On a side note, Why good people become bad online trolls

A lousy mood and inflammatory debate can provoke anyone to transform from a friendly offline Jekyll into an evil online Hyde, according to new Stanford and Cornell research.

It’s widely assumed that Internet “trolls” are different from the rest of us. Conventional wisdom holds that they’re innately sociopathic individuals whose taunting, derogatory or provocative internet posts disrupt cordial discussion.

But new research, published as part of the upcoming 2017 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, reaches a different conclusion: Under the right circumstances, anyone — even ordinary, good people — can become a troll, changing their online behavior in radical ways.

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