Design Interventions against Trolling in Social Media: A Classification of Current Strategies Based on Behaviour Change Theories

Trolling in social media has become a serious social issue, and as a result, most social media services have introduced various design interventions to combat it. This study aims to identify effective design interventions against trolling in popular social media services and investigate their approaches based on behaviour change theories in this paper. We have collected 13 representative design intervention cases in six widely popular social media services, and identified their strategies and related design patterns based on existing theories in design for behaviour change. We found two important dimensions—moment of action and required level of user engagement—and classified the 13 design intervention cases based on the two dimensions into four types. The classification of current strategies can serve as an instrument for researchers and designers to analyse and evaluate designing tools against trolling in social media.