Undergraduate Business Students Social Media and Online Trolling Behavior: Trends During and After Covid-19

Social media participation has now been woven into the fabric of nearly two-thirds of the world population. One unfortunate consequence, however, has been the incidence of trolling evidenced by online hate and harassment. Because undergraduate business students will be the future users and managers of social media, this study was undertaken to empirically examine social media participation and trolling incidence, in particular, with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Results demonstrate that undergraduates primarily utilize six sites with total social media time peaking at 310 minutes per day during the first year of the pandemic and then dropping to 273 minutes after the pandemic. In terms of trolling, while trolling incidence varied by year and by social media platform, both the percentage of students being trolled and the quantity of trolls received per person have been steadily increasing since the beginning of the pandemic. These results suggest that the pandemic has had a tangible effect on undergraduate student online behavior and that there is an increasing level of online social discord.