Troll Farms

TL;DR

This paper models how disinformation campaigns influence elections by strategically deploying messages that manipulate voter perceptions, with effectiveness depending on voter information precision and polarization.

Contribution

It introduces a constrained information design model capturing disinformation tactics and analyzes how messaging strategies vary with voter signals and polarization levels.

Findings

Manipulation effectiveness increases with voter signal precision.

Higher polarization reduces the sender's ability to manipulate outcomes.

Costly messaging leads to targeting only marginal voters and moderating supporter messages.

Abstract

We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially opposed to the sender's preferred outcome receive favourable messages, while those in favour are targeted with unfavourable messages to dilute adverse information. The sender's ability to manipulate political outcomes increases with greater precision of voters' independent signals, but decreases with polarisation. When messaging is costly, the sender may stop targeting marginally opposing voters while moderating message extremism among supporters.