research-article

The collective trolling lifecycle

Authors:

Pnina FichmanAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Volume 71, Issue 7

Pages 770 - 783

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24296

Published: 08 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Although collective trolling is an integral part of online communities, it has received little scholarly attention. Research on collective trolling, which involves an organized group trolling effort, is in its infancy perhaps because early works on online trolling depicted it as the deviant behavior of individuals who acted in isolation and under hidden identity. Thus, it is still unclear what collective trolling is and how it evolves. To address this gap, we collected 12,840 posts and comments pertinent to a brief, controversial, and very visible collective trolling event. The event, which surrounded Chinese rapper PG One on the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo, received 40 million reads in 1 day and a lot of media attention. Based on a thematic content analysis of 480 posts, we describe the collective trolling lifecycle through five distinct stages defined by posting frequency and content of posts. We also explain the transformation of participants' roles, tactics, motives, behavioral tone, and the variations in their thematic content, stakeholder group affiliation, and roles over time. The major contributions of the study are the characterization of collective trolling, and the addition of a lifecycle model to the understanding of trolling as sociotechnical, context‐dependent, and multidimensional phenomenon.

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Cited By

Sun HFichman P(2024)The Relationships between Influencers and Followers Who Troll and Proactive‐Reactive TrollingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.119561:1(1093-1095)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/pra2.1195
Nguyen HOgbadu-Oladapo LAli IChen HChen J(2023)Fighting Misinformation: Where Are We and Where to Go?Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_27(371-394)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_27

Index Terms

The collective trolling lifecycle

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology Volume 71, Issue 7

July 2020

146 pages

ISSN:2330-1635

EISSN:2330-1643

DOI:10.1002/asi.v71.7

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© 2019 ASIS&T.

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

United States

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Published: 08 June 2020

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Cited By

Sun HFichman P(2024)The Relationships between Influencers and Followers Who Troll and Proactive‐Reactive TrollingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.119561:1(1093-1095)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/pra2.1195
Nguyen HOgbadu-Oladapo LAli IChen HChen J(2023)Fighting Misinformation: Where Are We and Where to Go?Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_27(371-394)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_27

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