Trolling here, there, and everywhere: Perceptions of trolling behaviors in context

Abstract

Online trolling has become increasingly prevalent and visible in online communities. Perceptions of and reactions to trolling behaviors varies significantly from one community to another, as trolling behaviors are contextual and vary across platforms and communities. Through an examination of seven trolling scenarios, this article intends to answer the following questions: how do trolling behaviors differ across contexts; how do perceptions of trolling differ from case to case; and what aspects of context of trolling are perceived to be important by the public? Based on focus groups and interview data, we discuss the ways in which community norms and demographics, technological features of platforms, and community boundaries are perceived to impact trolling behaviors. Two major contributions of the study include a codebook to support future analysis of trolling and formal concept analysis surrounding contextual perceptions of trolling.

Chinese collective trolling

“…Our finding indicates that in the context of Chinese collectivistic culture, and under perceived lack of online anonymity in China, trolling is not an isolated behaviors of individual trolls, but rather a set of group behaviors. This is much in line with the argument that context, in our case Chinese Sina Weibo , shapes online behaviors (Sanfilippo, Yang & Fichman, ; Sanfilippo, Yang, & Fichman, ). Furthermore, our study provides an account of a Chinese trolling event as trolling behaviors vary during the various stages of the event; participants' roles evolve and change, and so do their tactics.…”

“…We designed a codebook, with 5 categories (stakeholder group, trolling role, content, and trolling tactic) and 49 codes. Codes were derived from prior work on trolling (Sanfilippo, Yang, & Fichman, 2017b), which we continuously revised during the coding process, adding codes that originated from our data.…”

Global Trolling: The Case of “America First”

“…Research on online trolling has focused mainly on trolling behaviors [21] and tactics [22], motivations to troll [6], enabling factors on social media, and perceptions of and reactions to trolling [23]. Trolls are driven by motives that range from political and ideological to malevolent to personal enjoyment [5], revenge and thrill seeking [6,24].…”

“…Scholars report on ideological and political trolling from around the globe through examples from China, Italy, and the USA [4,12,16,22]. The examples include: 1) ideological trolling by the Kremlin troll that is believed to be paid by a foreign government -in this case Russia [16]; 2) fake political accounts, which are humorous social media accounts; Italy uses satire as a form of activism [14] by assuming fake identities and taking advantage of anonymity on online platforms; 3) likewise social and political ideology drive trolling behaviors in the USA, using satire and humor [21,22]. Political satire, in any media, implies the act of mocking conventions [25], and thus seems to serve trolling actions very well [22].…”

“…What is appropriate is subjective and varies across cultures [27]. This context-dependent nature of humor becomes even more complex when considering also the sociotechnical context of this global trolling [21] in which the America First event took place.…”