Researchers discover how normal people (like you) become internet trolls
The troll's post is coming from inside the house. Possibly even your house, in fact.
A joint research project out of Stanford and Cornell Universities has determined that internet trolls are not just the rando online harassers that our parents warned us about, but also consist of plenty of first-time offenders driven to toxicity by a set of predictable factors.
Trolling has a recipe, in other words.
Just what is reportedly pushing your average Joe to the realm of internet-dickery? Two main indicators were identified by the research team: The tone of other comments, and the person's mood.
In other words, if you're feeling a bit off and read something trollish online, you're more likely to respond in kind.
"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," the study authors write. "These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aforementioned "right circumstances" include a little old thing colloquially called "The Mondays" (sorry). Basically, people are prone to nastiness when they're online Sunday and Monday nights between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. This result is similar to findings from last year suggesting that bullying on Twitter was the most severe Sunday evenings from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
To make matters worse, a little bit of online harassment goes a long way.
“It’s a spiral of negativity,” senior study author Jure Leskovec explained to Stanford News. “Just one person waking up cranky can create a spark and, because of discussion context and voting, these sparks can spiral out into cascades of bad behavior. Bad conversations lead to bad conversations."
The Wall Street Journal picked up the report, and was quick to note that some people are indeed chronic perpetrators of online harassment and abuse. However, as the research found, normal people online sometimes engage in abhorrent behavior as well.
"Our results suggest that trolling is better explained as situational (i.e., a result of the user’s environment) than as innate (i.e., an inherent trait)," the authors write.
If that is true, than targeted efforts by companies like Twitter to go after the worst offenders are alone not enough to make the internet a harassment-free place. Systematic approaches, like Google's Perspective API or making commenters take a quiz before posting, could succeed where individual account banning has failed.
But the latest research also suggests a fundamental limitation to efforts to civilize comments sections: There's no getting rid of Sunday and Monday nights.
