Modeling Trolling in Social Media Conversations

Abstract

Social media websites, electronic newspapers and Internet forums allow visitors to leave comments for others to read and interact. This exchange is not free from participants with malicious intentions, who troll others by positing messages that are intended to be provocative, offensive, or menacing. With the goal of facilitating the computational modeling of trolling, we propose a trolling categorization that is novel in the sense that it allows comment-based analysis from both the trolls' and the responders' perspectives, characterizing these two perspectives using four aspects, namely, the troll's intention and his intention disclosure, as well as the responder's interpretation of the troll's intention and her response strategy. Using this categorization, we annotate and release a dataset containing excerpts of Reddit conversations involving suspected trolls and their interactions with other users. Finally, we identify the difficult-to-classify cases in our corpus and suggest potential solutions for them.