The Collective Trolling Lifecycle

Abstract

This study examines the online collective process of global trolling of Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. The goal is to identify global trolling behaviors, patterns of global CI, and the role that national culture plays in this context. We performed thematic content analysis of 60 videos (each represents a country) that were posted over a three-week period in 2017, following Trump’s inauguration speech. We found that regardless of country, all the videos exhibit repetitive, provocative, pseudo-sincere, and satirical trolling behaviors; while these trolling behaviors cross national boundaries, the use of certain trolling behaviors correlated with a few of Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural differences. For example, videos from individualistic countries included significantly more instances of trolling behaviors than those from collectivistic countries. We found that in global trolling CI patterns of replication, innovation, and customization were prominent along with the impact or omission of the original idea. While most of these patterns have been documented by other scholars, we identified the additional pattern of omission that in an extreme case led to a minimalist approach excluding the original idea. This study is unique and timely in that it focuses on global trolling, analyzing internet videos as a medium of trolling.