The collective trolling lifecycle

Lia H. Sun and Pnina Fichman

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2020, vol. 71, issue 7, 770-783

Abstract: Although collective trolling is an integral part of online communities, it has received little scholarly attention. Research on collective trolling, which involves an organized group trolling effort, is in its infancy perhaps because early works on online trolling depicted it as the deviant behavior of individuals who acted in isolation and under hidden identity. Thus, it is still unclear what collective trolling is and how it evolves. To address this gap, we collected 12,840 posts and comments pertinent to a brief, controversial, and very visible collective trolling event. The event, which surrounded Chinese rapper PG One on the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo, received 40 million reads in 1 day and a lot of media attention. Based on a thematic content analysis of 480 posts, we describe the collective trolling lifecycle through five distinct stages defined by posting frequency and content of posts. We also explain the transformation of participants' roles, tactics, motives, behavioral tone, and the variations in their thematic content, stakeholder group affiliation, and roles over time. The major contributions of the study are the characterization of collective trolling, and the addition of a lifecycle model to the understanding of trolling as sociotechnical, context‐dependent, and multidimensional phenomenon.

Date: 2020
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