“You’re trolling because…” – A Corpus-based Study of Perceived Trolling and Motive Attribution in the Comment Threads of Three British Political Blogs

Abstract

This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 991 comment threads of three British political blogs. The study is concerned with how these motives affect the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the alleged trolls in the analysed threads. The paper identifies five broad motives ascribed to trolls: emotional/mental health-related/social reasons, financial gain, political beliefs, being employed by a political body, and unspecified political affiliation. It also points out that depending on these motives, trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Finally, the study argues that participants attribute motives to trolls not only to explain their behaviour but also to insult them.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1040875
Divisions: ?? 53981500Jl ??
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
Additional Information: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Event Title: 5th Conference on CMC and SocialMedia Corpora for the Humanities (cmccorpora17)
Event Type: Other
Event Dates: 2017-10-03 - 2017-10-04
Last Modified: 03 Dec 2024 08:26
Date Deposited: 04 Oct 2019 08:18
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://zenodo. ... 75#.XZb_VdVKhhE (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Conference contribution
Published Date: 2017-11-02
Accepted Date: 2017-11-01
Authors: Petyko, Marton (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-1897-9435)

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