Canadian criminology professor to study online trolls

Trolls have long been the bane of online existence and there's little that Internet users have been able to do about it.

That may soon change as a Western University professor and detective is hoping his new study will help to provide some ability to begin decoding the language and behaviour of trolls.

Michael Arntfield, who specializes in digital and emerging media, investigative journalism, and forensic linguistics and lexicology, has received federal funding to examine the understudied subject of the language that online trolls use.

His research assistants are gathering samples from social media to understand the communication patterns of trolls.

By analyzing the lexicon of trolls, Arntfield hopes to predict how an individual may behave in the future in the same way that criminal profiling helps experts anticipate the behaviour of offenders.

Arntfield, who also appears on the TV series To Catch a Killer in which he leads a team of civilians working to solve cold case crimes, is also studying the relationship between online bullies and their targets.

In February, a Canadian study found a correlation between online trolling and three personality disorders: sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.