Event overview
"Poor little snowflake, are you 'grossly' offended?": Quantifying Communicative Styles of Twitter Trolling
In this talk I will describe the phenomenon of ‘trolling’ and reveal the different communicative styles of Twitter trolling based on what linguistic features are present or absent within each Tweet. I will then illustrate how this method allows for the quantification of different communicative purposes and what implications this could have for law enforcement officials who judge a post according to whether it is ‘grossly offensive’.
For example, studies of trolling and of racist and sexist Tweets identified an antagonistic communicative style, the degree of which can be calibrated on a common scale. Using this distribution we can suggest how antagonistic a new suspect Tweet is with respect to the thousands of other trolling Tweets represented. The overall results demonstrate that trolling is a multifunctional phenomenon, often drawing on numerous communicative styles in a single post.
With ‘offensive’ being an elusive term and fundamentally a human, subjective experience, a tool dedicated to quantifying the degree of the communicative styles employed might help in understanding what styles comprise gross offence.
BIO: Isobelle Clarke is currently working on her PhD in Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, having transferred from the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University where she completed her Master’s degree in Forensic Linguistics. Isobelle is interested in abusive language online. In particular, her PhD is examining the variety of communicative styles and linguistic repertoires of Twitter trolling under the supervision of Professor Jack Grieve. Her most recent research has explored the communicative styles of Trump’s Tweets and global Twitter as a way to answer the ways in which and the extent to which Twitter trolling is similar or different from global Twitter and from the King Troll himself.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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15 Oct 2018 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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