This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 178 comment
threads of three Hungarian left-wing political blogs. It is also concerned with how frequently these motives are mentioned and how
they contribute to the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly
emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the
alleged trolls in the threads. The paper identifies five motives for trolling: emotional reasons, financial gain, political
beliefs, being employed by Fidesz or the Hungarian government, and unspecified political affiliation. Depending on these motives,
trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Furthermore, by suggesting that Fidesz or the Hungarian government employs
trolls, the posters discursively construct Fidesz as an autocratic and corrupt state party that tries to manipulate the
public.
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Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Deschrijver, Cedric
2021. On the metapragmatics of ‘conspiracy theory’: Scepticism and epistemological debates in online conspiracy comments. Journal of Pragmatics 182 ► pp. 310 ff.
Jenks, Christopher J.
2019. Talking trolls into existence: On the floor management of trolling in online forums. Journal of Pragmatics 143 ► pp. 54 ff.
Pisarski, Mariusz & Aleksandra Gralczyk
2021. From Disruption to Dialog: Days of Judaism on Polish Twitter. Religions 12:10 ► pp. 828 ff.
Sambaraju, Rahul & Chris McVittie
2020. Examining abuse in online media. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 14:3
Verschueren, Jef
2021. Reflexivity and Meta-awareness. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 117 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.