Do Online Trolling Strategies Differ in Political and Interest Forums: Early Results

Abstract

This study compares the effectiveness of different trolling strategies in two online contexts: politically oriented forums that address issues like global warming, and interest-based forums that deal with people’s personal interests. Based on previous research, we consider trolling as context-bound and suggest that relevance theory and common grounding theory can explain why people may attend and react to certain types of troll posts in one forum, but pay scant attention to them in another. We postulate two hypotheses on how successful (i.e., disruptive) trolling varies according to context: that trolls’ messaging strategies appear in different frequencies in political and interest forums (H1), and that context-matching strategies also produce longer futile conversations (H2). Using Hardaker’s categorization of trolling strategies on a covert–overt continuum, our statistical analysis on a dataset of 49 online conversations verified H1: in political forums covert strategies were more common than overt ones; in interest forums the opposite was the case. Regarding H2 our results were inconclusive. However, the results motivate further research on this phenomenon with larger datasets.