Functional linguistic variation in Twitter trolling
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.34803Keywords:
trolling, multidimensional analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, abusive languageAbstract
Trolling is a multifunctional phenomenon, which varies considerably, not only in terms of the behaviours it displays and the perceptions of those behaviours, but also with respect to the platform and the community in which it resides. From a forensic perspective, trolling also varies in terms of that which is prosecutable to that which is not. Despite trolling being a linguistic act, little is known about how trolling varies linguistically. This article examines the functional linguistic variation within a corpus of Twitter trolling as a step towards distinguishing forensically significant trolling from the rest. The analysis reveals two major dimensions of linguistic variation, namely ‘interactive versus non-interactive' and ‘challenging versus non-challenging'. This second dimension reflects previous descriptions of trolling behaviours, specifically that they can be hostile and challenging, and that they post content that is not challenging but provocative. While no distinct types of trolling Tweets are found in this corpus, the findings provide a framework for quantifying the degree of a communicative function exhibited by a trolling tweet, which arguably could inform prosecuting decisions.
References
“troll” NetLingo® The Internet Dictionary (1995-2015) Retrieved on 31 October 2015 from http://www.netlingo.com/word/troll.php
Asenas, J. J. and Hubble, B. (2018) Trolling free speech rallies: Social media practices and the (un)democratic spectacle of dissent. The Journal of Culture and Education17(2): 36—53
Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Biber, D. (2014) Multi-Dimensional analysis: A personal history. In T.B. Sardinha and M.V. Pinto (eds.) Multi Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on: A Tribute to Douglas Biberxxvi--xxxviii. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Biber, D. and Egbert, J. (2016) Register variation on the searchable web: A multi-dimensional analysis. Journal of English Linguistics44(2): 95—137
Carter, C. (2014) Twitter troll jailed for ‘campaign of hatred’ against Stella Creasy. Retrieved on 30 November 2018 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11127808/Twitter-troll-jailed-for-campaign-of-hatred-against-Stella-Creasy.html
Cheng, J., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. and Leskovec, J. (2015). Antisocial behavior in online discussion communities. InProceedings of the 9thInternational AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Oxford, UK: ICWSM-15
Cho, D., and Kwon, K. H. (2015) The impacts of identity verification and disclosure of social cues on flaming in online user comments. Computers in Human Behavior51:363—372.
Clarke, I. (2018) Stylistic variation in Twitter trolling. In J. Golbeck (ed.) Online Harassment: Human-Computer Interaction Series151—178. Manhattan, N.Y.: Springer International Publishing
Clarke, I. and Grieve, J. (2017) Dimensions of abusive language on Twitter. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online1--10. Vancouver, Canada: ACL
Cockerell, J. (2014) Twitter ‘trolls’ Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo jailed for abusing feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Retrieved on 6 September 2017 from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criado-9083829.html
Crown Prosecution Service (2018). Guidance on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guidelines-prosecuting-cases-involving-communications-sent-social-media
Deumert, A., (2014) The performance of a ludic self on social network(ing) sites. In P. Seargeant and C. Tagg (Eds.), The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet 23—45. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Dumenco, S. (2011) How Twitter can stop its descent into a cable-news-style disinformation network. Advertising Age82(15): 14—17
Friginal, E., Waugh, O. and Titak, A. (2018) Linguistic variation in Facebook and Twitter posts. In E. Friginal (ed.) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics342—363. New York: Routledge
Gimpel, K., Schneider, N., O’Connor, B., Das, D., Mills, D., Eisenstein, J., Heilman, M., Yogatama, D., Flanigan, J and Smith, N. A. (2011) Part-of-Speech tagging for Twitter: Annotation, features, and experiments. In Proceedings of the 49thAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Short Papers19—24. Portland, Oregon: ACL
Grieve, J., Biber, D., Friginal, E. and Nekrasova, T. (2010) Variation among blogs: A multidimensional analysis. In A. Mehler, S. Sharoff & M. Santini (eds), Genres on the Web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies303—322. New York: Springer-Verlag
Hardaker, C. (2010) Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions.Journal of Politeness Research6(2):215—242
Hardaker, C. (2013) “Uh....not to be nitpicky,,,,,but...the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.” An overview of trolling strategies. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict1(1): 58—86
Hardaker, C. (2017). Flaming and trolling. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of social media493—522. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton
Herring, S. C., Job-Sluder, K., Scheckler, R. and Barab, S. (2002) Searching for safety online: Managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. The Information Society18: 371—384
