Digital Teens and the 'Antisocial Network': Prevalence of Troublesome Online Youth Groups and Internet trolling in Great Britain

Abstract

A concern shared among nearly all generations of adults is that they must do something to tackle the problems in society caused by young people. They often forget that they were once young, and all too often blame young people for all of problems in their community. This paper challenges this view and shows how the blaming of Internet trolling on today's young people — called digital teens — is probably inaccurate. What might otherwise be called Troublesome Online Youth Groups (TOYGs), this paper looks at data collected from subjects in three UK regions (n=150 to 161), which includes young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Unlike might be typically thought, the data shows that far from these NEETs being the causes of Internet trolling it is in fact the areas with high levels of productivity, higher education and higher intelligence that report lower perceptions of quality of life that these electronic message faults (EMFts) most occur in.