Five Types of Russian Trolls

• Right Troll: These Trump-supporting trolls voiced right-leaning, populist messages, but “rarely broadcast traditionally important Republican themes, such as taxes, abortion, and regulation, but often sent divisive messages about mainstream and moderate Republicans…They routinely denigrated the Democratic Party, e.g. @LeroyLovesUSA, January 20, 2017, “#ThanksObama We're FINALLY evicting Obama. Now Donald Trump will bring back jobs for the lazy ass Obamacare recipients,” the authors wrote.
• Left Troll: These trolls mainly supported Bernie Sanders, derided mainstream Democrats, and focused heavily on racial identity, in addition to sexual and religious identity. The tweets were “clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout,” the authors told FiveThirtyEight.
• News Feed: A bit more mysterious, news feed trolls mostly posed as local news aggregators who linked to legitimate news sources. Some, however, “tweeted about global issues, often with a pro-Russia perspective.”
• Hashtag Gamer: Gamer trolls used hashtag games—a popular call/response form of tweeting—to drum up interaction from other users. Some tweets were benign, but many “were overtly political, e.g. @LoraGreeen, July 11, 2015, “#WasteAMillionIn3Words Donate to #Hillary.”
• Fearmonger: These trolls, who were least prevalent in the dataset, spread completely fake news stories, for instance “that salmonella-contaminated turkeys were produced by Koch Foods, a U.S. poultry producer, near the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday.”

The Rest @ Bigthink

How to Spot A Troll

Here is a recent list probably:

1.  Look for cultural discrepancies:
2.  leaving out a definite article:

• We need fight the terrorism to fight the terrorism! But not track phone calls to fight the terrorism.” — @michellearry, June 2015.

• “I want chaos to be over! We need #GOP president to stop it! #GOPDebateSC” — @heyits_toby, January 2016.

• “With Hillary in charge, America will burn in flames of a shame. So don’t let this happen!” — @tpartynews, February 2016.

3.  They can't form a question

• “Why our government doesn’t send us some help?! Phosphorus leak in Pocatello #phosphorusdisaster” — @ryanmaxwell_1, March 10, 2015.

4.  They have a specific agenda: Russian Trolls launched a pretty sloppy campaign when the invaded the Crimea:

• from:TEN_GOP Crimea since:2014–02–28 until:2014–03–18

5.  Amplifying divisive paranoia- what ever the issues is in the world, they will write crazy extreme narratives on both sides.

American Trolls

European Trolls

Chinese Trolls

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/9ef9f592-e2bd-11e7-97e2-916d4fbac0da

For years, China’s nationalist trolls were known as “50 cents”, or wumao, for the Rmb0.50 they were said to earn for each patriotic post. But more recently a new breed of volunteer warrior has emerged, nicknamed the “bring-your-own-rations wumao” for their willingness to work without pay. Some like to call themselves “little pinks”, a name derived from the colour of a popular online forum used by nationalists. With nationalism on the rise, fuelled by China’s economic ascent and perceptions of western decline, the propaganda drive has gone global. “Tell the China story well and build China’s soft power,” President Xi Jinping urged delegates at the party’s 19th congress in October.

The Rest @ Financial Times