17
votes
538 shares largest dataset of Russian troll tweets, compiled by two professors at Clemson University
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- Title
- Why We're Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets
- Authors
- Oliver Roeder
- Published
- Jul 31 2018
- Word count
- 1373 words
Why are these accounts still referred to as "russian trolls". They are provocateurs. I feel like the term "troll" has connotations of impotence - the kid in the classroom who says things seeking attention - whereas these accounts clearly achieve their desired results. All of the discussion I see uses this language and I wonder if it is diminishing the severity in the view of the American public.
I have always used the term "troll" to apply exclusively to people who are (1) writing online (2) in bad faith (3) to elicit a specific negative emotion from their audience. All three things must be true for someone to be a "troll." In that context, these accounts' behavior was exactly in line with my long-term understanding of what a troll is, and I will continue to use it to apply to them. Trolls are merely an online variant of provocateurs.
The term may, because of its online nature, be diminishing its severity with some Americans, but I would doubt it's because of any application to kids and more because of it being online rather than in reality.
When I see the term "troll" it usually refers to people who say such things "for the lulz" rather than to achieve a clear political goal.
I've literally never heard of the term being applied to kids outside of an online context. And every etymology I look up talks first about the term's usage in an online context, or it talks about a specific type of fishing. Is this something you have heard before or are you just reacting to the connotation that @determinism hears in the term?
Perhaps I did. Thanks.
I didn't express that very well - the connotation that I'm pointing out isn't that trolls are children but that they would be analogous to a kid in a classroom who speaks out of turn or says provocative things for attention. The important trait being that they seek (negative) attention and that ignoring them is a viable strategy for discouraging their proliferation. I understand that the term has evolved out of something more akin to hazing new users "trolling for newbies" or poking fun at an out-group.
In all of those flavors, my (official) policy has been to ignore them. Although, in practice I will sometimes choose to obsess over them when my brain has decided that it wants to feel enraged. I think the practice of ignoring trolls is commonly viewed to be best practice. However, I don't know if that is true in the case of Russian provocateurs.
To summarize my perspective: Calling them trolls gives the impression that they can/should be ignored - maybe that isn't the case.
I understand your point a lot better now. Thanks for the second stab!
I've almost always been in positions that have needed to understand the behavior of trolls and how they impact the people around them, so that might have colored whether I see them as something to be ignored (which I agree is what should be done on an individual level basis, and probably the same could be said of the russian twitter accounts in their prime, if there were a way of knowing that ahead of time).
Given this set of data, what analyses would be interesting to do with it? What insights could potentially be uncovered by taking a closer look?
Analysts have been taking stabs at reddit data for years, looking at word choice, topics covered, designing web-mobels of who and what the comments (or "tweets," if you're looking for the comparison) are responding to, among other sorts of things. The data set provides a lot of opportunities for people who are nerdy, into diving deep into the data themselves, and are driven by some question that they want the answer to.
Right. I'm a nerdy type myself, but I'm not currently "driven by some question that [I] want the answer to". I was wondering what interesting questions there might be out there that could be answered by studying the data.