For Whom the Bell Trolls: Troll Behaviour in the Twitter Brexit Debate

TL;DR

This study investigates the behavior of Russian-linked Twitter accounts during the UK Brexit referendum, revealing their activity patterns, content amplification tactics, and profile characteristics, highlighting cross-national influence efforts.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of Russian troll accounts' behavior in the UK Brexit debate, showing their activity shifts and profile features during the referendum period.

Findings

Accounts shifted from disruptive tweeting to content amplification on referendum day.

Many accounts created in 2016 contained German locations and terms.

419 of the 2,752 Russian-linked accounts posted Brexit-related content.

Abstract

In a review into automated and malicious activity Twitter released a list of accounts that they believed were connected to state sponsored manipulation of the 2016 American Election. This list details 2,752 accounts Twitter believed to be controlled by Russian operatives. In the absence of a similar list of operatives active within the debate on the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union (Brexit) we investigated the behaviour of the same American Election focused accounts in the production of content related to the UK-EU referendum. We found that within our dataset we had Brexit-related content from 419 of these accounts, leading to 3,485 identified tweets gathered between the 29th August 2015 and 3rd October 2017. The behaviour of the accounts altered radically on the day of the referendum, shifting from generalised disruptive tweeting to retweeting each other in order to amplify content produced by other troll accounts. We also demonstrate that, while these accounts are, in general, designed to resemble American citizens, accounts created in 2016 often contained German locations and terms in the user profiles.