Trolling in Twitter: A study about Mexican trolling

Abstract

Trolling has not been widely studied in the Spanish-speaking field, which is clear when the definition of trolear can only be found as a naturalized loan from trolling, being that these practices have different linguistic and cultural characteristics. According to a survey made to Mexican social network users, trolear is a practice that does not imply the use of some strategies used in trolling, having a more humorous than aggressive impact for users. Then, when analyzing the sociopragmatic resources found in a corpus of tweets made by Mexican trolls, a series of characteristics unique to trolear in Mexico were found, such as the use of criticism as a social weapon, humiliation or ridicule as a strategy for trolear, as well as the frequent appearance of aggressive humor and its humorous devices to achieve this purpose. Both methods, the survey and the tweets corpus analysis, will be developed in this study.