Affect or ideology: the impact of political polarization on perceptions of internet trolling

The study focuses on two types of political polarization (affective and ideological), which are supposed to influence the perception of political Internet trolling. The purpose of this study is to identify the role of affective and ideological polarization in perception of opposition and pro-government trolling. The author conducted a survey (N = 200) among users of Russian social network VK. During survey we showed our respondents vignettes with examples of troll-inflated conversations. These vignettes were composed based on indicators of trolling: provocation (aggression), mockery (sarcasm), spam, usage of templates and identification with trolls by other users. The dependent variable was the answer of the respondents, who decided in the course of the survey which example of discussion to classify as trolling. Respondents were also asked some questions to determine their political perceptions and level of perceived affective polarization. Two key independent variables were derived from their responses – distance between trolls’ and respondents’ political positions and the average level of perceived affective polarization. The author used probit-regression to measure the effect of these independent variables on respondents’ answers. As the result, we observe a statistically significant effect of ideological polarization on the perception of trolling. Hypothesis about the influence of affective polarization on the respondents’ answers was not confirmed.

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