The way commenters write can be used to detect if they'll end up getting banned, according to US researchers working on troll-busting algorithms.
A team from Cornell and Stanford Universities scanned the comment threads on three news sites - CNN, Breitbart and IGN - over the course of a year and a half. That totalled up to 35 million comments, sent by almost two million users. 50,000 of those users went on to be banned from the sites.
The researchers found that those banned users wrote in a different way to others. Their comments were generally harder to read and used fewer words that indicated positive emotion. They also behaved slightly differently in how they moved around the site - spending more time focused in individual threads than users who weren't banned.
