactly this proves anything about left-
leaning groups in general? Is it your position that coordinated deployment of
fake information can only be used against communities with certain
philosophical properties commonly identified as 'liberal'? In your opinion
what kind of information would be required to prove this perspective? Do you
have evidence to support the idea that communities with a different
philosophical leaning would not succumb to such a coordinated mis-information
campaign?

------
syphilis2
"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.

~~~
Terr_
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_ma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/p7u3k/troll_level_master/c3n98ia/)

~~~
insickness
#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.

~~~
Terr_
> #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
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.

------
samirillian
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.

~~~
rconti
Nope, not willing to argue that. Trolling is purely destructive in the way
that vandalism is; in a way that theft is not.

I view it as the lowest form of humanity.

~~~
ythn
Trolling is purely destructive? How about playing devil's advocate? Is that
purely destructive?

~~~
grzm
You can assume the role of devil's advocate in good faith, with the aim of
moving a discussion forward.

------
CM30
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.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
>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.

~~~
temp-dude-87844
An overnight time corresponds fairly well to when a 9-5 working professional
has retreated to bed with their spouse, yet sleep remains elusive. Finding
themselves alone with their thoughts and fewer and fewer of their friends
being still awake, I can see why some would turn to commenting, venting, or
inciting on public forums, for malicious disruption or otherwise. I don't
think the hypothesis you appear to draw follows from the facts at all.

~~~
gunnihinn
Ah! The dead of night! When I once had my most meaningful conversations with
my loved ones who, alas!, now turn to the sleep they did not before, for some
reason we shall not dig into, for there lie dragons!

------
ouid
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?

------
ifdefdebug
"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
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.

------
ConfuciusSay02
It doesn't inspire much confidence in the study when it doesn't even
acknowledge the pervasive issue of astroturfing online.

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

------
BoudewijnE
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!

------
microDude
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)

------
qwertyuiop924
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
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.

