Justifying the accusation
A descriptive comparative analysis of ordinary speakers’ accusations of
trolling and bad faith
Accusations of trolling (deceiving participants about one’s
communicative intention, conducted for amusement,
Dynel 2016;
Hardaker 2013) and bad faith (dishonestly denying a speaker’s
committing meaning,
de Saussure and Oswald
2009;
Oswald 2022) abound
in digitally mediated communication. The
labels chosen by
posters significantly impact the outcome of discussions, as accusations of
trolling tend to result in more abrupt settlements of disputes compared to
accusations of bad faith. However, proving these deceptive activities can be
challenging for posters. As a result, they often substantiate the “bad faith”
label by mentioning in their accusations what they perceive as strategies
indicating their interlocutors’ bad faith.
In this paper, I examine 161 accusations of trolling and bad
faith gathered from a forum. The analysis draws on Hardaker’s (
2010,
2013) research and proposes a comparison of the
strategies mentioned in these accusations. The aim is to describe the ways in
which posters justify the label they opt for when confronted with deceptive
activities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: How do ordinary speakers justify their accusation of deceptive
activities?
- 1.1Trolling and bad faith: Definitions
- 1.2How do posters justify the label of their accusation?
- 1.3Aiming at a descriptive analysis of the arguments mentioned in the
accusations
- 2.Dataset: Strategies mentioned in accusations of trolling and bad faith
- 2.1The forum: Forum sceptique
- 2.2The strategies and their constraints
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Dividing accusations into settled and relaunched disputes
- 3.2Establishing the categories
- 3.3Two additional categories
- 3.4Bad faith as a trolling strategy
- 4.Analysis and results
- 4.1Settling or relaunching the dispute
- 4.2Comparison – similarities
- 4.3Comparison – differences
- 5.Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References