Why politicised trolling on social media is more destructive than fake news

In authoritarian countries, the campaigns are often conducted by pro-government organisations

Online disinformation and the spread of deceptive political messages are pernicious, but they aren’t necessarily the worst abuse of social networks by governments and political actors. Rational people are resistant to propaganda, and irrational ones only consume messages that stroke their confirmation biases. No one, however, can be impervious to personal attacks on a mass scale.

A report by the human rights lawyer Carly Nyst and Oxford University researcher Nick Monaco is an early attempt to study the phenomenon of state-sponsored trolling, or the digital harassment of critics. The case studies come from a diverse set of countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Ecuador, the Philippines, Turkey, the US and Venezuela. The stories in the report, commissioned by the Palo Alto, California-based Institute for the Future, are all similar in some respects. Thousands of social network accounts, both operated by humans and by bots used to amplify the attack, gang up on a person who dares to criticise a regime or a political figure. Invariably, the person is accused of being a foreign agent and a traitor. Memes and cartoons are used to insult the target. The language of the comments, posts and tweets is often abusive; female targets, such as the Turkish journalist Ceyda Karan and her Filipina colleague Maria Ressa, are routinely threatened with rape. The general idea behind the campaigns is to give the target the impression of swelling public indignation about his or her work and views, but also to drown out the target’s voice with the howling of thousands of digital voices.

In more authoritarian countries, the campaigns are often conducted by pro-government organisations. That was the case in Russia in the early years of this decade. According to the Institute for the Future report, it’s the case in Azerbaijan today, where a group called Ireli (“Forward”) openly hunts the regime’s opponents on the web. The tendency, though, is toward Online disinformation and the spread of deceptive political messages are pernicious, but they aren’t necessarily the worst abuse of social networks by governments and political actors. Rational people are resistant to propaganda, and irrational ones only consume messages that stroke their confirmation biases. No one, however, can be impervious to personal attacks on a mass scale.

A report by the human the professionalisation of trolling. Russia’s Internet Research Agency, featured in an indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is just one example of how trolling operations can be run by a corporation-like entity. In Ecuador, a firm called Ribeney Sociedad Anonima won a government contract for trolling services. The Bahraini government has hired Western “black PR” firms to attack critics. 

In the less authoritarian states, where voting is still meaningful, trolling operations often grow out of election campaigns. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa created a troll army for the 2012 election and kept using it after he won. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte hired trolls to work for his 2016 presidential campaign and has since put some of the most prominent ones in government jobs.

The Institute for the Future report also takes aim at the pro-Donald Trump trolls in the US who proliferated during the 2016 campaign and remain active now that he is president. In the US case, the report defines state-sponsored trolling “as the involvement of hyperpartisan news outlets and sources close to the president” that have evolved “from an electioneering trolling machine to an incumbent government’s apparatus.” Certain statements from high officials, the report says, are “tantamount to a coded condoning of vitriolic harassment online from high officials.”

It’s difficult to understand why social media platforms do little, if anything, to stop the trolling campaigns. Twitter and Facebook will remove posts and comments containing death and rape threats, but not insults, treason accusations or suggestions that a journalist is on a hostile spy agency’s payroll. They also don’t make it easy to complain about entire trolling campaigns rather than individual comments and messages, which are difficult for a trolling target to flag.