A Troll is someone who is using a fake account on social media to spread misleading information, attack or provoke individuals for their own amusement, or gather personal information as part of an organized campaign. The interesting thing is these trolls don’t even have to be human… they could be bots or software programs designed to crawl the internet and post sponsored comments or tweets hundreds of times a day.
Exaggerated social and political opinion pieces and manipulated news stories have been around for centuries, but the internet and social media have provided a platform for these falsehoods, conspiracy theories and manipulation to spread faster and farther than ever. The public has been conditioned to not only consider this information as fact, but to chime in and express their own opinions and even judge others who are trying to pull the narrative back to the truth.
In a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which they monitored 126,000 true and false media stories over a decade, they found that the misleading stories were shared 6x more than the true stories – and so reached more people.
Some examples of this engineering as shown by the 2016 election and more recently the 2020 riots have included taking quotes out of context, slowing down video to show the speaker as less than intelligent, advertisements designed to mislead the public, news reporters only focusing on half of the story, videos compiled from non-related events or designed to show events that never happened, and foreign agent accounts pushing for social disobedience and unrest among Americans.
Here are some ways to spot a bot or troll:
- Unsolicited contact
- Accounts with no profile information or image
- Over-active accounts – posting multiple times a day even.
- The news accounts are questionable, use stolen images and doctored graphics
- The account often poses as an attractive young female with strong opinions encouraging polarization of the public interest and even violence
- They don’t post much personal information, mostly memes and articles from others
- Their posts send you to spoofed websites, misinformation, and manipulated content – sometimes for profit, sometimes to take your personal information.
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It’s a good idea to treat every story and comment you read on the internet with a grain of skepticism and take time to fully consider the source before you decide whether to believe the story – or worse click the share or reply button. Remember there are always two sides to a story, and if you have crossed paths with a troll you most likely don’t have the right one. If you find that you are being directly attacked by one, the best policy is just to ignore them. Engaging only gives them a platform and puts you at risk of additional cyber stalking. The main goal of a troll is to create problems, but you don’t have to play along.
Additional Resources:
Spot the Troll an online training quiz from Clemenson University Media Forensics: https://spotthetroll.org/start
Forbes: Dealing with Trolls : https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2015/04/09/10-tips-to-dealing-with-trolls/#5c58792d54f4