New algorithm could auto-squash trolls

[darrelld]

 

Ah trolls. A species we know well - those people who bounce around in comments sections flinging language dung all over the intertubes.

Well, that language dung comes in handy when trying to spot a troll, it turns out.

Researchers have found that misspelling and just plain bad writing are among the behaviour characteristics that can be crunched in a new algorithm that can predict commenters who'll be banished for trollery.

The researchers, from Stanford and Cornell Universities, say in their paper that their algorithm can pinpoint future banned users (FBUs) with an 80% AUC (Area Under the Curve is a type of accuracy scoring that takes false positives into account).

The researchers analysed troll behaviour in the comments sections of three online news communities: the general news site CNN.com, the political news site Breitbart.com, and the computer gaming site IGN.com.

Those sites all have a list of users who've been banned for antisocial behavior: a total of over 10,000 antisocial lab rats.

The sites also have all of the messages posted by the banned users throughout their period of online activity, giving the researchers a handy pool of subject material, they said:

Such individuals are clear instances of antisocial users, and constitute 'ground truth' in our analyses.

The algorithm compares messages posted by users who were ultimately banned against messages posted by users who were never banned, managing to spot FBUs after analysing as few as 5 to 10 posts.

They found clear differences between the two groups:

• • Trolls' posts are more garbled. The researchers used several readability tests, including the Automated Readability Index (ARI), to gauge how easy it is to read a given chunk of text. They found that nearly all of the 10,000 FBUs studied displayed a lower perceived standard of literacy and/or clarity than the median for their host groups, with even that lackluster standard dropping as they neared their ultimate ban.
  • Trolls swear more. Not only do they swear more, they're also pretty decisive. They don't tell others to "perhaps" go P off and F themselves, since they don't tend to use conciliatory/tentative words such as "could", "perhaps", or "consider" - words that research has found tend to minimise conflict.
  • Trolls are not sunshiney people. At least, they tend to stay away from positive words.
  • Trolls tend to wander. They have a tendency to veer off-topic.
  • Trolls like to dig in for protracted flame wars. This behaviour differs by community - on Breitbart and IGN, FBUs tend to reply to others' posts, but on CNN, they're more likely to start new discussions. But across all communities, they like to drag others into fruitless discussion, getting significantly higher replies than regular users and protracting the discussion by chiming in far more frequently per thread than normal people.

 

 

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/04/15/new-algorithm-could-auto-squash-trolls/

[GrySql]

That's very interesting and has some new data, thanks for the info.

[rjent]

Well hell, I might as well sell my computer .... :drop:

[acdii]

oh crap i is in troubles