FCJ-166 ‘Change name to No One. Like people’s status’ Facebook Trolling and Managing Online Personas

Tero Karppi University of Turku, Finland Whitney Phillips (2012: 3) has recently argued that in order to understand trolls and trolling we should focus on ‘what trolls do’ and how the behaviour of trolls ‘fit[s] in and emerge[s] alongside dominant ideologies.’ [1] For Phillips dominant ideologies are connected to the ‘corporate media logic.’ Her point is that social media platforms are not objective or ‘neutral’, but function according to certain cultural and economic logic and reproduce that logic through the platforms at various levels. [2] The premise, which I will build on in this article, is that the logic of a social media platform can be explored through the troll. In the following I will discuss how trolls and trolling operate alongside Facebook’s politics and practices of user participation and user agency. I provide a material “close reading” of two particular types of trolls and trolling within Facebook – the […]