Honeycutt, C. & Herring, S. C. (2009) Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos: IEEE Press
Husson, F., Josse, J. Le, S. and Mazet, J. (2017) Package ‘FactoMineR’. Retrieved on 30 June 2017 from http://factominer.free.fr
Laville, S. (2017) Internet troll who sent Labour MP anti-Semitic messages is jailed. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/10/internet-troll-who-sent-labour-mp-antisemitic-messages-is-jailed
Le Roux, B. and Rouanet, H. (2010) Multiple Correspondence Analysis. California: SAGE Publications, Inc
Lee, C. K. M. (2011) Micro-blogging and status updates on Facebook: Text and Practices. In C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek (eds.) Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media 110—130. New York: Oxford University Press
Mihaylov, T. and Nakov, P. (2016) Hunting for troll comments in news community forums. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics399—405 Berlin: ACL
Nicotra, J. (2016) Disgust, distributed: Virtual public shaming as epideictic assemblage. Enculturation. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from http://enculturation.net/disgust-distributed
O’Sullivan, P. B. and Flanagin, A. J. (2003) Reconceptualizing flaming and other problematic messages. New Media and Society5(1): 69—94
Ott, B. L. (2017) The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement. Critical Studies in Media Communication34(1): 59—68
Passonneau, R. J., Ide, N., Su, S., and Stuart, J. (2014) Biber redux: Reconsidering dimensions of variation in American English. In Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25thInternational Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers565—576. Dublin: Dublin City University and ACL
Phillips, W. (2016) This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Phillips, W. and Milner, R. M. (2017) The ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity and antagonism online. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Razavi, A. H., Inkpen, D. Uritsky, S., and Matwin, S. (2010) Offensive language detection using multi-level classification. In Proceedings of the 23rd Canadian Conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence16–27. Ottawa, Ontario: AI’10
Sanfilippo, M. R., Yang, S., and Fichman, P. (2017) Managing online trolling: From deviant to social and political trolls. In Proceedings of the 50thHawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1802—1811. Waikoloa, HI: HICSS
Schmidt, A. and Wiegand, M. (2017) A Survey on hate speech detection using natural language processing. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media1—10. Boston, MA: SocialNLP
Starmer, K. (2012) Twitter ruling: full statement from Director of Public Prosecutions. The Telegraph Online. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9555074/Twitter-ruling-full-statement-from-Director-of-Public-Prosecutions.html
Synnott, J., Coulias, A. and Ioannou, M. (2017) Online trolling: The case of Madeleine McCann. Computers in Human Behavior71: 70—78
Tatman, R., Paullada, A., Stewart, L. G. and Spiro, E. S. (2017) Non-lexical features encode political affiliation on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science63—67. Vancouver, Canada: ACL
Twitter (2018) The Twitter Rules. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
Yaqub, U., Chun, S. A., Atluri, V., and Vaidya, J. (2017) Analysis of political discourse on Twitter in the context of the 2016 US presidential elections. Government Information Quarterly34: 613—26
Zappavigna, M. (2017) Twitter. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of social media201—224. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton
Zappavigna, M. (2018) Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse.London: Bloomsbury
Cases/laws cited
Communications Act (2003) Retrieved on 8 August 2017 from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/contents
Handyside v United Kingdom, Merits, App No 5493/72, A/24, [1976] ECHR 5, (1976) 1 EHRR 737, (1979) 1 EHRR 737, IHRL 14 (ECHR 1976), 7th December 1976, European Court of Human Rights [ECHR]
Asenas, J. J. and Hubble, B. (2018) Trolling free speech rallies: Social media practices and the (un)democratic spectacle of dissent. The Journal of Culture and Education17(2): 36—53
Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Biber, D. (2014) Multi-Dimensional analysis: A personal history. In T.B. Sardinha and M.V. Pinto (eds.) Multi Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on: A Tribute to Douglas Biberxxvi--xxxviii. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Biber, D. and Egbert, J. (2016) Register variation on the searchable web: A multi-dimensional analysis. Journal of English Linguistics44(2): 95—137
Carter, C. (2014) Twitter troll jailed for ‘campaign of hatred’ against Stella Creasy. Retrieved on 30 November 2018 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11127808/Twitter-troll-jailed-for-campaign-of-hatred-against-Stella-Creasy.html
Cheng, J., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. and Leskovec, J. (2015). Antisocial behavior in online discussion communities. InProceedings of the 9thInternational AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Oxford, UK: ICWSM-15
Cho, D., and Kwon, K. H. (2015) The impacts of identity verification and disclosure of social cues on flaming in online user comments. Computers in Human Behavior51:363—372.
