Project Proposal

Research Question: ‘To what extent does language determine the severity of internet troll posts, focussing specifically on Britain?’

Overview: We intend to create an in depth study into the language of internet trolls in Britain. We aim to focus particularly on high profile cases in the media that have provoked not only the attention of the public but may have required legal enquiries, and if so, why? Whilst we are aware that it is often images or content that may provoke such consequences, we want to focus specifically on the language use and the implications of this. We feel this topic is particularly relevant in today’s society with the use of Twitter and Facebook becoming an integral part of everyday life.

Methodology: To start with, each member of the group will explore a specific case study of this kind and post their findings to the blog. We are aware that with using only five case studies, we will not be able to provide an entirely comprehensive conclusion, as this is an area of language that is constantly developing and consistently gaining new examples. We do, however, intend to provide an extremely comprehensive analysis and insight into the reaction of the public and courts of law.

Once we have five examples we will discuss and analyse the language, looking particularly at the words that appear to be the most severe. Following this, we will create a questionnaire which will obtain the responses of hundred participants from two different age groups, in order to compare perceptions of the language we are studying.

Ethics:   Due to the nature of our study, a lot of expletives will be involved. In order to keep our study ethical we will ensure to only question those over eighteen – before inviting people to complete the questionnaire we will brief them on the sort of language that will appear and warn them that it may be offensive to some. We intend to keep all cases anonymous, and just focus on the linguistic features rather than who the example might be about.

Hypothesis: We are hoping to obtain a consensus on what types of internet trolling posts are considered the most severe; maybe also some consensus on the types of language used in these posts. We will look to find what words used have caused the most offence, in the media, courts of law and from results of our questionnaire, which may differ between gender, age, beliefs and values.

A literature review will follow, compiling information from current internet journals, broadsheet newspaper articles and general books regarding the language of the internet.