Understanding the We-Intention to Participate in Collective Trolling on Social Networking Sites: The Online Disinhibition Perspective

Collective trolling, a crowd-based form of online deviant behaviors, has garnered significant scholarly and public interest due to its detrimental consequences on both individuals and society. Social technologies, such as social networking sites (SNSs), have been indicated to provide a perfect environment to facilitate a spectrum of such deviant behaviors. This study aims to investigate the determinants of the "we-intention" to participate in collective trolling on SNSs under the lens of the online disinhibition effect; simultaneously, the moderating role of gender is also examined. The proposed research model was empirically tested with a dataset of 407 valid SNS users recruited via an online survey. The PLS-SEM results indicated that SNS' environment characteristics, such as dissociative anonymity, asynchronicity, authority minimization and lack of monitoring, significantly increase perceived online disinhibition, which, in turn, positively impacts the we-intention to participate in collective trolling. Furthermore, the moderating role of gender is empirically validated.