Related papers
Trolling the trolls: Online forum users constructions of the nature and properties of trolling
Mel West
'Trolling' refers to a specific type of malicious online behaviour, intended to disrupt interactions, aggravate interactional partners and lure them into fruitless argumentation. However, as with other categories, both 'troll' and 'trolling' may have multiple, inconsistent and incompatible meanings, depending upon the context in which the term is used and the aims of the person using the term. Drawing data from 14 online fora and newspaper comment threads, this paper explores how online users mobilise and make use of the term 'troll'. Data was analysed from a discursive psychological perspective. Four repertoires describing trolls were identified in posters online messages: 1) that trolls are easily identifiable, 2) nostalgia, 3) vigilantism and 4) that trolls are nasty. Analysis also revealed that despite repertoire 01, identifying trolls is not a simple and straightforward task. Similarly to any other rhetorical category, there are tensions inherent in posters accounts of nature and acceptability of trolling. Neither the category 'troll' nor the action of 'trolling' has a single, fixed meaning. Either action may be presented as desirable or undesirable, depending upon the aims of the poster at the time of posting.
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Troll Theory?: Issue 22: Trolls and the Negative Space of the Internet
Glen Fuller
2013
This article explores the racial politics of trolling by examining virtual world raids conducted by users of the internet message board 4chan. Since these raids deploy offensive language and imagery that play upon African American stereotypes and history, they can be understood as participating in an ironic, post-political racism that masquerades as enlightened yet maintains online spaces as bastions of white heterosexual masculinity. Moving beyond this frame, however, this article looks awry at these performances and considers how they might also be understood as unintentional yet productive interrogations of racial politics and logics within game cultures and technologies.
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Representations of ‘trolls’ in mass media communication: a review of media-texts and moral panics relating to ‘internet trolling’
Jonathan Bishop
International Journal of Web-Based Communities, 2014
There is a general trend amongst mass media organisations around the world towards concentration of the visual, written and audio packaging and of newspapers, websites and television as channels of information. These platforms are explored in detail in this paper in relation to the moral panics around ‘internet trolling’. This paper discusses the history of trolling in the context of mass media, specifically ‘classical trolling’ and ‘Anonymous trolling’. A review of different media headlines finds that whether or not a story is portrayed in newspapers, online, or on television, the media will use a variety of ways to convey their messages. In the case of ‘trolls’, they show a darker, sinister and transgressive side of cyberspace in the form of abuse and vitriol (i.e., anonymous trolling). The paper concludes that future research should look in detail at the different character types of internet troller and how these affect the way so called ‘trolls’ are represented in the media and the effect this has on the attitude towards young internet users and trollers in general.
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Trolls
Andreas Birkbak
Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics, 2022
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Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions
Claire Hardaker
Journal of Politeness Research 6:2, 2010
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 1987; Bousfield 2008; Culpeper 2008; Terkourafi 2008), incivility (Lakoff 2005), rudeness (Beebe 1995, Kienpointner 1997, 2008), and etiquette (Coulmas 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 (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.
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Boundary maintenance and the origins of trolling
Jean Graham
New Media & Society, 2019
This article presents a new social framework for understanding the origins of trolling and its expansion from an obscure practice, limited to a handful of boards on Usenet, to a pervasive component of Internet culture. I argue that trolling originated, in the term of sociologists, as a form of boundary maintenance that served to distinguish communities of self-identified online insiders from others beyond the boundaries of their community and to drive outsiders away from their spaces. This framework can help us to better understand the transformations that trolling has undergone in the decades since its inception, as well as the persistence of misogyny and prejudice throughout the history of the practice.
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Managing trolling in online communities: an organizational perspective
Jan Breitsohl
Internet Research
PurposeThe literature lacks knowledge on how organizations can manage trolling behaviors in online communities. Extant studies tend to either focus on user responses to trolling behaviors (i.e. a micro-level perspective) or how the trolling infrastructure is governed by platforms (i.e. a macro-level perspective), paying less attention to the organizational community host. With more organizations hosting online communities on social media networks and trolling behaviors increasingly disrupting user engagement within these communities, the current understanding of trolling management practices has become inapt. Given the commercial and social damage caused by trolling behaviors, it is important to understand how these can be best managed. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the meso-level perspective of trolling management by focusing on organizational practice.Design/methodology/approachThe research design consists of an in-depth non-participatory netnography based on...
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DISCOVER TROLLING IDENTITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA : REVIEW
IJESRT Journal
Online social networks bring valuable information to millions of users-but their accuracy is based on the integrity of their user base. User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. An Internet troll is a member of an online social community who deliberately tries to disrupt, attack, offend or generally cause trouble within the community by posting certain comments, photos, videos, GIFs or some other form of online content. You can find trolls all over the Internet-on message boards, in YouTube video comments, on Facebook, on twitter, in blog comments and everywhere else that has an open area where people can freely post to express their thoughts and opinions. Troll is quite damaging to one's online reputation. The insult troll is hater, plain and simple. And they don't even really have to have a reason to hate or insult someone. These types of trolls will calling them names, accusing them of certain things, doing anything they can to get a negative emotional response from them-just because they can. This type of trolling can become so serious that it can lead to or be considered a severe form of cyberbullying.
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2018 - The Art of Trolling: Semiotic Ingredients, Sociocultural Causes, Pragmatic and Political Effects
Massimo Leone
Virality and Morphogenesis of Right-Wing Internet Populism, 2018
Through comparison and contrast with similar discursive practices, the paper singles out some of the main semiotic ingredients of trolling: topic-insensitive provocation; time-boundless jest; sadistic hierarchy of sender and receiver; anonymity of both the troll and his or her audience; choral character of the ‘actant observer’ of trolling; etc.
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Speech, Mockery, and Sincere Concern: An Account of Trolling
Jeffrey Kaplan
Public Affairs Quarterly, 2021
This paper offers an account of a phenomenon that seems increasingly common in public discourse: trolling. The term “troll” is colloquial, and no formal synonym exists in English. But the informality of the term should not mislead us into thinking that the underlying concept is so unimportant as to be unworthy of philosophical attention or so ill-behaved as to be resistant to philosophical analysis. This paper presents such an analysis.
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