- Trolling is defined as creating discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people by posting inflammatory or off-topic messages in an online community.
- Basically, a social media troll is someone who purposely says something controversial in order to get a rise out of other users.
- Over the past few years, journalists and politicians have often highlighted the presence of state-sponsored online trolls with the mission of swaying public opinion on particular issues.
- “Facebook has been tuning its systems to detect and block coordinated malicious behavior for several years,”
- “The threats faced by platforms, however, are rapidly changing.
- Until a couple of years ago, the main threat came from malware controlling fake accounts to spread spam and other frauds. This type of activity is controlled by programs and not by humans, and is therefore very precisely coordinated.”
- In recent years, social media platforms have witnessed the rise of a new type of threat: coordinated statesponsored trolls pushing a particular narrative on social media. This activity derives from humans rather than automated programs and is hence harder to tell apart from normal online chatter.
- This theory was confirmed when Twitter and Reddit released information about Russian and Iranian trolls, who had been making bold statements on their platforms.
- Russian trolls were typically pro-Trump, while Iranian ones were against him.
- This suggests that regular users could be inadvertently caught in the middle of discussions between state-sponsored actors supporting conflicting ideologies.
- Moreover, the researchers observed that Russian-backed trolls were more sophisticated and subtle than Iranian-backed actors.
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