What is it about?
Trolling is a major phenomenon affecting millions of people online on a daily basis, but it is a topic that is heavily under-researched. This is one of the first studies that involves talking directly to trolls and asking them core questions: what they do, how they do it, why they do it, and how the community reacts. We found that trolls are far more complex than the personality-type they are usually presented as, and that the online community is actually a major enabler of trolling behaviour, despite its apparent efforts to the contrary.
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Why is it important?
What we found contradicts a lot of popular conceptions of trolls. For example, trolls are frequently presented as little more than a personality type in the media - the antisocial bully who is out to make everyone as miserable as they are. Our results suggest that trolls are actually motivated by a variety of things, including enjoyment, revenge against other trolls, and even the pursuit of new friendships online. We also found that, despite reporting mechanisms and muting mechanisms available in online games, other gamers tend to choose to enable trolls by trolling back or raging. In short, trolling is not nearly as black and white as we thought it was.
Perspectives
This was an incredibly difficult study to recruit for, but also enlightening to perform. Reading through the interviews and the quotes selected in the article, you can really see that these are normal, socially-adjusted people. I think the article highlights the fact that it is not the people, but rather the actions, that are the problem; the norms need to change, not the personalities that make up the internet.
Christine Cook
Tilburg University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context, New Media & Society, December 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1461444817748578.
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