Who Let The Trolls Out? Towards Understanding State-Sponsored Trolls
Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, William Setzer, Michael, Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn

TL;DR
This paper analyzes 10 million posts from Russian and Iranian state-sponsored trolls on social media, revealing their strategies, influence, and how they adapt over time, highlighting challenges for automated detection.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of troll behaviors, strategies, and influence across multiple platforms, comparing Russian and Iranian campaigns and their evolution over time.
Findings
Russian trolls were pro-Trump; Iranian trolls were anti-Trump.
Campaigns are influenced by real-world events.
Behavior of trolls varies over time, complicating detection.
Abstract
Recent evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors to manipulate public opinion on the Web. Campaigns revolving around major political events are enacted via mission-focused "trolls." While trolls are involved in spreading disinformation on social media, there is little understanding of how they operate, what type of content they disseminate, how their strategies evolve over time, and how they influence the Web's information ecosystem. In this paper, we begin to address this gap by analyzing 10M posts by 5.5K Twitter and Reddit users identified as Russian and Iranian state-sponsored trolls. We compare the behavior of each group of state-sponsored trolls with a focus on how their strategies change over time, the different campaigns they embark on, and differences between the trolls operated by Russia and Iran. Among other things, we find: 1) that Russian…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Spam and Phishing Detection · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
