From royals to vegans: Characterizing question trolling on a community question answering website

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

The phenomenon of trolling has emerged as a widespread form of abuse on news sites, online social networks, and other types of social media. In this paper, we study a particular type of trolling, performed by asking a provocative question on a community question-answering website. By combining user reports with subsequent moderator deletions, we identify a set of over 400,000 troll questions on Yahoo Answers, i.e., questions aimed to inflame, upset, and draw attention from others on the community. This set of troll questions spans a lengthy period of time and a diverse set of topical categories. Our analysis reveals unique characteristics of troll questions when compared to "regular" questions, with regards to their metadata, text, and askers. A classifier built upon these features reaches an accuracy of 85% over a balanced dataset. The answers' text and metadata, reflecting the community's response to the question, are found particularly productive for the classification task.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages835-844
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356572
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 Jun 2018
Event41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018 - Ann Arbor, United States
Duration: 8 Jul 201812 Jul 2018

Publication series

Name41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018

Conference

Conference41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAnn Arbor
Period8/07/1812/07/18

Keywords

  • Abusive behavior
  • Antisocial behavior
  • Community question answering
  • Content abuse
  • Question trolling
  • Trolling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Information Systems

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