Disinformation Warfare: Understanding State-Sponsored Trolls on Twitter and Their Influence on the Web

Abstract

Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or "trolls." Although they are often involved in spreading disinformation on social media, there is little understanding of how these trolls operate, what type of content they disseminate, and most importantly their influence on the information ecosystem.In this paper, we shed light on these questions by analyzing 27K tweets posted by 1K Twitter users identified as having ties with Russia's Internet Research Agency and thus likely state-sponsored trolls. We compare their behavior to a random set of Twitter users, finding interesting differences in terms of the content they disseminate, the evolution of their account, as well as their general behavior and use of Twitter. Then, using Hawkes Processes, we quantify the influence that trolls had on the dissemination of news on social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. Overall, our findings indicate that Russian trolls managed to stay active for long periods of time and to reach a substantial number of Twitter users with their tweets. When looking at their ability of spreading news content and making it viral, however, we find that their effect on social platforms was minor, with the significant exception of news published by the Russian state-sponsored news outlet RT (Russia Today).

Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign

“…Manipulation through misinformation, or "fake news," has in the past year gain notoriety, as a result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election [3,32,37,43,48,57]. Data from Facebook and Twitter show that deceptive, made-up content, marketed as political news, was shared with millions of Americans before the 2016 election, 1, 2 although only a handful of studies have examined this phenomenon in detail [32].…”

Cross-Platform Disinformation Campaigns: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

“…Prior work on online disinformation has tended to focus on activities on a single social media platform such as Twitter (e.g. Arif et al, 2018;Broniatowski et al, 2018;Wilson et al, 2018, Keller et al, 2019Zannettou et al, 2019), or YouTube (e.g. Hussain et al, 2018), or in the surrounding news media ecosystem (e.g.…”

A Survey on Troll Detection

“…The list provided by the US Congress is being used in a number of research works aiming at the automatic detection of online trolls, particularly those interfering in the political sphere [10][11][12]. Some studies deal, in particular, with the diffusion of false information and fake news by trolls, describing the phenomenon as "disinformation warfare" [13]. In this sense, the problem can also be analysed from a general viewpoint of information quality assessment applied to social media [27].…”

“…Even when limiting the search to this rather narrow "topic", it is quite clear that the recent interest in this kind of application has been stimulated by recent events having worldwide resonance. For instance, the hype arisen by the alleged influence of Russia in the latest United States presidential elections has shown that malicious behaviours in social networks are not only a "local" menace within limited groups of users of a social network, but can assume world-wide dimensions, up to affecting world politics [10][11][12][13].…”