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# Fighting trolling with academic rigour
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2016/04/fighting-trolling-academic-rigour/
- Published: 2016-04-12T11:26:28.000Z
- Updated: 2016-04-12T11:26:28.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: community, community management, gaming, online culture, research

Trolling – hostile, provocative anti-social behaviour – is one of the biggest challenges to any large-scale online community – and that includes comment sections on mainstream publications.

The problem is far, far bigger in the online gaming world, though. And one of the biggest games in the eSports sector – [League of Legends](http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) – suffers particularly badly. The game’s publisher – Riot – is fighting back with [huge studies, conducted with academic rigour](http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647?ref=onemanandhisblog.com), and shared with the academic community:

> “We let loose machine learning,” Lin says. The automated system could provide nearly instantaneous feedback; and when abuse reports arrived within 5–10 minutes of an offence, the reform rate climbed to 92%. Since that system was switched on, Lin says, verbal toxicity among so-called ranked games, which are the most competitive — and most vitriolic — dropped by 40%. Globally, he says, the occurrence of hate speech, sexism, racism, death threats and other types of extreme abuse is down to 2% of all games.

2% is still substantial, but the approach here is certainly one community managers across the journalism world could learn from.