Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ordinary users can engage in trolling behavior in online discussions, identifying mood and discussion context as key triggers through experiments and real-world data analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates that trolling is not limited to a vocal minority but can be triggered by mood and context, supported by experimental and longitudinal data.

Findings

Negative mood increases trolling likelihood

Seeing troll posts significantly raises trolling probability

Mood and context together predict trolling better than past behavior

Abstract

In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.