Backbytes: America - a nation of online trolls

One-quarter of Americans admit to being online trolls - terrific work, America!

Despite the campaigns of some partly-political people to re-define the noble art of trolling as harassment and sending threats, that commendably hasn't washed with polling company YouGov.

It uses the traditional definition of the term "troll", not the more modern re-definition, and found that "nearly a quarter of those who have ever posted content admit to having maliciously argued over an opinion with a stranger, while 23 per cent have maliciously argued over facts".

Twelve per cent of people admitted to "making deliberately controversial statements" - we're not sure whether those people could more accurately be described as "politicians", but according to YouGov, "men are more likely to get into a malicious argument than women and Millennials are twice as likely as those aged 55+ to engage in trolling behaviour".

Twelve per cent of posters "admitted to having crossed the line so far that they have had their comment removed by a moderator". That, however, sets an especially low bar given the particularly sensitive souls responsible for moderating sites like The Guardian's Comment is Free.

According to YouGov, trolls can be found lurking almost everywhere on the internet, although their favourite habitats are Facebook and Twitter, according to the trolls that YouGov polled.

Non-trolls, however, report that trolls are most active on chat sites like Reddit. Politics, news and current affairs and religion were, predictably, the trolls' topics of choice. Or maybe non-trolls just don't like it when someone disagrees with them?

Sensibly, in the land of the free, the best response for dealing with trolls was thought to be simply ignoring them. "[This] seems to be the winning strategy," claimed YouGov.

Let's hope that message is received loud and clear by all who would criminalise words that they personally find "offensive".

Good work YouGov - and America - notwithstanding the peculiar use of the term "maliciously".