We have found the trolls and they are us, having a bad day.
Anyone brave—or foolish—enough to wade into online comments has seen how regularly they grow toxic, with all-caps outrage, threats and rants about #snowflakes.
It might be reassuring to think all the bile was the work of a minority of miscreants. But new research from Stanford and Cornell suggests that it doesn’t take much for ordinary people to turn troll.
In one experiment, researchers recruited 667 subjects and graded them on one of two quizzes featuring math, logic and word problems. One version was laughably easy, the other grueling.
The participants then read the same political article and engaged with reader comments. Some were given a forum seeded with trolling posts. The others read neutral remarks.
Thirty-five percent of those who’d cruised through the easy test and read neutral posts left trolling remarks. But the grouchiness grew for those who had been on the less rosy path.
Nearly half of those who’d taken the difficult test or read the negative comments left remarks judged to be trolling. And more than two-thirds of those who had endured both left trolling posts.
Looking at real-world data, researchers found indications that trolls are often made by the moment. They analyzed more than 26 million posts gleaned from CNN.com, finding increases in confrontational behavior late at night and early in the week, when evidence shows that people are more likely to be in bad moods.
They also found that people were more likely to have their posts flagged for abuse if they had taken part in a discussion that included flagged posts by others. Negativity, in other words, bred negativity.
Indeed, the researchers found that the strongest predictor of whether a post would be flagged for abuse was whether the preceding post was flagged, suggesting that much trolling starts with a decision to fight fire with fire.
“It’s a spiral of negativity,” says Jure Leskovec, associate professor of computer science at Stanford and senior author of the study. “Just one person waking up cranky can create a spark, and . . . these sparks can spiral out into cascades of bad behavior.”
Researchers say the findings could help create better online discussion spaces. Interventions could include recommending cooling-off periods to commenters who’ve been flagged or warnings alerting moderators to a post that’s likely to be from a troll.
“What this research is really suggesting is that it’s us who are causing these breakdowns in discussion,” says Michael Bernstein, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and a co-author of the paper.
He’s talking to you, #snowflake.
