troll or just anti-social ?

[space otter]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/science-can-now-spot-trolls-after-just-five-horrible-malicious-comments/ar-AAbjwwa


troll or just anti-social ?  OR  moderator replacement   





Science can now spot trolls after just five horrible, malicious comments

People aren't very nice to each other online. Everyone has read a comment thread and been annoyed at the vicious remarks, or witnessed a flame war under a YouTube video. Many online communities now have moderators, and they aim to ban trolls—those people who just who can't stay civil.

But can you identify trolls before they ruin a community? Researchers from Stanford and Cornell think they can (pdf), after analyzing 18 months worth of Disqus threads from the news site CNN, the right-wing political site Breitbart, and the gaming site IGN. That amounted to 1.7 million users, almost 40 million comments, and 100 million up- or down-votes on those comments.

They compared users who were later banned from a community with users who were never banned. Of the trolls, they observed:

We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users. Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when community feedback is overly harsh.

Using that, they developed an algorithm that can look at those factors and determine with 80% accuracy whether the troll will be banned in the future based on the content of their first five posts. The most powerful predictor is the reaction to (and deletion of) posts by moderators—but even without manual labeling, the algorithm still works with 79% accuracy.

Interestingly, the researchers said it becomes "increasingly difficult" to identify a troll and determine whether they'll be banned the longer they have been posting. "This suggests that changes in both user or community behavior do occur leading up to a ban," the scientists said.

The researchers' work was supported by a Google faculty research award, so perhaps we'll see this algorithm being used to identify and banish online trolls sooner rather later. But, as the researchers note, a success rate of 80% means that one in five users are still misclassified as trolls when they are just anti-social. What to do about this? The researchers are hopeful:

Whereas trading off overall performance for higher precision and have a human moderator approve any bans is one way to avoid incorrectly blocking innocent users, a better response may instead involve giving antisocial users a chance to redeem themselves.

[rdunk]

"troll or just anti-social ?  OR  moderator replacement" 

Certainly on some forums, the term "troll" would be synonymous with "skeptic"!

[Sinny]

On the flip side:

"Anti-social behaviour in a world full of conformists is a mark of intelligence"

The first 5 post rule seems to be efficient for weeding out the actual trolls however.

[Shasta56]

I moderate on a fairly tolerant forum.   We give people fair warning, in most cases, to clean up their act.  Even then,  the ban is voted on by the moderator and support team.  Of course some of our members are in their teens, and a certain amount of leeway is given.   But every now and then,  we someone who should have just stayed under their nice comfy rock.

Shasta

[ArMaP]

I moderate on a fairly tolerant forum.

So do I.

[Pimander]

I agree that many trolls can be spotted very quickly and you definitely don't need an algorithm.  The members I dislike most are not the trolls though.  It is the sort who are perfectly civil until they are accepted by the community, but they have an agenda of their own.  Once accepted, they get away with being anti-social for longer because they have friends or influence in the community.

I have become much less tolerant of those members recently.  The rest of you are cool.

[zorgon]

Certainly on some forums, the term "troll" would be synonymous with "skeptic"!

If a skeptics only purpose to enter a thread is to derail the thread then yes that skeptic is a troll