  In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts
constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is
confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary
people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger
mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion
(e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating
an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by
others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together
double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how
these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal
analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals
temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to
trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and
discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an
individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that
ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.
