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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 28:3 (2018) ► pp.391–416

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The motives attributed to trolls in metapragmatic comments on three Hungarian left-wing political blogs

 | Lancaster University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 27 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17007.pet
Abstract
This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 178 comment threads of three Hungarian left-wing political blogs. It is also concerned with how frequently these motives are mentioned and how they contribute to the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the alleged trolls in the threads. The paper identifies five motives for trolling: emotional reasons, financial gain, political beliefs, being employed by Fidesz or the Hungarian government, and unspecified political affiliation. Depending on these motives, trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Furthermore, by suggesting that Fidesz or the Hungarian government employs trolls, the posters discursively construct Fidesz as an autocratic and corrupt state party that tries to manipulate the public.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Trolling in computer-mediated communication
  • 3.‘Trolling’ and ‘troll’ as metapragmatic labels
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Data collection
    • 4.2Corpus and data analysis
  • 5.A taxonomy of the motives attributed to trolls
    • 5.1Assumed motive for trolling (1): Emotional reasons
    • 5.2Assumed motive for trolling (2): Financial gain
    • 5.3Assumed motive for trolling (3): Political beliefs
    • 5.4Assumed motive for trolling (4): Being employed by Fidesz or the government
    • 5.5Assumed motive for trolling (5): Unspecified political affiliation
  • 6.Annotation of the troll motive comments
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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