Algorithm 'identifies future trolls from just five posts'A website commenter who will end up being banned for antisocial behaviour can be spotted with 80% accuracy simply by examining their first five posts, claim researchers
It is possible to tell comment trolls apart from other users simply from looking at the way they write, researchers have found.
Studying the comments on three sites – CNN, Breitbart and IGN – over an 18 month period, the researchers at Cornell and Stanford universities found that users who went on to be banned wrote differently to other users in the same comment thread, using fewer words indicative of positive emotion.
Future banned users also tended to write comments that were more difficult to read than typical users, the researchers found.
“We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users,” the researchers add, in a pre-publication paper titled Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities.
“Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community.
FULL STORY:
theguardian 
