Shrey Tripathi

Reddit is a less well-known social media website built on anonymity and somewhat democratic principles. The probability of a post/comment “going viral” on Reddit is the same irrespective of whether a person is a celebrity or if they’re a commoner. Each community or “subreddit” has its own topics and rules enforced by subreddit moderators. The admins of Reddit only step in when there’s a public controversy or when their Terms of Service are violated.

AskReddit is one of the most popular subreddits. Their official description: r/AskReddit is the place to ask and answer thought-provoking questions. Of course, not all questions here are thought-provoking. Some are very obvious “troll” questions.

The Wikipedia entry for Internet trolls/ trolling:

In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog), with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses or manipulating others’ perception. This is typically for the troll’s amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival’s online activities or manipulating a political process.

The moderators of AskReddit continuously strive to remove such questions, however, it is not possible to manually inspect every question and do this – thousands of questions are added every day. This project aims to create a model capable of automatically detecting troll questions so that they can be flagged and removed.

Implementation

Check out the project and the report here.