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2015-04-30 12:01:54
New research suggests it is possible to identify online troublemakers before
they strike
Apr 30th 2015
HECKLERS have long been a problem for politicians and stand-up comedians, but
the rise of the internet has amplified their voices. Trolls, as these online
miscreants are commonly called, often abuse other users and can cause chaos.
Company websites and social media platforms are finding that they are spending
ever more resources on tackling such abuse. Dick Costolo, the chief executive
of Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform, has previously admitted
that his site's inability to deal with puckish users was embarrassing . It
recently introduced a new policy that hopes to starve trolls of oxygen:
messages that contain abusive language; accounts set up specifically to target
individuals; and threats of violence are now all banned.
Though this seems like a welcome response, as a strategy it is limited, being
only a reactive posture. A new paper suggests that it might be possible to
identify potential trolls before they do their worst. Researchers at Stanford
and Cornell have pulled out patterns of behaviour exhibited by the
approximately one in 40 users of three news sites CNN, Breitbart and IGN who
were subsequently banned for abuse. These include trolls unwillingness to
mould their conversation to the slang of an online community; their propensity
to swear; and the volume of contributions they make to a debate. Making an
algorithm of these patterns, the researchers believe they can be 80% confident
of identifying those likely to cause trouble within five posts online.
Such an approach, if exploited commercially, could save online firms some
serious money. Websites are having to spend an increasing proportion of their
budgets on moderating online posts and comments, says Richard Millington at
Feverbee, a consultancy that specialises in this area. Though companies charge
less than a cent to remove the nastiest of comments, the scale of some online
communities can cause costs to add up. The Huffington Post, a popular site, was
once forced to outsource its moderation of nearly 500,000 comments a day to a
team of 28 people.
For years the received advice for dealing with troublemakers on the internet
was a simple motto: don t feed the trolls . An increasing number of people,
and the preponderance of more virulent abuse, have rendered that advice less
helpful. For instance, death threats posted against women writers, such
Caroline Criado-Perez in Britain (whose tormentors were sentenced to prison),
are sadly becoming more common. But even when miscreants are eventually caught,
their comments can damage the reputations of websites and social-media
platforms, sometimes irretrievably. That is why the ability to forecast which
users are likely to become troublemakers would be so helpful. No one, after
all, deserves to have death threats delivered direct to their browsers or
inboxes.