Guardian Article on Internet Trolls

[PalJoey]

Posted: 5/5/14 at 4:54pm

The results of a University of Manitoba study:

A “troll”, in internet slang, is someone who deliberately upsets others by starting arguments or posting unnecessarily inflammatory messages on blogs, chatrooms, or forums. In recent years, it’s gotten so bad that YouTube needed to develop a way for users to moderate their video’s comments section, and Popular Science shut down its comments section entirely. Indeed, for trolls, the anonymity of the internet is the perfect playground.

But a new study by Erin Buckels and colleagues at University of Manitoba in Canada wanted to figure out who, exactly, these trolls are. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, internet users (mostly male, with an average age of 29 years) answered survey questions designed to assess what’s called the “Dark Tetrad of personality”. This tetrad includes narcissism (egocentrism and preoccupation with prestige), Machiavellianism (tendency to deceive and manipulate), psychopathy (lack of empathy and inhibition), and sadism (pleasure of inflicting pain or humiliation on others).




THE GUARDIAN: Internet trolls are also real-life trolls Why do some people find so much pleasure in harassing others online? A new study attempts to shed light on the behaviour of internet trolls