Mobilizing the Trump Train: Understanding Collective Action in a Political Trolling Community

Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were considered central in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election, which involved difficult mass mobilizations. Political trolls face unique challenges as they must build their own communities while simultaneously disrupting others. However, little is known about how political trolls mobilize sufficient participation to suddenly become problems for others. We performed a quantitative longitudinal analysis of more than 16 million comments from one of the most popular and disruptive political trolling communities, the subreddit /r/The\_Donald (T\D). We use T_D as a lens to understand participation and collective action within these deviant spaces. In specific, we first study the characteristics of the most active participants to uncover what might drive their sustained participation. Next, we investigate how these active individuals mobilize their community to action. Through our analysis, we uncover that the most active employed distinct discursive strategies to mobilize participation, and deployed technical tools like bots to create a shared identity and sustain engagement. We conclude by providing data-backed design implications for designers of civic media.

[1]  Thomas E. Shriver,et al.  MAINTAINING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT: CONFRONTING NEGATIVE PUBLIC PERCEPTION AND FACTIONAL DIVISIONS WITHIN THE SKINHEAD SUBCULTURE , 2004 .

[2]  Adrienne Massanari,et al.  #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures , 2017, New Media Soc..

[3]  Gabriella Coleman.  Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous , 2014 .

[4]  J. Nathan Matias,et al.  Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout , 2016, CHI.

[5]  Munmun De Choudhury,et al.  Social Media Participation in an Activist Movement for Racial Equality , 2016, ICWSM.

[6]  Britney Summit-Gil,et al.  This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture , 2016, New Media Soc..

[7]  Fabian Flöck,et al.  Evolution of reddit: from the front page of the internet to a self-referential community? , 2014, WWW.

[8]  B. Gardiner,et al.  The dark side of Guardian comments , 2016 .

[9]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types , 2014, ICWSM.

[10]  Gianluca Stringhini,et al.  Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan's Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web , 2016, ICWSM.

[11]  Pnina Fichman,et al.  Managing Online Trolling: From Deviant to Social and Political Trolls , 2017, HICSS.

[12]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[13]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Anyone Can Become a Troll , 2017 .

[14]  Charlene Jennett,et al.  Do games attract or sustain engagement in citizen science?: a study of volunteer motivations , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[15]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  Widespread underprovision on Reddit , 2013, CSCW.

[16]  A. Banerjee,et al.  A Simple Model of Herd Behavior , 1992 .

[17]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Just awful enough: the functional dysfunction of the something awful forums , 2014, CHI.

[18]  N. Hara,et al.  Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls , 2010, J. Inf. Sci..

[19]  P. Resnick,et al.  Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design , 2012 .

[20]  Yizong Cheng,et al.  Mean Shift, Mode Seeking, and Clustering , 1995, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[21]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities , 2015, ICWSM.

[22]  Tobias Höllerer,et al.  Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action using Online Bots , 2015, CSCW.

[23]  P ? ? ? ? ? ? ? % ? ? ? ? , 1991 .

[24]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  Antisocial Behavior on the Web: Characterization and Detection , 2017, WWW.

[25]  Mattia Samory,et al.  Sizing Up the Troll: A Quantitative Characterization of Moderator-Identified Trolling in an Online Forum , 2017, CHI.

[26]  Whitney Phillips.  This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture , 2015 .

[27]  Rongbin Han,et al.  Defending the Authoritarian Regime Online: China's “Voluntary Fifty-cent Army” , 2015, The China Quarterly.

[28]  S. Milgram,et al.  Note on the drawing power of crowds of different size. , 1969 .

[29]  V. S. Subrahmanian,et al.  An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities , 2017, WWW.

[30]  Saiph Savage,et al.  Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience , 2015, CSCW.

[31]  Bryn Alexander Coles,et al.  Trolling the trolls: Online forum users constructions of the nature and properties of trolling , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[32]  S. Bradshaw,et al.  Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation , 2017 .

[33]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community , 2011, ICWSM.

[34]  Tom Feltwell,et al.  "Could You Define That in Bot Terms"?: Requesting, Creating and Using Bots on Reddit , 2017, CHI.

[35]  Tsuyoshi Murata,et al.  {m , 1934, ACML.

[36]  W. Bennett,et al.  DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE PERSONALIZATION OF COLLECTIVE ACTION , 2011 .

[37]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests , 2014, ICWSM.

[38]  Florence March,et al.  2016 , 2016, Affair of the Heart.

[39]  L. Hughes.  Studying Youth Gangs , 2005 .

[40]  Amy Bruckman,et al.  Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization , 2013, CSCW.