Recreational nastiness or playful mischief? Contrasting perspectives on internet trolling between news media and avid internet users
Abstract
The term “internet trolling” has come to encompass a wide range of disparate behaviours: ranging from abusive speech and computer hacking to sarcastic humour and friendly teasing. While some of these behaviours are clearly antisocial and, in extreme cases, criminal, others are harmless and can even be prosocial. Previous studies have shown that self-identified internet trollers tend to credit internet trolling’s poor reputation to misunderstanding and overreaction from people unfamiliar with internet culture and humour, whereas critics of trolling have argued that the term has been used to downplay and gloss over problematic transgressive behaviour. As the internet has come to dominate much of our everyday lives as a place of work, play, learn, and connection with other people, it is imperative that harmful trolling behaviours can be identified and managed in nuanced ways that do not unnecessarily suppress harmless activities.
This thesis disambiguates some of the competing and contrary ideas about internet trolling by comparing perceptions of trolling drawn from two sources in two studies. Study 1 was a content analysis of 240 articles sampled from 11 years of English language news articles mentioning internet trolling to establish a ”mainstream” perspective. Study 2 was a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 participants who self-identified as avid internet users familiar with internet trolling as part of their everyday internet use. Study 1 found that 97% of the news articles portrayed internet trolling in a negative light, with reporting about harassment and online hostility being the most common. By contrast, Study 2 found that 30% of the 20 participants held mostly positive views of trolling, 25% mostly negative, and 45% were ambivalent.
Analysis of these two studies reveal four characteristics of internet trolling interactions which can serve as a framework for evaluating potential risk of harm: 1) targetedness, 2) embodiedness, 3) ability to disengage, and 4) troller intent. This thesis argues that debate over the definition of “trolling” is not useful for the purposes of addressing online harm. Instead, the proposed framework can be used to identify harmful online behaviours, regardless of what they are called.