* These are “Trolls” (their motive is to seek attention/revenge and are suggested to have person-ality traits associated with Sadism, low self-esteem, low conscience, and a low moral compass), “Lurkers” (they visit various forums but refrain from writing messages or comments), and “Posters” (they use forums to reveal per-sonal information that often relates to sex life, sexuality, fantasies, family problems, and personal problems, varying in motives).
* Dark traits can predict what kind of approach and values a person has towards others… The first of the three traits is “Machiavellianism” (Mach), characterized by often having a cynical worldview and by striving for power, money and status; they often are cold and pragmatic, and use false play and manipulation. They can be charming, cun-ning, strategic, enthusiastic and deficient in morals. The sec-ond of these traits is “Narcissism” (Narc), characterized by seeking attention and admiration, by being arrogant and ex-hibitionistic, and by striving for power and leadership. They often feel superior, dominant and self-righteous. They can be charismatic, productive and inspiring. Thirdly, “Psy-chopathy” (Psych), characterized by often being cold, and by being manipulative, and impulsive. They often have a low degree of empathy and little feelings of guilt… Studies have also suggested that Sadism should be included in the set of dark traits… Apart from the first three traits, Sadism can predict insensitivity to the suffering of others, and can also predict insensitivity when to “strike back” when threatened. Sadism also has shown a unique relation to Internet Trolling and to sexuality. The unique aspect of Sadism is that the individual enjoys the suffering of others.
The anonymity aspect of the online environment is reported to affect the behavior on internet (Seigfried-Spellar & Lank-ford, 2018). This could be due to de-individuation processes (Demetriou & Silke, 2003), inducing a state where individuals feel anonymous among many people. Postmes and Spear (1998) claim that de-individuation must not necessarily lead to unethical behavior on the Internet. However, de-individuation may lead to online disinhibition effects, meaning that in anonymity, communication is more uninhibited than in a face-to-face communication (Clark-Gor-don, Bowman, Goodboy, & Wright, 2019). Measures of Online Environment (OE) can be de-scribed with three subcategories (Ritter, 2014). One is “Acceptability” (relates to the hegemonic culture of the forum. Individuals who score high on OE-acceptability may feel it is okay to express themselves with both prejudice and sexist comments). A second is “Aloneness” (encourages harassment, as the OE is lacking social codes, creating inhibitory effects. Individuals do not feel they need to follow ordinary social norms and can write whatever they want). The third is “Anonymity” (neutralizes status disparities and makes individuals feel invisible while also reducing personal responsibility. Individuals participate in more risky behavior and treat people any way they want since no one knows who they are).
…The results showed that particularly Trolling (malicious posting) had significant correlations with almost all four dark personality traits. Controlling for dark personality traits, Sadism and Machiavellianism remained as the strongest predictors for Trolling. This is in line with Buckels et al.’s (2014) results that also showed a strong correlation with the Internet behavior style, and it provides more evidence of the importance of the role of especially dark personality traits. Not surprisingly, it seems that hard-minded people post more malicious content. Similarly, two of the dark personality traits, Sadism and Psychopathy, co-varied strongly with Posting (regular reading and posting on forums). Interestingly, it seems that hard-minded people also post more in conventional styles.
When the Online Environment was investigated as a mediator in these relationships, only trivial effects were found. This means that personality behind posting behaviors generally cannot be explained by how people see or feel or perceive their online environment on Internet forums. The one exception was Acceptability, which describes tolerance to harmful and socially unacceptable behavior on the Internet (Ritter, 2014), which had a small mediating effect explaining Psychopathy and conventional Posting. This study makes several contributions to research on individual behavior on the Internet. First, this study shows that an individual’s behavior on the Internet can be predicted by dark personality traits. The fact that Trolling is related to the dark traits is already known, but what is of interest is that these dark traits (especially Sadism and Psychopathy) are also represented in the regular Posters. Second, the present study also shows in an exploratory way that Online Environment cannot explain the relationship between the dark traits and the posting behavior. It seems that personality traits are “all it takes” for Internet commentary styles.
