Internet trolls are also real-life trolls [View all]

[DainBramaged]

Why do some people find so much pleasure in harassing others online? A new study attempts to shed light on the behaviour of internet trolls


My brother and I have a childhood history of internet trolling under our belts. Innocent enough, yes – but disruptive nonetheless. From the same room at our parents’ house, we’d play Yahoo! Graffiti (the internet’s version of Pictionary). The word was “dinosaur” and it was his turn to draw. He’d illustrate a beautifully elaborate rainbow. All the while, players would be guessing “rainbow,” “RAINBOW,” “RAINBOW!!!” and wonder why they weren’t scoring points. I’d wait until five seconds were left on the clock and finally, calmly, contribute “dinosaur”. We’ve been banned from Yahoo! Gamerooms until 2016. (With any luck, I’ll have my PhD by then and show Yahoo! that I’m a changed woman.)

A “troll”, in internet slang, is someone who deliberately upsets others by starting arguments or posting unnecessarily inflammatory messages on blogs, chatrooms, or forums. In recent years, it’s gotten so bad that YouTube needed to develop a way for users to moderate their video’s comments section, and Popular Science shut down its comments section entirely. Indeed, for trolls, the anonymity of the internet is the perfect playground.

But a new study by Erin Buckels and colleagues at University of Manitoba in Canada wanted to figure out who, exactly, these trolls are. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, internet users (mostly male, with an average age of 29 years) answered survey questions designed to assess what’s called the “Dark Tetrad of personality”. This tetrad includes narcissism (egocentrism and preoccupation with prestige), Machiavellianism (tendency to deceive and manipulate), psychopathy (lack of empathy and inhibition), and sadism (pleasure of inflicting pain or humiliation on others).

Buckels and colleagues asked about the participants’ internet behavior, including how frequently they comment on blogs and forums. They also gauged how the subjects commented, asking whether they preferred debating, chatting, making friends, or trolling. Of the 418 participants, 59% said that they actively comment on websites. Among those, nearly a tenth admitted that their favorite activity was trolling other users


http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/feb/25/internet-trolls-are-also-real-life-trolls