Internet trolling has been around for decades now and it has gained more noto-riety in the past decade due to increased media coverage of trolling activities.
Trolling affects users in many different online spaces and it appears to be pre-sent everywhere (Coles & West, 2016a). Trolling has many faces and the term
“trolling” has often been used widely about all kinds of malicious or harassing activities on the internet. Such activities might be starting inflammatory conver-sations, harassing individuals or groups, sharing hurtful imagery, vandalizing community updated pages, defacing memorial pages and it has even been used synonymously with cyberbullying. The media has often concentrated in the worst of cases and thus helped with creating this monstrous image of internet trolls. Wider public also uses the term trolling in various ways, adding more confusion to what actually constitutes as trolling. It is not uncommon in mod-ern online discourse that anything from being offensive to merely expressing different opinions are enough for branding the poster as a troll. Trolling how-ever does have a more humorous side to it and not all trolls do it out of malice.
Trolls have even contributed to the wider online culture in the form of memes, which are now widespread and mainstream.
Literature about trolling is still rather scarce and many studies have point-ed this out (e.g. Shachaf & Hara, 2010; Hardaker, 2010; Griffiths, 2014; Wi & Lee, 2014; Hardaker, 2015; Synnott, Coulias & Ioannou, 2017). Trolling studies vary from particular areas such as RIP trolls, misogyny, automatic troll detection, newspaper comment section trolling, how trolling is perceived, why do they troll, vitriolic discourse in online forums, political trolling and other trolling topics. Many studies have been among the first to tackle their specific topics as there are still many untapped topics and ways to approach trolling. Definitions of trolling have been constantly evolving due to trolling also evolving in the changing online environments, causing confusion about the basic issue of what trolling is. Studies about internet trolls are also difficult to perform as trolls are elusive and deceptive by nature, forcing researchers to find alternative ap-proaches to study them. It is understandable that relatively new phenomena such as trolling in its current form can be hard to tackle. Sanfilippo, Yang and
Fichman (2017a, p. 1802) summed up well the diversity of trolling, “Trolling behaviors are extremely diverse, varying by context, tactics, motivations, and impact,” and also added that the definitions vary, as well as perceptions and reactions to trolling. It is clear from this that trolling as a topic needs examina-tion from multiple angles to be fully understood. Also, there seems to be a lack of clear consensus about many main topics within trolling studies, which is an obvious problem and therefore definitive answers are hard to find.
This study attempts to provide much needed information from the trolls’
perspective and more precisely bring understanding of why and how trolling starts, progresses and ends. Most studies have not been able to use trolls for their studies and have had to rely on views of systems operators or non-troll members of online communities. Those approaches have often received differ-ent results. Another factor that has caused results between studies to differ has been their source, as different online spaces have different views of trolling, the results are different as well. This study uses data from 109 different trolls’ own accounts of their trolling, both active trolls and trolls who have quit, from dif-ferent sources. Three methods were used to collect data: online discussion in-terviews, online survey and online search of internet material in the form of confessions, comments and interviews. This is a novel approach that avoids the problem of relying on non-trolls’ views and receiving information only from a limited number of online spaces. Information that is received directly from trolls can provide insights that other means may not be able to provide. How-ever, there is still the possibility of trolls giving false statements. This problem is mitigated in this study by not focusing on the individual commentaries from trolls but to the overall picture provided by many trolls. Qualitative research method was used because of its ability to answer questions of how and why, therefore it is the most suitable method for the purpose of this study. For the analysis of the data, thematic analysis was used. This was a logical choice as it forces to get acquainted with the data thoroughly, provides means to sort out the varying data and makes possible for unexpected findings to emerge. In overall, this thesis attempts to answer three research questions:
1. Life-cycle of trolls: What is the life-cycle of a troll, how does one start trolling, what is their active trolling time like and why do they stop trolling? Especially of interest are the factors behind starting and stop-ping trolling. This is the main question for the thesis.
2. Troll definition: Are current definitions adequate and should there be a new way to define trolling?
3. Evaluation of past research: How well has the past research under-stood why trolls start, their behaviors and how they could be stopped?
In the literature review part of this study, over 70 scientific articles were read to compile a thorough summary of the current literature. Purpose was to include every article that was found on the topic of trolling, so an accurate overview of the studies could be made. The empirical part of this study consists of 109 dif-ferent trolls’ statements from multiple sources and the results are used to
ex-plain the life-cycle of trolls. In other words, the journey of a troll from start to finish. The results from this study can possibly bring more clarity to the topic of trolls and help future studies to calibrate their approaches and pursue topics that are more relevant.
The literature review part of this study first covers the definitions of trolling and makes a clear distinction between trolling and other online behav-iors that are often conflated with it. Also, information of what literature knows about the trolls themselves and what drives them are looked at. Next, the activi-ties that trolls take part in and what kind of behaviors they have, are presented.
Last chapter of literature review looks at how trolls are perceived by other users online as well as what ways are there for dealing with trolls or for preventing trolls. Research method chapter will explain the used methods and how the re-search was conducted for this study. Results chapter goes through the findings from this study and explains why they start trolling, what happens while they are trolls and how it ends. Results are discussed in the discussion chapter and the life-cycle is presented.