New Research Suggests Anyone Can Become An Internet Troll

Are people born Internet trolls, or does the Internet turn them into horrible people? New research from Stanford University and Cornell University suggests that it’s the latter.

- Angela Moscaritolo

The research, published as part of the upcoming 2017 Conference on Computer- Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, offers evidence that anyone has the potential to become a troll.

“We wanted to understand why trolling is so prevalent today,” Stanford computer science researcher and lead author of the paper Justin Cheng said in a statement. “While the common knowledge is that trolls are particularly sociopathic individuals that occasionally appear in conversations, is it really just these people who are trolling others?”