These students have developed a tool to kill Internet trolls in the womb

Internet trolls can turn an excellent website into an abuse-riddled mess that many people would sooner avoid, just ask Twitter. While many of the larger websites out there have legions of bots and mods that try to combat these trolls, more often than not, justice is only served after the damage is done. However, a few students at Stanford have developed a system which they claim can kill trolls in the womb. 

Trolls are the scourge of many an Internet site. These are people who deliberately engage in antisocial behavior by posting inflammatory or off topic messages. At best, they are a frustrating annoyance; at the worst they can make people’s lives a misery. So a way of spotting trolls early in their online careers and preventing their worst excesses would be a valuable tool. Today, Justin Cheng at Stanford University in California and a few pals say they have created just such a tool by analyzing the behavior of trolls on several well-known websites and creating an algorithm that can accurately spot them after as few as 10 posts. They say their technique should be of high practical importance to the people who maintain online communities. Cheng and co study three online news communities: the general news site CNN.com, the political news site Breitbart.com, and the computer gaming site IGN.com.