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

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.Comment: Best Paper Award at CSCW 201

The Relationship between Cyberbullying and School Bullying

Many children are likely to experience aggression in their relationships with schoolmates. With the advent of modern forms of communication, children are now able to harass their peers with mobile phones and e-mails, a behaviour known as cyberbullying. To determine the relationship between school bullying and cyberbullying, 432 students from grades 7–9 in Canadian schools were surveyed about their experiences of bullying. The results indicated that students who were bullied in cyberspace were also likely to bully their peers in cyberspace (r = 0.46, p < 0.001) and be bullied at school (56%). In addition, students who were bullied in cyberspace only, and students bullied both in cyberspace and at school, experienced difficulties at school such as low marks, poor concentration, and absenteeism. These results suggest that bullying that occurs either at or outside school can have an impact on school learning

Why Girls? Using Routine Activities Theory to Predict Cyberbullying Experiences Between Girls and Boys

This study uses data from the Second Youth Internet Safety Survey (D. Finkelhor, K. J. Mitchell, and J. Wolak 2011) to predict the risk of cyberbullying between genders. Although much of the cyberbullying literature has considered gender in analyses, nearly all studies have lumped boys and girls together when examining risk factors. This gender lumping has led to the inaccurate perception that risk factors for cyberbullying affect both genders similarly. Therefore, this study fills that void by reviewing differences in the online behaviors of boys and girls, whether these differences affect risk for cyberbullying, and whether routine activities theory is applicable in explaining the risk of cyberbullying for both boys and girls. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC