Eggheads crack open web troll brains

1) And just how much did this masterpiece of obviousness cost?

2) does '1' now make me one of the nasties?

Recognition at last!

Cool, so I now I know I'm an ethically relativistic, rash, impulsive, vengeful troll when I flame Virgin Media.

<vengeful-troll>

OR MAYB THEY REELY R A BUNCH OF MONEYGRUBBING BASTARDS WHO TREAT US LIKE CA$H COWS AND DONT GIV A SHIT ABOUT TEH QUALITY OF SERVICE THEY ***FAIL*** TO PROVIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

</vengeful-troll>

better at discerning these opinions and rhetoric from facts and descriptions?

So, what they are essentially saying is that when you read anything about any product or company you have to be "better at discerning these opinions and rhetoric from facts and descriptions", this then would include;

1) Corporate advertising and "brand" where most of what is said is opinion or rhetoric and contains as close to zero truth as toothless regulators allow

2) Astroturfing by corporate lackeys on internet forums where any attempt to disseminate any real world experience or facts about the product is met by marketing speak, fatuous drivel and the pretence that the poster is a real customer

3) Actual customers (/victims) who are angry thanks to the extreme dissonance between the BS spouted by the corporate and the actual reality, hmm, wonder why they stick the boot in???

I don't think they understand the term "troll"

What a troll does is to light the blue touch paper and then step back and giggle.

hee hee.

This is so flawed, I don't know where do I start!

@"Researcher Michael Workman gave personality tests to 193 largely college-educated "social media literate professionals" from across the US and Europe"

193 college-educated social media literate professionals isn't a cross section of the population and it isn't a particularly large sample group.

... meanwhile ... @"The main outcome was that of the four traits they tested for" ... oh great, so they tested just 4 traits.

Talk about a biased and flawed sampling and the outcome they interpret from this is that trolls attack "corporations, rather than trolling individuals."

Well yes some people do indeed attack corporations ... but that isn't the only form of trolling, as we all know, but clearly the journal writers don't (so why do they ignore other forms of trolling?).

Also they fail to separate consumer campaigns against justifiable corporate contempt, which does happen.

As for … "corporate reputation management" … that is basically, propaganda. Corporate reputation management people seek to bias everyone's perception in favour of a corporation just as protesters seek to bias peoples perception out of favour of a corporation. Both are propaganda, one for, one against. (Which incidentally also highlights that shill tactics are inherently part of corporate reputation management, because they would need to use corporate propaganda against protester propaganda).

Anyway this journal isn't analyzing all forms of trolls (as the title of this story implied) its simply focusing on corporate trolling. There are other forms of trolls (such as NPD people who simply delight in learning to manipulate people), so why doesn't this journal group even mention other forms of trolling?

Something doesn't add up about all this, so time to "follow the money" as they say ... This "Computers in Human Behavior" is a journal ... which is sold. So who would buy their journal? Could it be the customers of such a journal are corporations who want to protect their corporate reputations? At which point, bingo, it now starts to makes sense.

Could it be this is a poorly researched journal report just to create something to sell or are they simply poor researchers? Either way, this journal is very flawed.

Computers in Human Excrement more like.

What's so wrong with ethical relativism?

"The main outcome was that of the four traits they tested for, the strongest correlation with cyber-smearing was a belief that ethics are relative and that there is no objective right and wrong"

Ethics are always subjective and in my opinion anyone who views the world in a purely black and white, right and wrong manner is incredibly suspect.

Reputation management?

I wonder why if a company provides good products/service, it would need to hire someone to manage the company reputation?

For me, if I know a company has hired one of these bottom feeders (reputation managment companies), I take it as a big stay away warning.

I dont shout, I just hAVE PROBLEM WITH THE Caps lock key being too close to the letter "A" ON MY NETBOOKS KEYBOard.

Trolling pedants is easy

Trolling is a art.

Starting at the wrong end

This study is just another piece of PC reinforcement of the status quo

It takes no account of the huge frustration to individual human beings of having to deal with automaton like corporates who can never be in the wrong.

Corporates and Governments view is generally that if human beings (customers, voters etc) don't like what happened it was

- they don't understand

- they didn't listen to us

- we didn't explain it to them in small enough words (the nearest thing you get to an admission of culpability)

- it was a contractor so nothing to do with us

- it was some bloke what doesn't work for us any more/has been retrained

Sure there's trolling for the sake of it but it's mostly political based - most of the anti-corporate stuff is rooted in truly frustrating experiences in dealing with corporate robots who just want you to STFU and hand over your wallet.