"Internet Warriors" article is a portrait of online trolls

The New York Times has posted an interesting article about that small cadre of people who post online with amazing frequency. This includes Tweets, posts to social media like Facebook and comments posted in response to news articles (my particular interest).

Amazing might not be strong enough. One 22-year-old college student has posted 175,000 Tweets, according to the article. (Let's imagine she has been at it for five years, so that's 35,000 Tweets a year, or 96 a day, every day. Good grief!)


The book is called The Internet Warriors and looks at 21 Internet trolls from around the world. (Most are from outside the U.S.)

If the goal of this book author was to humanize these people, it didn’t work. On the contrary, the examples he chose are caricatures of Internet trolls – half are unemployed, several appear to be physically and socially isolated, several are openly racist and almost all are angry about some perceived injustice perpetrated against them. I really do not believe the online harassment many of these people conduct is “intense online debate,” as the author calls it. Debate, even when it is intense, does not need to sink so low.

It is true that online forums are dominated by a few people who post a disproportionate amount of content. There is not a lot of academic research on these frequent posters. But what is available suggests that in some forums these people play a positive role, or at least they are no less civil than other posters (Blom, Carpenter, Bowe, & Lange, 2014; Coe, Kenski, & Rains, 2014; Graham & Wright, 2014). While it often seems like the frequent posters are the worst trolls, that might not be the case.

(Afterthought: For an article about online trolls the piece has attracted few comments - five as of Nov. 11.)

Sources

Graham, T., & Wright, S. (2014). Discursive equality and everyday talk online: The impact of "Superparticipants." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 625-642.

Coe, K., Kenski, K., & Rains, S. A. (2014). Online and uncivil? Patterns and determinants of incivility in newspaper website comments. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 658-679.

Blom, R., Carpenter, S., Bowe, B. J., & Lange, R. (2014). Frequent contributors within U.S. newspaper comment forums: An examination of their civility and information value. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(10), 1314-1328.