April 12, 2018
The common advice to new internet users is to never feed the trolls ... But who are these trolls? What does it mean to troll? Why do people act that way anyway?
ILS Professor Pnina Fichman and Madelyn R. Sanfilippo, a postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Information Law Institute at New York University, address these and other questions in their book, Online Trolling and Its Perpetrators: Under the Cyberbridge (Rowen & Littlefield Publishers). Specifically, the book addresses the enabling factors, motivations, and impacts of trolling. It also discusses how online community members and administrators identify and handle incidences of trolling. Of particular interest, the authors explore different kinds of trolling. This includes drawing a distinction between “hard” and “light” trolling and considering cultural differences in trolling around the world.
For further reading, see “Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls” (Journal of Information Science, 30(3), 2010) by Dr. Fichman and ILS Professor Noriko Hara, and “The bad boys and girls of cyberspace: How gender and context impact perception of and reaction to trolling” (Social Science Computer Review, 33(2), 2015) by Fichman and Sanfilippo.