Clarke, I. (2018) Stylistic variation in Twitter trolling. In J. Golbeck (ed.) Online Harassment: Human-Computer Interaction Series151—178. Manhattan, N.Y.: Springer International Publishing
Clarke, I. and Grieve, J. (2017) Dimensions of abusive language on Twitter. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online1--10. Vancouver, Canada: ACL
Cockerell, J. (2014) Twitter ‘trolls’ Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo jailed for abusing feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Retrieved on 6 September 2017 from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criado-9083829.html
Crown Prosecution Service (2018). Guidance on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guidelines-prosecuting-cases-involving-communications-sent-social-media
Deumert, A., (2014) The performance of a ludic self on social network(ing) sites. In P. Seargeant and C. Tagg (Eds.), The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet 23—45. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Dumenco, S. (2011) How Twitter can stop its descent into a cable-news-style disinformation network. Advertising Age82(15): 14—17
Friginal, E., Waugh, O. and Titak, A. (2018) Linguistic variation in Facebook and Twitter posts. In E. Friginal (ed.) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics342—363. New York: Routledge
Gimpel, K., Schneider, N., O’Connor, B., Das, D., Mills, D., Eisenstein, J., Heilman, M., Yogatama, D., Flanigan, J and Smith, N. A. (2011) Part-of-Speech tagging for Twitter: Annotation, features, and experiments. In Proceedings of the 49thAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Short Papers19—24. Portland, Oregon: ACL
Grieve, J., Biber, D., Friginal, E. and Nekrasova, T. (2010) Variation among blogs: A multidimensional analysis. In A. Mehler, S. Sharoff & M. Santini (eds), Genres on the Web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies303—322. New York: Springer-Verlag
Hardaker, C. (2010) Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions.Journal of Politeness Research6(2):215—242
Hardaker, C. (2013) “Uh....not to be nitpicky,,,,,but...the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.” An overview of trolling strategies. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict1(1): 58—86
Hardaker, C. (2017). Flaming and trolling. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of social media493—522. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton
Herring, S. C., Job-Sluder, K., Scheckler, R. and Barab, S. (2002) Searching for safety online: Managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. The Information Society18: 371—384
Honeycutt, C. & Herring, S. C. (2009) Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos: IEEE Press
Husson, F., Josse, J. Le, S. and Mazet, J. (2017) Package ‘FactoMineR’. Retrieved on 30 June 2017 from http://factominer.free.fr
Laville, S. (2017) Internet troll who sent Labour MP anti-Semitic messages is jailed. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/10/internet-troll-who-sent-labour-mp-antisemitic-messages-is-jailed
Le Roux, B. and Rouanet, H. (2010) Multiple Correspondence Analysis. California: SAGE Publications, Inc
Lee, C. K. M. (2011) Micro-blogging and status updates on Facebook: Text and Practices. In C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek (eds.) Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media 110—130. New York: Oxford University Press
Mihaylov, T. and Nakov, P. (2016) Hunting for troll comments in news community forums. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics399—405 Berlin: ACL
Nicotra, J. (2016) Disgust, distributed: Virtual public shaming as epideictic assemblage. Enculturation. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from http://enculturation.net/disgust-distributed
O’Sullivan, P. B. and Flanagin, A. J. (2003) Reconceptualizing flaming and other problematic messages. New Media and Society5(1): 69—94
Ott, B. L. (2017) The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement. Critical Studies in Media Communication34(1): 59—68
Passonneau, R. J., Ide, N., Su, S., and Stuart, J. (2014) Biber redux: Reconsidering dimensions of variation in American English. In Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25thInternational Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers565—576. Dublin: Dublin City University and ACL
Phillips, W. (2016) This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Phillips, W. and Milner, R. M. (2017) The ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity and antagonism online. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Razavi, A. H., Inkpen, D. Uritsky, S., and Matwin, S. (2010) Offensive language detection using multi-level classification. In Proceedings of the 23rd Canadian Conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence16–27. Ottawa, Ontario: AI’10
Sanfilippo, M. R., Yang, S., and Fichman, P. (2017) Managing online trolling: From deviant to social and political trolls. In Proceedings of the 50thHawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1802—1811. Waikoloa, HI: HICSS
Schmidt, A. and Wiegand, M. (2017) A Survey on hate speech detection using natural language processing. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media1—10. Boston, MA: SocialNLP
Starmer, K. (2012) Twitter ruling: full statement from Director of Public Prosecutions. The Telegraph Online. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9555074/Twitter-ruling-full-statement-from-Director-of-Public-Prosecutions.html
Synnott, J., Coulias, A. and Ioannou, M. (2017) Online trolling: The case of Madeleine McCann. Computers in Human Behavior71: 70—78
Tatman, R., Paullada, A., Stewart, L. G. and Spiro, E. S. (2017) Non-lexical features encode political affiliation on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science63—67. Vancouver, Canada: ACL
Twitter (2018) The Twitter Rules. Retrieved on 1 October 2018 from https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
Yaqub, U., Chun, S. A., Atluri, V., and Vaidya, J. (2017) Analysis of political discourse on Twitter in the context of the 2016 US presidential elections. Government Information Quarterly34: 613—26
Zappavigna, M. (2017) Twitter. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of social media201—224. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton
Zappavigna, M. (2018) Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse.London: Bloomsbury
Cases/laws cited
Communications Act (2003) Retrieved on 8 August 2017 from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/contents
Handyside v United Kingdom, Merits, App No 5493/72, A/24, [1976] ECHR 5, (1976) 1 EHRR 737, (1979) 1 EHRR 737, IHRL 14 (ECHR 1976), 7th December 1976, European Court of Human Rights [ECHR]
Published
2019-09-11
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Clarke, I. (2019). Functional linguistic variation in Twitter trolling. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 26(1), 57-84. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.34803
