Well, part of the problem is that who a "Troll" is, is debatable. In general someone who had a strong opinion that is contrary to the majority of people participating in a discussion or response thread is viewed as a troll. Ditto for people telling you things you don't want to hear, especially if they are stated strongly, and happen to demolish what you wanted to believe to begin with. In general people respond with anger when they have strongly held beliefs challenged rather than even considering alternative viewpoints or *gasp* realizing that defining parts of their
personal beliefs might be entirely wrong.
The problem with a scientific study of this sort is that you need a real community to see trolls or what are being called trolls incorrectly, and see things unfold as they happen, to truely see the response. Scientists creating a simulated trolling and then telling people to just read it, as opposed to participating in the discussion, is kind of meaningless and shows no understanding of the phenomena.
It should also be noted that if your looking for evidence of the problems involved in internet communication, the things to consider are situations like a certain Bioware employee who made a grandiose statement about avoiding the forums because of how "toxic" they were. In general, when it's actually important, people will tend to simply remove themselves or ignore things they don't want to hear or consider (even when they need to, like in this case) rather than actually remaining glued to it to the point of changing for the positive or negative.
Look again with Bioware and what they did with "Dragon Age 2" they asked fairly early on in the dev process if it was okay for them to have a human hero, with no origin story, and a pre-defined name in exchange for increased voice acting. The answer was an overwhelming "no" from the community. Bioware generally ignored everything they didn't want to hear, listened only to positive feedback, and then told everyone they did what they wanted to do with community approval. On some levels, looking at later "toxic forums" comments it leads me to believe that they might simply be creating their own reality while becoming detached from the real thing, due to simply ignoring any negative feedback they get as the work of "trolls".
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To be honest, if scientists are going to do useless intenet studies, I'd be more interested in finding out if any of the "Memes" created by 4 Chan or Anonymous can be seen to be working.
The point of a Meme is to basically burn something into the collective consciousness to the point where it doesn't go away and can actually be instinctively inheranted as a sort of ancesteral memory. An example of this would be to say take a group of people with a very distinctive style of society and arcetecture, steal their babies, drop the babies on an habitable planet to be raised by antiseptic robots and then see what they wind up building over a period of time. The idea of a meme is that if you were to say do it with Arabs their eventual buildings would match the existing MO of towers with domed tops, theocracy, and a general style of dress because this is how the people did it for thousands of years and the people would "remember" these things without actually remembering them consciously and develop along those lines. The same could apply to any group with a distinctive style ranging from Europeans and their style of arcetecture, to Asians, or whatever else. The idea features heavily in science fiction by way of justifying how someone might say visit planet seperated from the rest of spacefaring humans that fell into barbarity, rose from it, and then grew to almost exactly resemble some ancient civilization or other based on what the people were like or what group wound up dominating.
There have been all kinds of permutations of this over the years including "killer memes" that result in the destruction of those they infect, viruses that move through ancesteral memory, and similar things.
At any rate the joke with 4chan and Anonymous was that some of this stupidity was supposed to be circulated on such a high level and so heavily saturated that it would seep into the human consciousness through the wonder of the internet. Every time I hear someone talking about "old memes" or "memes they wish would die" they seem to kind of miss the point, and truthfully I've actually run into a few kids and stuff who have spouted or referanced memes without knowing the source or original context. When you consider even something as benign as Lolcats has wound up being everywhere for over a decade now you do have to wonder if The Internet is accelerating the process dramatically as some people theorized (which began the entire schtick).
That kind of a study might be more interesting, see how many kids recognize memes or think they seem vaguely familiar or "heard that somewhere, but don't remember where". Before they even really have unfettered net access.
Of course that would be a waste too, but better than trying to study trolling as a phenomena. That's almost as silly as people studying "cyber bullying".
