Regardless of your political views, the question has become almost inevitable as you scroll through your social media feed.
Flitting through a particularly contentious comments section, it might be the seemingly random capitalization, the similarity to posts you've seen before, or the glaring inaccuracy of the words themselves that draws your attention.
But when you see it, you ask yourself: Is that a troll or bot, or a real person?
Usually, Clemson communications professor Darren Linvill said, it is a real person who just has a different viewpoint than you do.
"Most of the weird activity in your conversation is just somebody that's different from you and, from another perspective, may not be weird," he said.
Linvill and his colleague Patrick Warren, a microeconomics professor at Clemson, have garnered national attention in recent years as they've worked to understand and snuff out coordinated social media efforts aimed at spreading misinformation, specifically those operated by foreign governments.
He is optimistic that trolls had less impact on this election than in recent years.
"It's very hard to say how much of it is out there," he said. "My gut wants to say there's less and the stuff that is out there is less influential, you know, smaller accounts. I would be surprised if there were troll accounts with 150,000 followers like Russia was running in 2017 and 2018."
On one level, that can be attributed to a growing understanding among academics like Linvill, intelligence communities and, in part, the social media platforms themselves in how to identify and respond to cases of state sponsored trolling.
An example of how the response to trolling has become stronger in recent years, Linvill said, was Twitter removing more than 100 accounts from its site in September after the FBI notified the platform Iran was using them to create chaos following the first presidential debate. An undergraduate class Linvill and Warren ran this fall was able to identify another network of about 100 Iranian trolls connected to an imam that was spreading anti-Western, anti-Israeli and anti-Saudi rhetoric.
Earlier this year, the two professors found Russian trolls pushed posts criticizing Sen. Lindsey Graham, worked to deepen South Carolina's racial divides, and touted candidate Bernie Sanders in the state's Democratic primary.
"In 2016, Russia was literally paying for political Facebook ads in rubles," Linvill said. "So the bar was real low. I mean, you do anything and you're going to do a better job of cleaning this up than they did in 2016."
While institutions have adapted and created better enforcement policies to address the issue, Linvill said the trolls are likely adapting as well.
For instance, Linvill said he hasn't seen an account connected to the Internet Research Group, a Russian company that actively attempts to influence American politics through trolling, since May.
"That definitely doesn't mean they're not there," Linvill said. "That just means that the way we were able to identify them before, they're not doing that anymore, because there was success in shutting down that particular kind of account."
And the number of state actors trying to influence American politics through social media continues to grow. Countries like Iran, Cuba and Venezuela have recently launched their own efforts. Russia, however, remains the most prolific and effective proliferator of misinformation.
The impact trolls had on this year's election also varies depending on on your definition of a troll. While Linvill focuses primarily on how foreign governments spread disinformation through deceptive activity, he said individuals and public figures can just as easily spread false or misleading information.
Unfounded conspiracy theories like those espoused by the QAnon movement have spread like wildfire on social media platforms. Some pundits and officials have seized on isolated incidents of confusion or mistakes at polling places to make baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
"There's definitely some coordinated activity spreading misinformation," Linvill said. "But there's a fine line between coordinated authentic and coordinated inauthentic."
The full extent of troll and bot activity leading up to the election is still unknown, Linvill said. It took him and Warren about a year to get their arms around the scope of the impact it had in 2016, and the trolls are only getting more sophisticated. But although most of the seemingly strange posts you see on social media are real people, and the extent to which foreign actors are attempting to spread misinformation on the platforms is unknown, users should be cautious and skeptical about what they read on Twitter and Facebook, Linvill said.
"On social media, we treat every stranger like they're our best friends and we invite them into our home, and introduce them to our friends, and we hand them our microphone and let them talk to all of our friends," he said. "It's absurd that the rules online for so many Americans are totally different from the rules in real life. Many of these problems would not exist if we just operated by the same rules."
The Link LonkNovember 10, 2020 at 03:09AM
https://ift.tt/3pekRk8
In 2020 election, social media trolls likely less prominent than 2016, Clemson expert says - Charleston Post Courier
https://ift.tt/3g8jVYU
Troll
No comments:
Post a Comment